A Real Story

My coworker bet me twenty bucks I wouldn’t last a week on a hookup site because I’m “too much of a planner” for casual stuff. I signed up that night on my lunch break, mostly out of spite, and wrote a bio that just said I liked tacos and hated small talk. Within two days I was messaging Rae, who opened with “if you’re not lying about the tacos, El Jarocho on 5th, Thursday.” No flirting, no build-up, just logistics. I liked that.

We met at a dive bar near her place first, not the taco truck, because she said she wanted to see if I was a serial killer in daylight before committing to street food. We ended up talking for two hours about her ex who’d ghosted her mid-lease and my divorce that was barely six months final. It wasn’t romantic, but it was easy, and that’s how it stayed for about three months — no labels, no future tense, just her place on Sundays and the occasional Tuesday text that said only “free?”

It ended plainly. She got a job offer in Denver and told me flat out, no drama, and I remember being surprised how much that stung for something I’d sworn was casual. What I actually learned wasn’t about hookup sites being secretly romantic — it’s that I’d never once told her what I actually wanted, and neither had she, and we both just let the arrangement define itself by default. Now if I’m on one of those apps again, I say the quiet part out loud in the first conversation: what I’m looking for, and what I’m not, before it gets far enough to hurt.

I still owe my coworker twenty bucks. I never told him why I stopped counting the days.