A Real Story

I got divorced at 43 and had never once used a dating app, so I did what any recovering project manager does: I built a spreadsheet. Columns for Match, eHarmony, OkCupid, and Hinge — cost per month, messages sent, replies received, actual dates that happened. I gave each site two weeks and tracked everything like it was a vendor comparison at work, which honestly made the whole thing less terrifying.

Match cost me the most and got me one date at a taco place where the guy — wait, woman, sorry, I keep telling this story to my brother who dates men — where she spent forty minutes explaining her ex’s crypto losses. eHarmony’s questionnaire took ninety minutes and matched me with three people in two weeks, all lovely, zero chemistry. Hinge I almost dropped after four days because nobody was responding to my “most spontaneous thing I’ve done” prompt about eating gas station sushi in Reno.

Then a woman named Deb replied to that exact prompt with a story about eating a hot dog off a Ferris wheel, and we texted for three days straight about terrible amusement park food before we even set up a call. My spreadsheet has her listed under Hinge, row 14, cost-per-match: basically nothing, because we met on day nine of a fourteen-day trial. We got married in October, and I still have the file — I show it to friends going through divorces now, half joke, half genuine advice: track it like data, but let the weird prompt answers actually win.