A Real Story

Three weeks after my divorce was finalized, I downloaded Pure on my lunch break because a coworker mentioned it was built for exactly what I thought I wanted: no coffee-date small talk, no six-week texting buildup, just something simple. My bio said ‘recently single, not looking for anything serious, love tacos.’ I matched with a guy named on his profile only as ‘M,’ and we set something up for that same Friday because the app deletes your chat history after an hour if you don’t move fast, which honestly forced me to stop overthinking every message the way I used to on regular apps.

We met at a dive bar near my apartment in Bushwick, and it was fine, actually good, until he asked afterward if I wanted to ‘keep talking, see where it goes.’ I panicked and said sure, mostly because I didn’t know how to say ‘no, I meant exactly what my bio said’ without sounding cold. So I spent the next two weeks half-responding to texts from someone I had zero interest in dating, which felt worse than any bad date I’d had in my marriage’s final year.

The thing that actually fixed it wasn’t the app, it was a blunt three-line message I finally sent him: ‘I had fun, I’m not looking for more than that, no hard feelings if that’s not your thing.’ He said thanks for being direct and we never spoke again, which is exactly what should have happened weeks earlier. Now my profile says the same thing my texts eventually did, and I stopped assuming the app’s whole premise would do the honesty part for me.