A Real Story

Back in March I decided one app wasn’t cutting it, so I had Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Coffee Meets Bagel all running on my phone at the same time, color-coded by little sticky notes on my lock screen like some kind of dating trading floor. I told myself this was strategy — cast a wide net, see who bites, optimize for chemistry. What actually happened is I started confusing Dana from Bumble, who worked at a vet clinic and kept sending me pictures of rescue rabbits, with Danielle from Hinge, who was training for a half marathon and hated anything with fur because of allergies.

The wreck came on a Tuesday. I left Danielle a voicemail — because she’d asked me to call instead of text, which should’ve tipped me off she was serious — and spent forty seconds asking how her bunny Waffles was doing. There is no bunny. There was never a bunny. She called me back within the hour, not to yell, just to very calmly ask if I was seeing multiple people, which, yes, obviously, but hearing it said out loud made me feel like a guy running a Ponzi scheme with my own love life.

I ended up meeting Dana in person two weeks later at a diner near her clinic, and she thought the whole voicemail story was hilarious, mostly because she’d been doing the exact same juggling act with three guys from Coffee Meets Bagel. We compared notes over mozzarella sticks like two burnt-out air traffic controllers. We’ve been together eleven months now, and the sticky notes are gone, but I still triple-check a name before I hit send on anything.