The first man I matched with on the dating app didn’t say hello.
I wasn’t prepared for this. I had only just downloaded the app, still believing in romance, serendipity, and the possibility of meeting someone in the produce aisle while comparing avocados. Instead, I was now the emotional support stranger for a man grieving a countertop appliance.
The second man opened with, “I’m not tall,” which was confusing because I had not asked. I hadn’t even typed a single word. My phone buzzed again: “I’m five-eight. Please don’t leave.”
I hadn’t planned to. I was still reading his profile, which featured him holding a fish the size of a toddler.
The third man said, “I don’t get many likes,” which felt like a confession whispered in a church pew. He looked like someone who definitely got likes—cheekbones, jawline, a suspiciously symmetrical face. But he insisted he was invisible. I began to wonder if the app was haunted.
By the fourth match, I realized the app was less a dating platform and more a digital confessional booth where men lined up to repent for sins they hadn’t committed yet.
“Forgive me,” one typed, “for I have not been chosen.”
I told him I wasn’t a priest.
He said, “Same difference.”
Somewhere around Match #27, I started keeping notes. Not on the men themselves, but on the strange ecology of the whole thing. The app felt like a wildlife preserve where insecure male creatures wandered freely, shedding facts about themselves like molting feathers.
One man told me he only dated women under 25 because “they smell like hope.”
I unmatched him so fast my phone made a noise I’d never heard before.
Another man said he was so relieved I was his age. “Everyone else is twenty-two,” he said. “I can’t keep talking about astrology and oat milk.”
I told him I liked oat milk.
He unmatched me.
By the time I reached Match #103, I realized I wasn’t dating. I was conducting field research.
Men were not struggling to date. They were struggling to feel worthy while dating. And I, apparently, had become the unofficial emotional lifeguard of the app, pulling men out of their own existential riptides.
The final man of the night messaged me: “Hi.”
Just that. A single, normal, non-traumatic greeting.
I stared at it, stunned. A regular hello? A simple, unadorned hello?
I wrote back: “Hello.”
He replied: “Sorry, I’m not tall.”
And that was when I deleted the app, threw my phone onto the couch, and declared myself free.
The heavy weight of a hundred men’s unearned trauma lifted off my shoulders. I put on my shoes, grabbed my keys, and walked out the door. If I was going to find love, or at least a normal conversation, it wasn’t going to be in a digital confessional booth.
It was time to go buy some more avocados.
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