When it comes to dating, making the first move can be a daunting prospect—but it can also be a highly rewarding one.
Beyond the benefit of scoring yourself a relationship with the person you are into (win), making the first move can impart a new-found confidence, not only in your dating game, but in yourself too.
Dedicated to empowering women and helping end misogyny around the globe, Bumble calls on women to make the first move.
Regardless of what type of communicator you are (a texter, video or phone-call person), the dating app offers its users different modes of chatting so that women can feel confident in their dating approach. Bumble’s Virtual Dating tool means that users can connect with matches, and feel safe, before deciding whether they are happy to share personal information or meet up in real life, taking away a lot of the pressure that comes with making the first move.
Many of our favourite celebrity relationships only came to be thanks to women kicking outdated gender notions to the curb and embracing their own rules on dating.
Need a little confidence boost? Here, six celebrities who made the first move.
Jennifer Lopez
There may have never been a J-rod had Jennifer Lopez not made the first move. The singer and actress first met Yankees trainer Alex Rodriguez at a baseball match back in 2005, when she and Rodriguez were with other people. It wasn’t until 12 years later that the pair reconnected again.
“I was having lunch somewhere and I saw him as he passed by,” Lopez reveals. “Afterwards, I went outside, and for some reason I felt like tapping him on the shoulder.”
Rodriguez made the next move: “He texted me, said, ‘Let’s go out to dinner,’ and I said, ‘OK.’ We had a nice dinner.”
Whitney Wolfe Herd
While Whitney Wolfe Herd met her husband through mutual friends while on a skiing trip, her social networking app Bumble has revolutionised the dating game and empowered millions of women worldwide to make the first move by encouraging genuine connections, respectful conversations and meaningful interactions.
Frustrated at watching the incredible and accomplished women in her life wait around to be asked on dates by men, Wolfe Herd launched Bumble in 2014 with the purpose of empowering women and helping end misogyny around the globe. Wolfe Herd’s approach to business is “find a problem in society that you want to change and fix it.”
Anne Hathaway
Just months after cutting ties with her previous boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri, due to legal issues surrounding his arrest for wire fraud, Anne Hathaway met Adam Shulman at the Palms Springs Film Festival. The actress claims it was love at first sight for her: “I knew from the second I met him that he was the love of my life,” she said.
Hathaway initially thought Shulman had a girlfriend, but on finding out he was single, she decided to throw a party just to get him to come.
”I have no problem making the first move when I see a guy I like,” the actress has said.
”I was in L.A. when I met him. I was told he had a girlfriend, and I backed off because I’m not that girl. Then when I found out six weeks later that he didn’t have a girlfriend, I was like, ‘We should throw a party. We should invite Adam.'”
Whitney Port
The Hills star Whitney Port married her husband Tim Rosenman in 2015 after making the first move a few years prior. Rosenman had been producing on her MTV spinoff, The City, at the time.
“I definitely made the first move,” Port later said. “I got his phone number and made up some excuse why I needed to reach him for something.
“I kind of felt he was never gonna try it with me. He’s not shy but I know in his past with girls he had difficulty making the first move.
“And I know, because of our jobs—because I was the talent and he was the producer—he wasn’t going to cross that line. It had to be me, you know.”
Kim Kardashian West
After the public breakdown of her whirlwind 72-day marriage in 2012, Kim Kardashian wasted no time in reaching out to Kanye West.
“I called [Kanye] because I’m sure it was really hurtful that I got married and, even though it’s not like we communicated all the time, I knew what he was thinking. So I thought he was going to call me as soon as he knew that I was single again,” she said years later.
“He didn’t, and so I called him and I said, ‘Hello? I thought you were at least going to call me and say ‘I told you so,’ or something?’ And then—he’s always been a good friend to me, like, we’ve always been there for each other—then he invited me to a fashion show of his in Paris and I went, and then the magic happened.”
Gigi Hadid
One of Instagram’s most beloved couples, Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik, met at a party of a mutual friend a few years before they began dating. Malik had been engaged to Perrie Edwards at the time.
It wasn’t until a year or so after that the pair would go on their first date. When appearing on Ellen DeGeneres, Hadid disclosed that she had been the first one to admit she had caught the feels.
“We played it cool for, like, 10 minutes, and then I was like, ‘You’re really cute,'” the model said.
Brought to you by Bumble.