A Real Story

After my divorce at 44, I did what any recovering engineer does with a problem: I made a spreadsheet. Columns for site name, monthly cost, number of messages sent, number of replies, and number of actual dates. I ran four sites over fourteen months — the big general one, the one that makes you answer 150 questions, a niche one for outdoorsy types, and one my sister swore by. Total spend came to $640 and change, and my reply rate on the cheap general site was embarrassingly higher than the fancy questionnaire one, which felt like it matched me with women three states away who liked hiking I’d never do.

The questionnaire site did produce one memorable disaster: a match who turned out to be my son’s soccer coach’s ex-wife, which I did not clock until we were already at dinner comparing notes about the exact same under-10 tournament in Ohio. We laughed about it, finished the meal, and never spoke again, which felt like the correct outcome.

What actually worked wasn’t the algorithm, it was consistency — logging in the same twenty minutes every night instead of binge-swiping on Sundays, because the timing seemed to matter more than the platform. I met my now-wife on the cheap general site in month eleven, after I’d nearly canceled it twice. She’d almost quit too, the same week, for the same reasons. If either of us had followed through on quitting, my spreadsheet would’ve had one less row and a very different ending.