A Real Story

I joined Plenty of Fish in 2021 mostly because it was free and I’d just paid a lawyer more money than I care to think about. The sign-up process throws this absurdly long personality test at you, something like 200 questions about whether you’d rather stay home on a Friday or whether you cry at commercials. I answered honestly, half annoyed, thinking it was a gimmick to keep me on the app longer.

A week later I matched with a woman named in the profile only as “night owl librarian,” and our compatibility score was something like 92%, which felt like a weird thing to brag about on a first date. We met at a 24-hour diner in Bristol at 11 p.m. because that’s when her shift ended. She ordered a Shirley Temple, no alcohol, and told me flat out she’d been sober four years. I liked that she didn’t dress it up.

We talked for two and a half hours about nothing important — her ex’s terrible taste in furniture, my inability to parallel park — and she paid for her own pancakes before I could argue about it. The test had apparently flagged us both as “routine-oriented but restless,” which sounds like a horoscope but turned out to be dead accurate; we’ve spent three years now taking the same Sunday walk and still somehow never running out of things to say on it.

I tell people the quiz is corny and it absolutely is, but I also tell them not to skip it or rush through it out of impatience. Mine took maybe forty minutes and it’s the only dating app homework that’s ever paid off for me.