Tinder will start letting you block people by their phone number

Tinder is finally letting you avoid all your exes, friends, colleagues, relatives, and anyone else you might not want to run into on a dating app. The company announced today it’ll start allowing people to block their phone contacts.

Romance-seekers can access the feature from their settings, under the “Block Contacts” menu, where they can define which contacts they’d like to block — meaning these people won’t surface for them, and vice versa.

Users can either upload their full contacts list to Tinder or add them individually. Tinder says it won’t store everyone’s contacts — only the ones they’ve chosen to block — and people can unblock or disconnect their contacts list at any time. Blocked contacts won’t be notified they’ve been blocked. Of course, there’s no easy way of knowing if an ex or other undateworthy person even has a Tinder account; it’s more of a preventative measure. And if a blocked individual has since changed their phone number and joins Tinder, their account could still surface.

People have wanted to avoid the possibility of an awkward digital run-in forever, and this might, finally, give them a fighting chance at doing so. However, it also feels years late. I don’t know why Tinder took so long to launch this, but hopefully new users won’t have to know the misery of running into an ex on Tinder ever again.