A Real Story

I’m an analyst by trade, so when Tinder burned me out for the third time in two years, I did what I do at work: I made a spreadsheet. Six apps, columns for cost per month, number of actual conversations that led to a first date, and a column I labeled “Did I want to delete the app after using it for 20 minutes.” Hinge and Bumble tied for lowest score in that last column, which in my scoring system meant they won.

I gave each app three weeks. On Hinge, I answered the prompt “a shower thought I recently had” with something about how airports are just sad malls, and a guy named Aaron commented that he’d once cried at a Cinnabon in Terminal C. That’s it, that’s the whole hook. We texted about airport food for four days before he asked if he could take me to get actual Cinnabon, not the metaphorical kind, at 9pm on a Tuesday.

My spreadsheet says Hinge cost me about eleven dollars a month during the trial period and produced two dates, one of which I’m now married to. Bumble, for the record, produced zero dates and one guy who sent a paragraph about his fantasy football league unprompted. I still have the spreadsheet. Aaron asked to see it once and got quietly offended that Bumble scored so low, since that’s where his sister met her husband.