I moved to a new city a few weeks ago, downloaded Hinge, and gave myself what seemed like a fairly straightforward assignment: meet some women. I’m 26. A dating app felt like a reasonable place to start.
Two weeks later, I have some matches and absolutely no success. Which is a strange combination. Enough interest to suggest my profile isn’t invisible, but nothing that has turned into actually meeting someone.
I know two weeks isn’t a long time. Saying it out loud makes it sound even shorter. But those two weeks are also a decent chunk of my entire life in this city, so they feel bigger from where I’m standing.
There’s something particularly awkward about trying to date somewhere new. I’m still getting used to the place, and now I’m also trying to figure out how to introduce myself to women in it. The app puts people in front of me, which helps. What happens after that is apparently a separate skill.
The matches make it harder to know what to change. If nobody matched with me, at least I’d have a clear starting point. Instead, I’m stuck wondering whether I’m doing something wrong or expecting things to happen faster than they usually do.
I don’t need every match to become a relationship. A date would be a perfectly respectable opening achievement. Just meeting someone and finding out whether we get along would make this feel a little less abstract.
And I keep coming back to the question I had before I downloaded Hinge: how do you meet women when you’ve just moved somewhere? The app was my first answer. After two weeks, I’m curious what the other answers look like.
