A Real Story

I was 52, three weeks post-divorce, and I downloaded one of those adult dating apps because a friend swore it was “just for fun, no pressure.” The profile setup took ten minutes. Within an hour I had eleven messages, which felt flattering until I noticed every single guy had a six-pack, a boat, and exactly one blurry photo taken from a weird angle. I ignored that red flag because I wanted to ignore it.

Here’s what nobody warns you about: on this particular app, you can’t actually read a reply without buying “coins.” So I bought a $40 pack. Then a $60 pack when a guy named Dale seemed to be typing something real. Dale’s messages arrived in perfect, oddly formal English, always right after I topped up my balance, and always stopping cold the second I suggested a phone call. By the time I’d spent $180 across six weeks, I did the math and realized the app made more money keeping me curious than it ever would matching me with an actual person.

The embarrassing part isn’t that I got fooled — it’s that I knew, around week four, and kept going anyway because deleting the app felt like admitting the divorce had made me lonelier than I wanted to admit out loud. What finally snapped me out of it was a free coffee date I set up on a completely different, boring, unpaid app, with a guy who mentioned his knee replacement unprompted and showed up fifteen minutes early looking exactly like his photos. Nothing romantic came of it, but it reminded me what a real conversation actually feels like, which is a lot less shiny than Dale’s texts and a lot more useful.

If you’re going to try one of these apps, at least go in knowing the coin or credit systems are often the actual product, not a side feature. Ask yourself whether a match will get on a video call within the first few days. If the answer keeps sliding, so should you — off the app.