A Real Story

I’ll admit it: I had my Hinge distance capped at eight miles and, unofficially, at ‘anything above 14th Street or a short cab ride.’ I told myself it was about efficiency, not snobbery, but really I just didn’t want to explain to my roommates why I was taking the M train to Queens on a Tuesday. For four months I matched with the same rotating cast of guys in finance who all had a photo holding a fish and a bio that said ‘no drama.’ It was a wasteland.

Then my phone glitched, or maybe I fat-fingered the settings, and my radius shot up to 25 miles. Within a week I matched with a guy in Ridgewood who did wood restoration for old brownstones and sent me an actual paragraph about a Sunday flea market instead of ‘hey.’ I almost didn’t reply because Ridgewood felt, in my head, like a foreign country, even though it’s a 35-minute ride on the M. We met at a bar near the Halsey stop that only served natural wine and had one bathroom with a broken lock.

We’ve been together over a year now, and I still laugh about how close I came to never seeing his profile because of an arbitrary line I drew on a map out of laziness disguised as preference. My honest takeaway for anyone dating in this city: your ‘too far’ is probably one train transfer, and the algorithm is not the problem — your own imaginary borders are.