A Real Story

After my divorce I did what any recently single accountant would do: I made a spreadsheet. Four columns, one for each of the ‘top dating sites’ everyone kept recommending — Match, eHarmony, Hinge, and one I’d never heard of called Coffee Meets Bagel. I tracked messages sent, replies received, first dates scheduled, and a column I labeled ‘red flags in bio’ because apparently a lot of men in their forties think ‘no drama’ belongs on a dating profile.

Match cost me the most and gave me the least — mostly men who’d clearly copy-pasted the same opener to fifty women that week. eHarmony’s questionnaire took ninety minutes and matched me with three guys in a month, all lovely, all six hours away. Hinge is where the actual humans were. Guys answered the prompts like they meant it, one wrote a whole paragraph about hating cilantro that made me laugh out loud on my lunch break, and I ended up meeting him for coffee two weeks later.

We’ve been together eleven months now and he still doesn’t know I ranked him against three other apps’ worth of candidates before agreeing to dinner. My takeaway, for what it’s worth: the ‘best’ site isn’t universal, it’s whichever one your actual demographic bothered to fill out a real profile on. For me that was Hinge. Your spreadsheet may vary.