A Real Story

I kept a Notes app list titled “Matches – Do Not Delete” for eleven months, which sounds unhinged until you realize it was the only way I could track what was actually happening. By the time I quit Tinder I had 111 opened conversations and exactly four second dates. Most conversations died on question two, always some version of “so what do you do for fun,” which I now understand is the digital equivalent of a dial tone.

Bumble was better for about six weeks, then I noticed I kept getting the same eleven guys resurfaced with slightly different first photos, like the algorithm had a shortlist and was just recycling it. I switched to Hinge mostly because a coworker wouldn’t shut up about it, and the difference wasn’t the men, it was the prompts — I stopped writing “I love tacos and travel” and started writing about the time I got food poisoning in Lisbon and cried in a gelato shop. That one prompt tripled my reply rate. People don’t want a resume, they want something they can actually respond to.

I met my now-boyfriend three weeks after rewriting that profile. He opened with a joke about the gelato story, which meant he’d actually read it, which by that point felt like a small miracle. We’ve been together fourteen months and I still have that Notes list, mostly as proof that the apps aren’t broken, most of our profiles just are.