How we behave here

1. Why these exist

Paheli only works if the small number of people you meet each day are worth meeting. These guidelines are the standard everyone agrees to, and they apply to your profile, your photos, your prompts, your messages and how you behave toward people you met here — including after you have moved the conversation somewhere else.

They form part of our Terms of Service and our Terms of Use. Breaking them can cost you your account.

2. Be real

• One person, one account. Your real first name, your real age, your real face.
• Recent photos of you. No photos of other people, no images pulled off the internet, no AI-generated faces, no ten-year-old pictures.
• Say what you are actually looking for. Casual, short-term, long-term or open to what comes — all of them are welcome here. Pretending to want something else to get someone’s attention is not.
• If you are seeing someone else, say so. People are allowed to decide whether that works for them.

3. Be kind — and be a decent loser

Most of what goes wrong on dating apps is not a crime, it is discourtesy at scale. On Paheli:

• No harassment, threats, intimidation, or messaging someone repeatedly after they have gone quiet.
• No insults about someone’s body, skin tone, height, weight, income, caste, religion, region, accent, English, disability or family.
• No hate speech and no slurs — including “jokes”.
• Rejection is allowed. Cruelty is not. If someone is not interested, let it go. If you are not interested, say so kindly or simply unmatch.
• If you would not say it to their face, in front of their friends, do not type it.

4. Consent matters

• No unsolicited sexual content. Do not send explicit photos or messages unless the other person has clearly said they want them.
• “No” ends it. So does silence, so does “maybe later”, so does a change of subject. Do not push, do not negotiate, do not wear someone down.
• Consent online is not consent offline, and consent once is not consent always. It can be withdrawn at any point, by anyone, for any reason.
• Never pressure anyone into meeting, drinking, travelling, staying, or going anywhere they did not choose.

5. What is not allowed on your profile

• Nudity, sexual acts, or lingerie-only shots as profile photos.
• Photos of children as your main image, and any child in a sexual or suggestive context — ever.
• Violence, gore, weapons brandished as threats, or self-harm.
• Drug use, drug sales, or anything else illegal under Indian law.
• Contact details in photos or bios — phone numbers, UPI IDs, social handles, QR codes, links. Share them in chat, with someone you chose.
• Political, communal or religious content aimed at attacking a group.

6. Paheli is not a marketplace

Do not use Paheli to:

• ask anyone for money, gifts, recharges, loans, UPI transfers or investment — for any reason, however sympathetic the story;
• promote a business, a startup, an event, a channel, a course, a trading or crypto group, or an MLM;
• offer or seek escorting, sugar arrangements or any exchange of intimacy for money or goods;
• recruit people onto other apps, groups or paid communities;
• sell anything at all.

If someone on Paheli asks you for money, it is a scam. Do not send it — report them and read the Safety Centre.

7. Respect other people's privacy

• Do not screenshot and share someone’s profile, photos or messages — not to your group chat, not to social media, not “anonymously”.
• Do not post or threaten to post anyone’s private information: phone number, address, workplace, family details, health status or sexual orientation.
• Do not try to find someone’s other accounts, turn up where they work, or contact their friends or family after they have unmatched you.
• What someone tells you in a chat was told to you, not to the internet.

8. What you do off Paheli still counts

Once you have met someone here, the conversation often moves elsewhere. Our rules follow it. If you harass, threaten, defraud or harm someone you met on Paheli — over another app, over the phone, or in person — and we receive a credible report, we will act on your Paheli account. Serious matters are also reported to the authorities.

9. How to report

• In the app: open the profile or the chat menu, choose Report, and pick a reason — fake profile, inappropriate photos, harassment, spam, underage, or other. Add detail if you can; it makes the review faster.
• Block at the same time if you want them gone immediately. They are not notified.
• By email: support.paheli@gmail.com — include the profile name, roughly when it happened, and screenshots if you have them.
• Anyone under 18 on Paheli should be reported straight away, using the underage reason. We treat these first.

Reports are confidential. The person you report is never told who reported them.

10. What happens next

Depending on severity and history, we remove content, warn, limit features, suspend, or permanently ban — the ladder is set out in section 8 of the Terms of Use. Serious categories skip straight to the last rung.

We do not tell you what action we took against another person’s account, because that is their personal data. We do act, and a report is never wasted — patterns across multiple reports are how most bad accounts are caught.