A Real Story

I joined Badoo about a year after my divorce because a coworker swore by the ‘People Nearby’ radar for actually meeting someone local instead of texting a stranger three states away for six weeks. It worked fast. Within a week I matched with a guy named Danny who showed up as ‘0.3 miles away’ while I was getting coffee at my usual spot on a Tuesday morning, and we ended up talking for two hours right there at the counter. For about four months it was genuinely sweet, he remembered my order, he showed up with my favorite pastry once, the whole thing felt real.

The thing that unraveled it was so small. I’d left the app open on my phone at his place one night, and the radius setting was still on ‘browsing’ from earlier, so it kept refreshing as we drove around. I watched his profile picture pop up as ‘nearby’ in three completely different zip codes over the course of one Saturday errand run, each one a different coffee shop, each one clearly a spot he frequented enough that the app had cached his usual haunts. When I asked him about it, he admitted he’d been doing almost the exact same opening line and the exact same ‘accidental’ coffee shop meetup in at least two other neighborhoods, just rotating locations so nobody would piece it together.

I’m not saying Badoo is a bad app, honestly the proximity feature is what made our first date happen in the first place. But I learned the hard way that the same tool that helps you find someone charming ten minutes from your house also makes it incredibly easy for someone to run the same playbook on a rotating cast of women across a whole city. Now if a match’s whole vibe feels like a well-rehearsed bit, I ask myself whether I’m meeting a person or just the next stop on his route.