A Real Story

I got divorced at 34 and figured dating apps would be the easy part, since everyone talks about how men just swipe on everything. I downloaded Tinder, put up a gym mirror photo, a blurry group shot from a wedding, and a one-line bio that said something like “just a normal guy, love tacos and travel.” Six weeks later I had three matches, and two of them never replied to my first message. I started wondering if the app was broken.

A coworker, Priya, saw me moping about it at lunch and basically roasted my profile in real time. She made me delete the mirror selfie, cropped the wedding photo so it was just me, and made me add a picture of me actually cooking dinner, which I almost didn’t include because I thought it looked boring. She also rewrote my bio into two sentences that said something specific about my life instead of “love tacos.” I moved to Hinge mostly because she said Tinder rewards volume and Hinge rewards a real profile, and within three weeks I had more actual conversations than I’d had in the entire six weeks before.

The thing nobody tells guys is that the app matters less than most people think, but the profile matters enormously more than we assume. I wasn’t ugly or boring before, I was just invisible, because I gave women nothing to respond to. Once I gave people something specific to comment on, a cast iron pan, a dog I was dog-sitting, an actual sentence about why I moved cities, replies started coming from women who clearly read the whole thing before swiping. I still didn’t get flooded with matches, nobody does, but the ones I got were real.

I eventually met someone on Hinge who commented on the cooking photo asking if the sauce was homemade, and that conversation turned into three years together before we broke up amicably last spring. I’m back on the apps now, older, slightly wiser, and I still keep that cooking photo in rotation.