A Real Story

I joined Zoosk at 39, four months after my divorce was final, mostly because the ad said it ‘learns your type’ faster than I could figure out my own. That thing they call the Carousel — the stack of faces you tap yes or no on — became a nightly habit, like solitaire. I didn’t think about what I was actually clicking until it started only showing me women in their late twenties with golden retrievers in every photo. Apparently three weeks of that pattern is all it takes for the algorithm to decide who you are. I hadn’t even noticed I was doing it.

Then a woman named R. matched with me and opened with, ‘Your Carousel history is basically a personality test you didn’t consent to, and it says you’re avoiding anyone over 35 with kids.’ I laughed out loud in my kitchen. She’d guessed right — I was 42, freshly divorced, and quietly terrified of stepping into another ready-made family situation, so I’d been swiping away from anything that looked like one, without ever admitting it to myself.

We met at a brewery near her place and I told her the truth: yes, I’d been dodging profiles with kids in them, and yes, it was fear, not preference. She had two teenagers and zero patience for men who’d waste her time pretending otherwise, so she appreciated that I said it out loud instead of ghosting three dates in. It also helped that Zoosk auto-renewed my subscription that same week without me noticing, so I was annoyed enough about the charge to actually show up and make it worth something.

Fourteen months later we’re still together, and she still brings up the Carousel comment whenever I try to be cagey about something. Zoosk didn’t magically find my soulmate — it just showed me, uncomfortably clearly, who I was actually looking for versus who I was too scared to click on.