Pineapples and pizza belong together — unlike, sadly, you and me
To All the Women Whose Dating Profiles I Couldn’t Like on Hinge (An Essay About Modern Love)
It’s not you, it’s the dreaded dating app paywall — and my refusal to “pay to win” at the game of love.
📵 Hinge: The Dating App “Designed to be Deleted” (’Til the Next Time You Reinstall It) 😉
Have you ever experienced FOMO but for someone on a dating app?
Picture this: you’ve been browsing profiles on the dating app Hinge. This is your second (or third?) time reinstalling it.
But Hinge was “designed to be deleted.” You wonder if maybe you suck at online dating. Or — possibly — what you really suck at is love.
You’re basically that Halsey song personified.
The fears melt away when you see a profile that sparks your interest. They curated the photos well, cleverly responded to prompts and — oh my God — even added a voice memo.
You press the heart button, but your like doesn’t go through.
The dreaded dating app paywall strikes again — holding yet another potential connection for ransom.
After ten minutes of window shopping, you finally hit Saks Fifth Avenue. The mere prospect of their affection is beyond your budget. Pack your baggage and hike your broke, touch-starved ass home, player.
Tomorrow, a new batch of likes will be waiting.
All eight of them.
👄 The Feminine Urge to Bite the Apple 🍎
Yet, from beyond the paywall, the profile whispers your name, taking on the allure of forbidden fruit.
Mesmerized, you’re compelled to take a bite. But how?
Hacks? Not the noblest way to go about it, but history would assure you humans have done far worse for love. Am I right, Jaime Lannister?
The things we do for love, indeed.
Consider Eve from Genesis — the first book of the Old Testament, not the English rock band Lily Collins’ dad was in.
Eve sinned by biting a forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Her main squeeze, Adam, took a bite right after. But did they deserve to be exiled from Eden?
Hell no. Like Jon Snow, the OG lovebirds knew nothing and could not have known any better.
But God was going through a wrathful, egomaniacal Patriarch of Everything phase. Still, believers argue the banishment came from a place of love.
Love makes mindless fools of us all.
With that in mind, will you choose to bite the apple after all?
A serpentine voice whispers…
Do it.
Thirty dollars per month for Hinge’s Preferred Membership could change everything…
What’s the worst that can happen?
🔖 To Pay, or Not to Pay $30 a month — Wait, Is This What Love Costs in the Digital Age? 👎🏼
What if she’s the one?
Whoa there, Seabiscuit! You don’t even subscribe to that “one true love” Hollywood propaganda. Still, you want to believe.
Your brain splices a montage of scenes starring you and the beautiful stranger. It looks like the life of your dreams. You’re falling in love with an abstraction. This isn’t the first time.
Cool your Jacuzzi jets, Romeo.
Or maybe you are the star-crossed Candide. In that case, would dating apps in “the best of all possible worlds” dangle your destiny like a juicy banana behind Gorilla Glass?
Get real. This timeline stinks.
In the digital age, relationships are often treated as a commodity to “hard” or “soft launch” on socials.
Dating apps like Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder use a Pay-to-Win (P2W) model wherein paying for upgrades confers benefits and advantages. The incentive is simple: the users desire human connection — love.
Or, you know, the more primal stuff.
Money talks. Sex sells.
An enticing contrast to the topic of this article is the subscription-based creator platform OnlyFans.
On OnlyFans, you’ll find independent creators of all kinds producing content from cooking to fitness to fashion. But if we’re being honest, when people think of OnlyFans, they think of sex workers and NSFW content.
Sites like OnlyFans, where subscribers can message models directly, offer an element of interactivity that is thought to be appealing and exciting. It’s reminiscent, if not directly comparable, to what’s known as the Girlfriend Experience (GFE) — but the Skip the Dishes version.
Skip the Dates. Skip the Drama. Get the nudes.
Now think about this: Hinge Preferred costs $30 a month.
Have you ever seen an OF model charge a subscription price of $30 a month? It’s usually less. Much less.
So what does it all come down to?
A) Take your chances with Hinge Preferred ($30/month)
B) Subscribe to that OnlyFans model (Free — $25/month, varies by model)
C) Go outside, live your life, and meet people (Priceless)
D) ALL OF THE ABOVE BECAUSE YOU ARE A MOTHERFUCKING BALLER AND A BO$$ AND YOU DON’T PLAY BY THE RULES SET BY THE SYSTEM #YOLO
As for the “perfect girl”? She loves complete sentences, Oxford commas, and doesn’t fucking exi —
Maybe you should settle for someone average — who smells nice, enjoys your quirks, and accepts your flaws.
Would you be satisfied with that?
Happy, even?
That’s what your grandparents did. They made do with whoever was around and available. Ah, the good ol’ days.
Back when good enough was good enough.
🌿 Sylvia Plath and Oscar Wilde Sitting on a Tree, FOMOOTPLOYL 💋
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
In her novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses a fig tree to symbolize the potential life paths her protagonist, Esther, could pursue.
Like an analysis-paralysis prone arborist, she watched each branch rot, plop, and die.
Your fig tree holds ever-changing promises of fulfillment, self-actualization, and companionship. Branches may prune and die, but new ones grow in their place.
Careful not to miss the tree for the branches.
Some say feelings are fatal. Maybe. But lofty expectations and sexy hypotheticals are a dynamic duo that (with ninja-like stealth) render your fantasies dead on arrival.
This can be rooted in FOMO for people on dating apps. This version of FOMO — for romantic prospects — needs its own abbreviation.
FOMOOTPLOYL = Fear of Missing Out on the Potential Love of Your Life?
Hmm… Hard pass. Like your ex’s thick saliva, FOMOOTPLOYL doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.
No thank u, next.
Remember what Oscar Wilde said:
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
That quote wasn’t about text messaging etiquette, but it might as well be.
Besides, if a Hinge match wanted to read long bodies of text you authored, just send them your Medium referral link and watch those cents roll in.
Maybe you’ll make enough to justify the cost of Hinge Preferred.
🍍If You Seek Amy — or a Girl by Any Other Name 🍕
Dear Amy from Hinge,
It seems the Hinge stakeholders have decided I have sent my last like. Not forever. Just for tonight. Sorry, Amy.
Despite my inability to send a like, I did like your profile with my mind. Under different circumstances, we could have matched — assuming you liked me too. I imagine our correspondence would have been delightful.
I loved how you said, “Pineapples deserve a seat at the table of acceptable pizza toppings.”
AMEN! Pineapples and pizza belong together — unlike, sadly, you and me.
Sincerely,
Some random dude from Hinge
🚫 Hinge Likes May be Limited but Hope is Bottomless! 🍑
Image and presentation will make or break your chances of finding love online. It’s superficial, but that’s the reality of online dating.
Luckily, congeniality still counts—especially once you match. So try not to have the personality of an empty shopping cart.
Writing bios and expressing yourself in a way that stands out requires originality and cleverness. Anyone who’s been on dating apps for more than ten minutes can spot clichés ten profiles away.
And even if you make a profile you’re proud of, and feel confident, temper your expectations.
Keep low expectations, and high hopes.
Stay grounded, realistic, and practical.
Like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, flights of fancy will take you nowhere. But, like planes that disappear without explanation, the love of your life is probably out there. Somewhere.
With this in mind, every dating app user can get more mileage out of cultivating an unlimited reservoir of hope.
Hope will motivate you to persevere.
In the face of the unknown, the hope that love is out there — and that you are worthy of it — is worth more than unlimited likes.
Not paying for premium features means no second-guessing the profiles you passed up on. Similarly, life doesn’t come with undo buttons.
Picture this: you see an attractive stranger in public. You’d like to go up to them and introduce yourself, break the ice. But what are you going to say?
You overthink. And overthink. And overthink.
Are you going to make that first move or not?
The window of opportunity closes. And they’re gone. Too late. You spend the rest of the day imagining what could have happened if only you had been more confident and put yourself out there.
You can’t undo what you didn’t dare to do in the first place.
What future did you discard like a paper receipt onto serendipity’s ashtray?
What if the person beyond the wall of your hesitation was the one?
Do you smell a parallel?
Dating apps like Hinge collapse barriers, temporal and geographical.
Some barriers are harder to collapse. Not paywalls per se, but the walls within us. The walls we build around our hearts. The walls predicated on insecurities — around self-image, intelligence, or feelings of worthiness.
Some may feel they aren’t cut out for love. But when those people hold on to hope and keep going — no matter what — that is beautiful.
Especially considering the toxic ideologies that run rampant online — worldviews peddling hate, sexism, and a deep-seated bitterness that poisons the souls of young, impressionable people. Especially young men.
Without hope, the world is a dismal place.
Without love, we are lost in the dark.
There’s no guarantee your ideal partner is on Hinge anyways, but the possibility is ever-present.
Also, maybe the love of your life isn’t even on a dating app but out in the world, waiting for you to stumble into their life — or trying to slip into yours.
For all you know, the endless matching and messaging are just distractions to pass the time until fate intervenes.
So make the most out of every interaction.
When sparks do fly, it won’t require much force.
After all, navigating the complexities of life and dating will influence your development into the partner (and lover) you will become once the right person comes along.
To All the Women Whose Dating Profiles I Couldn’t Like on Hinge
I wanted to thank you.
Thank you for the reminder that love is something to pursue, but not force. Choosing radical acceptance over radical persistence has done me many favours.
Maybe someday we will cross paths under different circumstances. And we will both have found the love we were looking for.
Until then, I will keep looking for real love.
I will cultivate an unlimited reservoir of hope. Someday, I will be one-half of a steamy love sandwich. Or a love submarine. Or a Hawaiian pizza.
Maybe I’ll find love the old-fashioned way. It’ll be like a Hollywood romcom but with better writing. Fewer clichés. An Asian leading man, AKA me.
Who knows? Not me. I doubt you do either.
And, you know what? I like not knowing what the future holds.
It’s funner that way.
Sincerely,
Some random dude from Hinge
