Supply Side Dating App-onomics

Tony liked you. Ryan liked you. Jer liked you. DaMonn liked you. Matt liked you. Steven. Michael. James. Same message every time, cheerful as a bill collector: open the app, match, start talking. So I open the app.

I cannot view even one of them.

Nobody made me sign up for this. I want that on the record before I start in on the rest of them: I did it myself, both thumbs, stone sober, on a Tuesday afternoon.

There are 10+ men who have liked me. That is all I get. Heads behind fogged glass, no faces, just enough shape to prove somebody is standing there. Ten plus. Could be eleven. Could be forty-seven. Could be an entire infantry division of divorced vice presidents named Matt sitting behind that blur, breathing quietly and waiting to be processed. They stay in the pile until the machine decides to hand one over, and then I vote on him, like a warden doing rounds through a very polite prison where everybody has a master's degree and a picture from Machu Picchu.

Ryan liked me. Fine. Where is Ryan?

In storage. Matt is back there too. DaMonn. Tony. Filed behind the drywall somewhere, waiting for a green light that is not up to them either. There is something indecently funny about being told this many men are interested in me while being forbidden to see them. They have been reduced to inventory in a room I cannot enter. A horde of suitors is back there, and briefly I am concerned for their wellbeing. I hope they at least get a chair. Maybe they give them water.

A couple make it through, though. The algorithm wants me to evaluate a few samples to establish a baseline.

Oh. Him. No. One more goes back in the drawer. Another slides up to take the spot. Someplace in that machine there's a drain, and I'd bet money none of them knows they're circling it.

I have been on this thing about five minutes. A little longer, technically. It took The League five hours to let me in, which I am told is fast. I was not watching the clock. I have some self-respect and several other browser tabs. Then word came down that whatever office handles admissions had approved my application, and I went to see what they had made of me.

associate director.

Oh for fuck's sake.

It pulled the title straight from LinkedIn, which I had only used to prove I was a real person and had never bothered updating after the actual promotion because updating my digital presence ranks somewhere below cleaning the gutters in things I think about doing voluntarily. But the universe has granted me a second chance: a little pencil in the app next to the title, so I pressed it. Paywall.

That was the first time this whole business nearly got my money. Not to reduce my time spent on the waitlist. Not to see the men. To fix a noun. Ten years working my way into a title only to be undermined by a grayed-out edit icon. I am a director. The League has other records. Fine. Let it stand there and lie.

Then the first official batch unlocks for my consideration. Ten men. I do not mind this part. Ten is a number you can hold in your hand. Every one of them has a box marked ‘what I'm looking for,’ and I made the mistake of thinking it might tell me something about the man whose face was directly above it. It does not. It is an order form.

Kind, humble, supportive. Reliable, nurturing, loves a glass of wine. Easygoing, compassionate, wants children.

They all seem to be shopping for the same woman. Warm keeps coming up. Warm, supportive, affectionate, loves travel, family-oriented. Six profiles in and she has stopped sounding like a person and started sounding like something wrapped in butcher paper behind a counter somewhere, pink and agreeable, stamped USDA CHOICE, maybe a little rosemary tied around her ankle. Oh, just kidding. I am sure she is real somewhere. Probably owns throw pillows with words on them. I hope there is enough of her to go around.

What I found interesting was that there seemed to be a surprising amount of emotional availability being requested by men posing beside boats. And an equally surprising number of children, dogs, cats, jerseys and wine glasses attached to the requests. Two kids. Dog dad. There would inevitably be a football in at least one photo and by the third man I was starting to think it had reproduced.

One man called himself a golden retriever type, like this was a selling point. I know the type. Cheerful past the point of usefulness. Grateful you walked in the door. Desperate need for attention hanging off him like a smell, all that enthusiasm coming at you across the hardwood at a dead run. Don’t get me wrong - lovely dogs, golden retrievers… I just don’t want to date one.

As for what I put down under my own ‘looking for’ section. The app only allots three words for this space, and I chose: smart. independent. weird. Limited to three, and I spent one on weird.

Already regretting that, because weird does not cost anybody anything anymore. Everybody is weird. Weird has a mug about tacos. Weird did an escape room once and now brings it up when conversation stalls.

I want something crossed wrong. A bad splice. A little wire hanging loose somewhere behind the eyes, touching metal every now and then and making the whole machine behave strangely for reasons even the manufacturer cannot reproduce. Some little short in the wiring where the normal answer never arrives and the current has to go looking through the walls for another way out. Maybe it throws a spark. Maybe nothing useful comes of it. I just want proof the factory settings did not survive the drive home.

Power couple would be nice too, if that phrase had not already been dragged behind a barn and shot by people with matching headshots who call themselves founders. I am not asking for an empire. All I want is two people who already have their own lives in order and then, through some miracle of clerical error, are allowed to combine resources and become slightly more dangerous as a duo.

The forms all say the same thing anyway. Best friend. Settle down. Family first. Football on Sundays. Wine. Travel, then more travel because apparently nobody has ever had enough airports.

My idea of a vacation crosses the ‘va’ out of the word and inserts ‘stay’ in its place. Same bed. Same water pressure. I know where the light switches are. My shampoo lives in the shower instead of three ounces of it being decanted into a translucent bottle like I am carrying a urine specimen through customs. Nobody has folded the end of the toilet paper into a little triangle to remind me I am sitting in a room where hundreds of strangers have previously taken a shit. Nobody expects me to come back spiritually altered because I slept somewhere with plumbing I do not trust.

Truth is I have almost no memory for experiences anyway. I could drag this body through four airports, feed it pretzels at thirty thousand feet, wreck its internal clock, spend thousands of dollars being dysregulated somewhere breathtaking and six months later retain three disconnected images and a staggering credit card charge. I am autistic. Unfamiliarity is not automatically adventure just because there is an ocean behind it.

And the reward that seems intrinsic for everyone else, but escapes me completely, is the “experience” itself and perhaps forty-seven photographs from your hotel balcony and food pics from dinner at some Mediterranean Michelin restaurant. Hell, I do not even have social media to be conspicuous about my consumption or prove I went somewhere and did something. Terrible return on investment.

Speaking of investments, one man listed himself as a principal, and for a second that woke something up in me because principal means a specific thing in my native world of financial services… then I realized normal businesses got hold of the word and started using it however they pleased. “Principal @ His Own LLC” Could mean he owns something. Could mean he has a laptop and enough nerve. Principal of nothing but himself, and confident about it.

Out of the entire tray, I liked one man. One. Whether he knows that remains unclear because he may not have been issued me yet. We are being distributed to one another on separate schedules like school lunches at different periods. Maybe tomorrow he gets me. Maybe Sunday. I have no idea what is happening back there. Ryan is still behind the wall, far as I know. Then Nicholas H. found a crack and came through it.

congrats! Nicholas H. power moved you!

Nicholas had paid. That got my attention. A Power Move lets you elbow your way toward the front of the crowd so the other person sees you sooner. Nicholas had looked at the system, looked at the line of men waiting to be released, and decided he would not be dying back there with Ryan. The rest were waiting on the system. Nicholas paid the system to stop being a system for him.

Well, Nicholas. I'm sat.

This man read smart, independent, weird and put down actual American currency to change the order the world introduced him to me in. I wanted to see what kind of man pays cash to force the elevator open between floors. And what message had he sent shooting out in front of everyone else for me to see?

hello, how are you doing? 😉

Nicholas.

That is what you paid to expedite? I kept staring at it, convinced the rest of the message had gotten held up somewhere. Customs, maybe, with my urine-specimen-sized shampoo bottles. Somebody found an undeclared fruit.

There is nothing wrong with hello, how are you doing? That is almost the problem. You could serve it to an infant. There is no rough surface anywhere on it for a personality to catch, and now the whole stunt is funnier because Nicholas has shoved both arms into the machine, stopped the belt, climbed over everybody in line and come out the far end just to knock politely like he was returning a casserole dish.

I wanted something incriminating. Tell me you hate wind chimes. Tell me there is a cashier at the local Shop’n’Save that you are engaged in a silent war with and neither of you remembers how it started. Tell me you have been banned from somewhere boring. Give me one small reason to believe the blood is circulating.

Instead: hello, how are you doing? 😉

Okay. I respected the initiative. The execution concerned me.

Somewhere around James, or maybe Steven, I started asking why, no... resenting how this is how people are supposed to find each other now.

Maybe my father was right. Half my life ago he told me to go hang around the engineering library at the college up the road. At twenty this sounded like advice from a man who understood neither engineering libraries nor women. Why would I loiter by the periodicals waiting for some quiet man to trip over my foot? Now I think he may have understood the assignment better than I did.

Go sit near the engineers. I would rather watch a man's mind work than read what he wrote about himself for an audience. Give him something that will not work. A jammed printer. A door hung wrong that keeps sticking. Let me see which detail makes him angry and whether he notices the obvious problem first or bypasses it completely because he has become obsessed with some secondary mechanical insult nobody else cares about. Does he start taking things apart? Does he read the manual? Does he refuse to read the manual on principle and then spend forty-five minutes independently reconstructing the information contained in the manual?

Useful information, that. Certainly more useful than loves travel. We could sit near each other for the better part of a year before either of us decided there was enough evidence to say hello. Call that romance if you want.

Or I could do it the old way.

Stand at a bar. Let liquor make the introductions, sand a few coats off everybody's judgment until conversation becomes possible. Except I do not drink anymore, so I would be standing there at full clarity while everybody else gradually became easier to operate. No, thank you.

I opened Safari instead. Maybe the engineering library has public hours.

Tony liked you! Open the app and match to get the conversation started.

I still cannot see Tony.

Won't tomorrow, either, probably.