A Real Story

I was three months into grad school, living off a stipend that barely covered rent, when my roommate suggested I try online dating. I laughed at her. I’d seen the subscription prices for the popular apps, and I genuinely could not spend $35 a month on the possibility of meeting someone. So I downloaded Plenty of Fish because it was free and I’d heard it was basically the Walmart of dating apps — unglamorous, but functional.

The first two weeks were rough. I got a message that just said “hey sexy” from a guy whose profile picture was a truck. I matched with someone who turned out to be advertising a crypto scheme. But then I matched with a guy named in his profile as a high school chemistry teacher, whose first message referenced a specific line from my bio about hating cilantro, which told me he’d actually read it. We texted for four days before meeting up, and because neither of us had money, our first date was a free outdoor concert series at a park near campus, where we split a six-dollar burrito from a food truck because that’s all either of us had in cash.

What got me was that he’d only been on the app because he’d just gotten laid off from a private school job and was, in his words, “reallocating funds toward literally anything but a dating subscription.” We were two broke people who’d both assumed free apps meant scraping the bottom of the barrel, and instead we found each other exactly there. Fourteen months later he still teases me about the burrito, and we’ve since upgraded to splitting groceries instead of gas station snacks.

I tell people now: don’t assume the free tier is a wasteland. It’s full of people who are there for the same boring, practical reason you are — because they’re broke, or busy, or just don’t want to pay to find out if this whole thing works. Turns out that’s not a bad group of people to date.