For the past five days, I’ve used the popular dating app Hinge.
To be honest? It made me want to cry.
Why did I, a 27-year-old man with questionable hygienic habits and a recent psychotic breakdown, choose this moment to engage with the world of dating apps? The answer is simple: I figured my transition to Madison would be made considerably easier were I to have formed an intimate, loving relationship with someone on the ground beforehand.
I’m moving to Madison in a month. This does not give me much time. Fortunately, I am not one to bow my head to the rampant pessimism that pervades our times.
I had never used a dating app before. Actually, I have never been on a date before. I have had one girlfriend-who-was-actually-more-of-a-friend in my life, and I blindly fell into the relationship, which, again, felt more like a friendship than anything else.
In short, I have no experience when it comes to Hinge and everything it represents.
I chose Hinge by process of elimination. Tinder is a meme, and as a rule, one should not engage with things that are memes. Bumble only allows female users to message male users, which poses a significant problem to people, such as myself, whose only chance at success is via witty comments. ChristianMingle seemed promising, but I do not believe in the Holy Trinity.
Thus, I arrived at Hinge. Hinge markets itself as a dating app that is “designed to be deleted,” which is precisely what occurred on Day 5 of my Hinge journey. It’s not supposed to be a place for quick hookups; Hinge users are seeking real and meaningful connections.
The only thing that makes me more nervous than the thought of eating dinner with a stranger is the thought of having sex with a stranger, so I thought Hinge was about as good as it was going to get. I went to the Google Play Store and downloaded the app.
Now, I don’t know how other dating apps work, but to create a Hinge profile you are asked to upload six photos of yourself and respond to three prompts, e.g. “What if I told you that…”, “The key to my heart is…”, “Dating me is like…” etc. etc.
These criteria presented an immediate challenge. First of all, I did not have six photos of myself. Well, I did, but I had to go all the way back to 2018 and 2019 to fill the six slots.
Does this make me a weirdo? Do people — guys, especially — have dozens of high-quality images of themselves stored on their phones? Glancing at the profiles of some of the other users convinced me that it wasn’t enough to take six selfies of yourself at slightly different locations; most profiles included six photos that were clearly taken by someone else.
These people clearly do not have what it takes to survive in an Internet age in which identity theft runs rampant.
But those without recent photos of themselves should not despair. As stated, Hinge provides various prompts which allow you to express your unique individuality.
As far as I can tell, the majority of users have decided against this route. The number of profiles I saw in which the user said that they wanted to “travel,” that they are won over by “food,” and that they like to talk about “everything” was as depressing as my experience on the app itself. Like, who the fuck doesn’t want to travel? You like food? Congratulations, that makes you a member of the species homo sapien. And I hope you’re down to talk about Makorana particles because it’s a topic I’ve been interested in for a while.
In other words, although Hinge enables users to answer prompts, because the answers to these prompts are so often inane, it ultimately comes down to your looks.
Which, I suppose, was to be expected. But disappointing nonetheless.
My prompts? They’re a little embarrassing now that I’m writing them down, but it’s true I couldn’t take the whole thing seriously. So I went with things like “I could stay up all night talking about… insomnia.” “When I need advice, I go to… Walmart.” You get the gist of it. I like to think I was being subversive.
With my profile set, I was ready to start flipping through women like they were Pokemon cards.
And I did. I flipped and I flipped and I flipped.
But I could not find a single person who didn’t take the stupid prompts seriously. Not a single goddamn one. I’d probably flipped for a couple of hours. By this point, I would have married the first person who responded “My Love Language Is… English.” But nothing, nil, nada.
Ok, I thought. I’m being too picky. You can’t always get what you want. Life is about compromises.
So, and it sounds somewhat awful to put it this way, but I lowered the bar. I took it for granted that the person’s prompt responses would be basic as hell. I’d already gleaned that I had no shot with people who were markedly attractive. I was trying to find some sort of middle ground.
There’s definitely something disturbing about spending hours rifling through one woman after another. That’s something I learned from this whole Hinge experience: there are a lot of goddamn women on this planet. And you can’t dedicate your heart, soul, and attention to each and every one of them. The relative attractiveness of the woman’s main profile picture soon became the sole barometer by which I clicked “Like” or “Skip.”
Women, women, women. One after another after another after another. There’s something vaguely hypnotic about the whole thing. I felt like I was in a trance state for much of it.
If we’re being honest, it’s somewhat dehumanizing and degrading. On apps like Hinge, people really are reduced to their facial features. And some of us are simply better at winning that battle than others.
Me? Over the course of five days, I became increasingly liberal in my Like-to-Skip ratio, and I probably sent Likes to 30 or so women. Of course, I didn’t choose just anybody, but I also didn’t choose women who were clearly the most desirable. I also didn’t simply Like their photos; I responded to one of their prompts with, as you dear readers should know, a characteristically witty comment.
The result?
Not a single person responded to me. No one. Not even half of one.
Frankly, I couldn’t believe it. Look, I know I’m no Leonardo DiCaprio, but I feel as though I’m batting average in the looks department and my stupid prompt responses were, at the very least, clever.
Apparently not?
There’s a rational part of my brain that is telling me, “Elai, this means nothing. You can’t reduce people down into six photos and three short responses. You, too, are a person. So, don’t worry about it.”
Then, there’s a part of my brain that believes to have understood the situation for what it is that is telling me, “LOL, you’re fucked.”
When all is said and done, Hinge made me feel desperate and ashamed.
I think they should create a support group. I’d call it Twinge.