A Real Story

In the spring of 2021 I had exactly $4.13 in my checking account and a stack of unpaid loan statements, so paying $30 a month for a dating app was not happening. I downloaded OkCupid because it was free and because I’d heard the personality questions actually mattered instead of just being a swipe carousel. I answered something like 220 of them over three nights, including the weird ones about whether I’d date someone who still lived with their parents at 34 (I said it depends, which apparently is the correct answer).

Dmitri showed up as a 91% match, which I assumed was a glitch because his profile picture was him holding a dead fish and grinning like an idiot. His first message wasn’t “hey” — it was a full paragraph about how he’d also answered “depends” on the parents question because his own mom needed help after surgery. We texted for a week before meeting at a laundromat that had a coffee counter in the back, because neither of us wanted to spend money on an actual date and both of us had laundry to do anyway. He folded my towels while we talked, which I still bring up.

We’ve been together two years now, still mostly broke, still doing laundry-date coffee when money’s tight. I never upgraded to paid OkCupid — never needed to. The free version gave me everything: the questions, the matching, the guy holding a fish. I tell my younger cousin this every time she complains about not wanting to pay for Hinge: sometimes the free thing works exactly as well as the thing you’re paying for, you just have to actually fill out the profile instead of leaving it blank and hoping.