A Real Story

I downloaded Hily three weeks after a five-year relationship ended, mostly because my coworker said it had fewer bots than the app I’d tried in college. My profile was bare bones — one photo of me at a Phillies game and a bio that just said ‘ask me about my dog.’ Nobody did. What actually broke the ice was one of those prompt questions Hily throws at you, something dumb like ‘best gas station snack, no wrong answers.’ A woman named Colette answered with ‘the hot dogs that have clearly been rolling since the Clinton administration,’ and I laughed out loud on my couch at 11pm on a Tuesday.

We texted through the app for four days before meeting at a diner off Route 1, and I remember being terrified she’d be nothing like her texts. She showed up in scrubs, straight off a twelve-hour shift, ordered a mozzarella stick appetizer as her entire meal, and told me within twenty minutes that she’d been swiping mostly out of boredom and low expectations. I liked that she wasn’t performing anything. We ended up sitting in that diner for almost three hours until the waitress started stacking chairs around us.

What surprised me about Hily was how much the little compatibility stuff — the personality quiz, the daily match suggestions — actually lined up with how we clicked in person. I’d assumed it was gimmicky filler, but Colette and I are both the type who needs alone time after socializing hard, and the app had flagged that as a shared trait before we ever met. We’ve been together nine months now, and the gas station hot dog joke is still something we bring up whenever we’re driving somewhere and starving.