A Real Story

It was a Tuesday, I’d just watched my ex pick up the last of his stuff, and I typed “singles near me” into my phone like it was a search bar for my whole life. Three apps later I had a profile up and matches rolling in within the hour. What I didn’t notice was that the app defaulted my search radius to 50 miles. So for about six weeks I was driving to towns I’d never even heard of — one guy was 47 miles out in a place with a single stoplight and a diner that closed at 7pm.

None of those dates were terrible, exactly, just exhausting. Ninety minutes each way for coffee with someone whose photos were five years old is not what I signed up for. I kept thinking the problem was the men, or the app, or my own bad luck, until a coworker asked why I was always so tired on Thursdays and I explained the whole saga. She laughed and asked if I’d checked my distance settings. I had not.

I dropped the radius to 10 miles that same night and the pool of matches shrank fast, which honestly felt like a small failure at first. But two weeks in I matched with a guy who turned out to work at the hardware store four minutes from my apartment — I’d probably passed him in the parking lot a dozen times. We met for pie at the diner near my place, no highway involved, and talked for three hours.

We’ve been together eight months now, and it still makes me laugh that “near me” almost meant “anywhere but here” because of one setting I never bothered to check. If you’re searching for singles near you, actually look at what “near” means on your app before you burn a tank of gas finding out the hard way.