A Real Story

At 42, freshly divorced and allergic to wasting money, I did what any recovering project manager would do: I made a spreadsheet. Columns for monthly cost, my buddy’s horror stories, and something I labeled ‘creep factor’ based on Reddit threads. Match.com scored lowest because it was the most expensive and my friend Dave swore he got ghosted eleven times in a row there. eHarmony won on paper. OkCupid was the budget pick.

I joined Match anyway, mostly out of stubbornness, because their algorithm kept resurfacing a profile with a photo of a cat glaring at a can of tuna and a bio that said ‘this cat has rejected me more than most men.’ That was Denise. I messaged her about the cat, not about anything romantic, and she wrote back three paragraphs about her cat’s entire personality disorder like it was a legal deposition.

We met at a diner off Route 9 that only takes cash. She ordered a patty melt and ate it like she meant it, no picking at a salad to seem dainty, and we talked for three hours about nothing important until the waitress started stacking chairs around us. I told her about the spreadsheet on date four and she laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down.

The spreadsheet still exists somewhere on an old laptop, and Denise brings it up whenever I claim to have a good plan for anything. The lesson I actually took from this: no list of the ‘best dating site’ means much if you’re not willing to write a genuinely weird first message. The algorithm didn’t do the work. The cat did.