020 - Being a Six on Hinge in NYC (Part 1)
I tasted heaven.
Signing Up
The first thing that surprised me is that they let anyone on Hinge. I could be (and was and am) allergic to commitment, emotionally brittle, and flaccidly uninterested in romance. But you don’t need to be an eligible bachelor to join Hinge, the same way you don’t need a sweet tooth to download Candy Crush. You just need 10 minutes to put towards creating a profile. And then a billion minutes to spend swiping.
Creating the Profile
In the 10 minutes I spent carefully crafting my Hinge profile, I grew 3 inches in height, received 2 promotions at work, and moved to a slightly nicer neighborhood. In 10 minutes, a man was sculped from the boyish clay of my being: a 6’3” Senior Creative Director who lives in the West Village of Manhattan. For every woman within 100 miles I was undoubtedly their wettest dream, their manic pixie dream man, Michelangelo’s David with an Amex. Nothing could stop me.
Until they asked for 5 photos. Yes, the reckoning came swiftly. Pride cometh one onboarding screen before the fall. But from the ashes of hope, a compromise was born! “I don’t need hot photos of myself.” I said. “Hot photos are for jocks, morons… and people who are attractive enough to take hot photos. What I needed is to moonlight as someone with personality.”
Look! Here’s me reading a book. OOOOH! Now I’m holding a guitar. WOW am I really making bread from scratch. YES YES! And here I am in Italy with my friends. I wouldn’t be allowed to have such hot friends if I wasn’t funny, would I?
Funny though I may be, I had to prove it. Behold the prompts:
Is it Moby Dick? Is it Infinite Jest? Is it Hamlet? I didn’t care. My profile was finished. I was in.
Swiping, Ad Infinitum
Finally, the fruits of my labor. Reaping time after sowing mode. My thumbs burn just thinking about it.
Swiping is the closest I’ve come to fathoming the concept of infinity, for no matter how infinitesimally small I made my parameters (age 27-29, 2 mile radius) or how narrowly I honed my desires (no pets, no kids, does hard drugs), the women brought to my fingertips were endless…More than there are grains of sand at the beach; than there are stars in the sky, than there are letters in the alphabet. There was no niche too obscure that I couldn’t max out my screen time (the limit is 24 hours in a day) swiping ravenously.
Some friends refer to the Hinge pool as ‘a verdant garden,’ other friends, who my mom doesn’t like me hanging out with, call it ‘the killing fields.’ But no matter what you call it, the ‘all you can look and hope to suck and fuck buffet’ is always open.
Until it’s not.
…the humbling continues in Part 2.