When I was single, I spent a lot of time on Hinge reaching the end of my matches and trying to make the app produce more possibilities. I live in a predominantly white country. I’m Black, and I’m attracted to Black women, so the number of people I genuinely wanted to meet was already fairly small.
I would filter for race, run out of matches, and then expand the search to include people who weren’t Black. That gave me more profiles to look at. It rarely gave me anyone I wanted to date. I’d keep swiping left, working through a larger list with much the same result.
I had nothing against the people appearing on my screen. The attraction simply wasn’t there for the vast majority of them. Still, an empty list made me feel as though I should change something, so I kept widening it. After a while, the whole routine became tiring.
Eventually, I let the matches run out. I stopped trying to refill the list and decided to be more patient. If there weren’t any new people I wanted to meet, there weren’t any new people I wanted to meet.
Oddly enough, I started going on more dates. I saw fewer profiles, but the women who appeared were often active on the app or had recently joined. They seemed less worn down by it. There was less scrolling, and more of the connections actually went somewhere.
One day, I matched with someone who had just joined Hinge. We met a couple of days later and got along really well. A week or so afterward, she deleted the app. We’ve now been together for six months.
I later read about an approach called the burned haystack dating method and recognized something of my experience in the idea: instead of searching endlessly through a haystack for a needle, clear away more of the hay. I don’t know whether what I did fits the method exactly. I mostly stopped repeating a search that wasn’t helping.
It worked out for me, which makes me curious about other people’s experiences. Has anyone else let the possibilities get fewer instead of constantly expanding them? What happened when you waited?
