by Jessica Pan
The app works like all the others: you swipe right on the people you want to meet (people with pets, people eating tacos) and swipe left on people you’d rather skip (people at Glastonbury). I start off tentatively, trying to give attention to each woman, but soon become a callous lothario from swiping fatigue. Snapchat filters that transform you into cute animals in every photo? Next! Interests include spirituality and mindfulness? Next! Only kissy selfies? Next!
The app is designed for reciprocity. You swipe right on the people you’re interested in, but if they don’t swipe back, poof, you’ll never get the chance to talk. And, apparently, the woman who lunches in Paris and regrets nothing doesn’t want to talk to me. Which is fine. That’s her right. Whatever. I’m fine. (I hope she regrets it.)
When you have a match, there’s a ding (such a rush), and the app encourages you to send a message to “your future BFF.”
Crucially, after you’ve matched, you only have twenty-four hours to message each other before your potential friendship expires. And if they don’t reply to your message within twenty-four hours, they disappear forever. There are so many possibilities for rejection on this app.
A woman named Elizabeth appears. Her bio reads: “I’m into cooking, trying restaurants, trash TV, theater, reading, traveling and exploring. Love a girls’ night in as much as a night out. Lived in New York for a few years. Looking for friends to explore the city with or maybe start or join a feminist book club.”
Yes! Yes, Elizabeth, yes! I send her a message about how I’d be up for her feminist book club and trying new restaurants. Safe. Solid. Not groundbreaking but friendly enough.
Elizabeth doesn’t reply.
“Elizabeth, don’t do this to us!” I yell at her photo. I watch the time dwindle away.
And then, before we have even begun, our time is up. Her profile photo fades to gray, like she’s dead. Which she is. To me.
I don’t have time to mourn her. There are plenty more fish in the sea, plenty more women petting elephants to meet.
I match with another woman. Her name is Ellen. She looks nice. Kind eyes. She asks me whether I intend to stay in London. I admire this up-front attitude. Why invest in me if I’m only here temporarily? That’s how we all got here in the first place. We made friends, put in the hours, shared all of our best anecdotes—and for what? For them to up and leave for Athens.
Then she asks me my star sign.
“Aries,” I reply.
I’m chopping onions for the chili I’m making for dinner when Ellen sends another message. I lean over the counter to read it.
“Oh no! Aries are THE WORST! It’s a massive clash! It’s always, ‘ME ME ME,’ and they’re so moody and stubborn. And obsessed with having a man in their lives.”
I blink at this message. OK, Ellen. Calm down. I might be an Aries, aka THE WORST, but if you prick me, do I not bleed? (And then retaliate swiftly, as me and my star sign compatriots are wont to do.) But Ellen, do I not need friends, too? Do all Aries deserve to die alone?
I can’t resist asking, “What sign are you?”
“It’s in my profile,” she replies.
I check her profile. She’s a Gemini. I decide to try to rise above this. Her profile says that she’s from a city called Carlisle and she loves soccer. “What soccer team are you a fan of? Carlisle United?” I ask her, trying to climb onto more neutral territory.
“I was, but now I support Arsenal because I moved to London.”
Ditch her, Sam’s voice says in my head. Ditch her now.
See, Sam is not very discerning with his friends (I’d go as far as to say he could afford to be a little more discerning). But he comes down hard on people who abandon their local soccer teams for shinier, more successful alternatives (he supports Sunderland, a British soccer team who have been on a downward spiral in recent years). Loyalty to your team is a sign of basic decency. People who ditch theirs are fair-weather fans and fair-weather friends. It’s an unspoken truth that they are not really to be trusted.
Probably because they are snakes. Two-faced Gemini snakes.
“I think it’s the end of the road for us, Ellen,” I say out loud, while chopping the onions extra hard. I finish making dinner, and neither of us messages the other again.
This was already so much more complicated than I had imagined. I was being eliminated as a friend based on my birth month. And I had rejected a woman because of her chosen soccer team. Truly, does this app turn everyone into assholes?
Well, at least we don’t start out that way. Each match sends a friendly message, followed by a smiley face. The smiley face with red cheeks, to be precise. Everyone uses this emoji. It says, “I’m a nice person, I want to get to know you, I have good intentions, I’m not a murderer.” It’s scary how effective it is. How reassuring. As if, by law, we all know murderers are obliged to use the murder emoji (skull, I’m assuming) as an opening gambit to give us a fair heads-up.
Most women say they like: brunch, yoga, wine, concerts, dancing, watching movies. Same goes for art galleries and exhibitions. We just want to be TV ads showing off perfect all-inclusive vacations in Cancún.
I send a few messages like, “I like comedy, too!” and “What’s your favorite kind of ice cream?”
Within a few hours, I begin to finally understand the widely discussed app fatigue. A coworker once told me that she had rejected 15,000 men on Bumble and was done with apps, and I had responded, “But the next match could be someone amazing!” I’d gone into this wide-eyed, hopeful: You could meet anyone! So many different, interesting, exciting people, just sitting in the palm of your hand, waiting to be met! Adventures to be had!
An hour later, I’m swiping left on women just for calling themselves “authentic,” liking clubbing, and going to Burning Man.
When I do match with someone, we have awkward banter over messenger, and then someone has to make the first move to make the friendship happen IRL. Most of the conversations are really banal, so it’s hard to say, “Should we continue this conversation about nothing over dinner?” Plus there are women who simply don’t reply to you, as if your opener of, “Hey, Jen, is that your dog in the photo?” isn’t good enough for them.
The main barrier with my matches is that I’m too embarrassed to “ask them out.” We’ve come so far: we’re both on the app, we swiped right on each other, we’re chatting on messenger, but we’re both too tentative to put ourselves out there and suggest meeting up in real life.
It feels eerily familiar to my early days with Sam. Our messages were teasing and frequent, but as we are both shy, things could have been drawn out for months before we went on our first date.
Except, before we met, Sam had booked a one-way, nonrefundable ticket to go and live in Australia. Love, or maybe fear of losing potential love, makes us bold—I made a move. I invited him to my friend’s birthday party, made it sound casual, he showed up at 2 a.m. drunk, told me I was his favorite person in China, the next day I asked him out to dinner, he kissed me, and we’ve been together ever since.
Not sure I can apply any of those lessons to this scenario.
Without any of that urgency, I don’t know how to “ask” the women out. Many women I’ve spoken with also struggle with this make-or-break moment, because they don’t want to seem too forward or be rejected. But the entire point of the app is to meet up in person and expand your friendship group, not have five or six lackluster back-and-forth exchanges before never messaging each other again. The premise fails completely if neither party makes a move.
Then, one day, over Instagram, I get a message from someone I’ve never met before. Her name is Venus. She is originally from Macao but had studied in the US. She’d read one of my articles and recently moved to London and wanted to know whether I wanted to have dinner. Remarkably—brazenly—she appeared to ask this with no qualms.
I feel so flattered. See,
Ellen? Some people like disgusting Aries women like ME ME ME. People want to have dinner with me!
Venus and I meet for Malaysian food, and I ask her about making friends in London.
“I was really lonely when I first moved here, but I found my Sex and the City crew on Bumble BFF,” Venus says.
“What? Really?” I ask, valiantly ignoring the SATC reference.
Apparently, Venus had a lengthy online conversation about fashion school with an Irish girl named Clarissa; they met for coffee, then brunch, and since then, they’ve practically been inseparable.
“Clarissa introduced me to two other girls she met on Bumble BFF, and now we’re all best friends. We hang out all the time.”
I nearly snap my chopstick in half. I want this! This is my dream!
But had she had any dud dates?
Venus says she had one friend-date with someone who lived far away, and they haven’t seen each other since (see? Distance equals doom), but Clarissa lived two train stops away from Venus.
“We just got back from a trip to Geneva together.”
I put down my chopsticks.
Now I am tempted to say, “You guys need a fifth in your Sex and the City crew . . . ?”
But Venus is twenty-five. I suspect she thinks I’m near death, the way all women in their twenties (previous self included) look at women in their thirties and beyond. I’d be “old crone in the corner photobombing their group selfie and asking them to keep the noise down” to her Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte. Also, I begin to sense that this dinner is more of a networking opportunity for her when she asks me for advice on filing taxes as a freelancer. Which is fine with me, because she has given me something priceless.
Hope.
I go back to the apps with renewed enthusiasm, but with one key change. I adjust my settings to extend my age range. Seeing Venus reminded me that it’s fun to connect with women who aren’t my age. Venus and I liked each other, despite our age gap, and one of my closest former coworkers was ten years older than I am.
I adjust my app settings so that I can be matched with women fifteen years younger and older than I am. Immediately, a woman with long dark hair appears in my app. She’s elegant. Forty-four years old. A novelist named Abigail. Who lives nearby. I swipe right on her. Ding! We’ve matched.
She sends me a message. “I’ve never done this before, do you want to get coffee? If it’s bad, it’ll make a funny story, at least.”
Good opener, Abigail.
I message her back, “Yes! Let’s do it!”
A few days, later, I’m getting ready for my first friend-date from the app. I’m nervous. Would I be an attractive prospect?
In romance, potential suitors can pretend you have no chemistry or you weren’t their “type.” But because we can have as many friends as we want, being rejected as a friend is brutal—the message loud and clear: “I genuinely do not like to be around you.”
I wash my hair. And try not to be late.
I walk into the café and spot Abigail sitting in an armchair in the corner. I recognize her from her profile photo (another difference, I am told, from dating apps is that the photos tend to be accurate). She stands up and gives me a brief hug and then asks me what I want to drink. I order a flat white and settle into my chair, studying her surreptitiously.
Abigail brings the coffees over, and we immediately start talking about writing—she’s working on her second novel and deep into the edits. She’s open about how difficult she finds writing the first draft. Her vulnerability sets the tone: she’s honest and warm. She’s doing Deep Self talk—this I can do now.
She talks candidly about her recent divorce, mentioning that her ex-husband has a new girlfriend, so I take the plunge and ask her whether she’s started dating again.
This feels like a personal question to ask someone I’ve just met, but Abigail nods.
“Unsolicited dick pics are a very real thing,” she says.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I say, laughing.
“But the good thing is that I get to see some great bathroom tile designs,” she adds.
We talk about the relief of being on a friend-date, rather than eyeing each other up to see whether we want to sleep with each other.
“Isn’t it great that you and I won’t have sex with each other and then ghost each other?” she says.
It is.
Abigail is warm but straightforward, and I like her immediately, which is amazing, because on paper I wasn’t sure we would have a lot in common. She’s a forty-four-year-old single mom with a five-year-old kid. She has a PhD in archaeology and is the kind of woman who drops her kid off at school, goes running, and then sits down to write epic novels. Will I ever be as great as this woman? I’m not sure, but I’m very happy to meet her.
I walk out of the café on a high. I met a stranger and had coffee and a great conversation. My first friend-date. A roaring success.
But I don’t know how to proceed at this point. Do I contact Abigail again? Wait for her? This is when my friendship mentor, Rachel B., steps in.
“My biggest piece of advice is make the first move and also make the second move,” she advises.
I take out my phone and text Abigail: “I hereby promise to never send you a dick pic.”
Abigail texts me back to promise me the same thing. She says she’d love to meet up again, but, for the next few months, she’s very busy with book edits. We agree to get in touch in a month or so.
My date with Abigail had gone so well that I feel confident that by the end of this experiment, I’ll have about ten new best friends. We will go to Tenerife together and drink Bellinis on the beach.
My second friend-date is with Jade, who works for an arts charity. We arrange to see a comedy show near King’s Cross on a sweltering hot day. She has red hair and gives off an artsy vibe in a floral shirt. She buys us Aperol spritzes, which we drink while I sweat profusely through the entire comedy set. Halfway through the show, I notice that the woman sitting directly in front of me is wearing the exact same H&M dress as I am. And we’ve both sweated straight through it. I want to share this with Jade but feel too self-conscious.
After the show, Jade and I walk back to King’s Cross together. And that’s when I’m faced with a dilemma. What now? Do I tell her I had a nice time? Ask to see her again? Angle for a cheek kiss? Because we saw comedy together, we didn’t really get to talk to each other, except for a quick conversation during the intermission, cooling off outside with our cocktails. I’d liked her a lot, in those fleeting fifteen minutes as we chatted about our jobs and the comedians, but now saying goodbye feels so very awkward. Jade initiates a hug and says we should do this again sometime. Lesson learned: don’t meet up for a first friend-date and then sit in silence next to each other for two hours.
Date three is Zara. We meet outside the British Museum, and we have a drink in the basement of a bookstore. She’s fascinating—she grew up in France but also has a hybrid Scottish accent and parents from Bahrain. But it feels less like a conversation and more like I’m watching a one-woman show on feminism, multiculturalism, and her boyfriend’s racist family. I’m captivated by it, but I don’t feel a connection. Would I listen to her podcast? Yes. Interview her for a profile? Yes. Become her friend? Not sure.
Then it’s Nicole, an accountant, and while she’s perfectly nice, we have nothing in common. I find myself looking for excuses to leave our coffee date early. Later, I grab dinner with an event planner who rants about her job for forty minutes, so I quickly wolf down my pizza so I can bolt home as soon as possible.
I realize that with all of them, there’s no spark.
Does there need to be a spark in friendship? I’ve always thought so. You want to have chemistry with someone when they’re helping you move the dead body; otherwise, it’s just a very, very bad night for both of you.
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br /> And while loyalty and support are important to me in the long run, I want to laugh and have fun with new friends.
At this point, it’s pretty obvious, though—I am plowing through my friend-dates. I’m wining and dining women at the rate of a recently single John Mayer with a fresh haircut on a thirty-two-city road tour.
As I looked at my rows of message after message to different women, it dawns on me. I am the fuckboi of Bumble BFF: a Serial Dater. A fuckfriend.
But unlike a fuckboi, it’s all because I am in search of that ineffable spark.
Not just a quick shag.
See, Abigail aside, each of these women was perfectly nice, but my feelings for them are tepid. And I can tell that the lukewarm-ness is mutual. Or maybe we just didn’t push through the awkwardness barrier to get to the good parts.
Then something very dark dawns on me. Not one of my other friend-dates has asked to see me again, either. Who is the real fuckboi in this situation, hmm?
OK, I think it’s still me.
But have I asked enough questions? Had I self-disclosed enough? Too much? I thought I could make friends easily if I was willing to try—now, I realize, I know nothing. What friends? Whom can I trust? Unlikable people don’t know they’re unlikable, do they?
But I had no choice but to persevere.
Everyone in London is so busy and tired from work, family, dating, and sending/receiving dick pics. I’m beginning to feel nostalgic for small-town Texas. With literally nothing else going on, within ten minutes you can get twenty people to meet you in a parking lot to light a can of body spray on fire.
And how do other people date multiple people at once? How can you possibly stay motivated? Why would you want to? The admin is a nightmare. The small talk. The rote life story swapping. There are so many Sarahs, Katies, and Samanthas on the app that I can’t keep up. I’m exhausted. There must be another way.
A few days later, I read a news article about a woman in New York named Natasha who had blindly sent hundreds of men on Tinder the same message: meet her for a first date in Union Square “near the stage.” As dozens of men began mingling around the stage, looking for her, she appeared with a microphone and announced that she had asked them all there at the same time so she could save time and eliminate unsuitable matches.
