Author: Rob

I met this guy at a bar called Joyface in the East Village last year. I was 25. He approached me in person. I feel like people my age don’t really do that anymore. Dating apps have literally been around since I was in high school, so actually walking up to somebody at a bar and chatting them up feels like kind of a lost art. When somebody approaches me in person, I’m much more inclined to say yes, even if I’m not 100 percent into it. It’s like positive reinforcement. I have this theory that if I say yes,…

I’ve known EJ since high school. Sort of. We went to Stuyvesant, which is this extremely competitive New York City public school where kids would cry because they got two questions wrong on the PSATs. I responded to this high-pressure environment by barely doing my homework and hanging out after school on this giant wall with the other kids who smoked weed. EJ was one of those kids. He was very old-school New York. I mean, I was born and raised here, but he was really of the city. He had an accent you don’t hear young people have anymore.…

Within minutes of the internet being invented, its creators and earliest users realized it could be used to find people to fuck. The issue, of course, was that this tiny subset of people was overwhelmingly male and, we can safely assume, profoundly unfuckable. Match and eHarmony got going in the mid-nineties, but initially offered little more than an online version of the newspaper personal ad. That began to change around the year 2000 – the year I tentatively dipped my wick into the wild world of online dating at the age of 23. Nerve had started life as a thinking-person’s…

There’s always going to be a weird power dynamic when you start fucking someone you first saw onstage. I’d been following this ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek rock band around Boston for years. They were great, they had a big local following, and after enough sold-out shows and late nights hanging around afterward, I’d gotten to know all of them pretty well. They were basically my peers – early thirties, funny, messy, rock-and-roll people. Then they got a new guitarist. He was younger than me. Tall, lean, rangy, guitar practically hanging around his knees. And he had these eyebrows. The eyebrows were insane.…

I swiped right on Patrick, but exactly why I met up with him so soon after he shot me a message is hard to remember. His profile photos were all of him doing outdoorsy shit like kite surfing. I could tell he had a good body, but I couldn’t really see his face. This was in 2015 or so, just before dating apps insisted on a clear picture of your face. Or at least a face. It was a simpler time.I think his profile mentioned that he was half Asian, which I liked, but his answers to the canned profile…

It was 2004, I was 28, and everything was breaking my way. I lived in a huge loft on the Bowery with a roommate I rarely saw. I had a job I liked, making decent money, a big group of friends, and a social life that routinely kept me out until five in the morning. I was dating a hot DJ, seeing another woman, and hooking up with other people in between. I knew bartenders, promoters, writers, weirdos. I could walk into a party and know half the room. Basically, I had no reason whatsoever to leave New York. Then…

In Manhattan, in 2002, meeting someone from the internet was still something you might lie to your friends about. There were no dating apps because there weren’t any apps. Your decidedly unsmart phone was mostly useful for calling/texting people and playing Snake. If you wanted to meet strangers online, you went home, sat down at a computer, logged onto a website, and kept that shit to yourself.That had changed with the advent of the Nerve Personals, the dating section of an online sex-and-culture magazine called Nerve. It attracted the kind of downtown people who wanted to meet someone online but…

I’m sure that some people are still getting value out of Feeld, but just prior to the New York Times’ article that blew it up in March of 2019, it was fucking incredible. A big part of what made it great was that most people had no idea it existed.Formerly “3nder” until forced to undergo a rebrand by the Match Group, which owned Tinder, Feeld was a place where I met dozens of gorgeous women bent on working their kinks out with a willing stranger. Where else could I have met someone like Taylor? Taylor was 24, a light-skinned black…

I met Jessica in the winter of 2017. We connected on Feeld, the dating app where people are encouraged and expected to be incredibly specific about the sort of sexual experience they’d like to have. Profiles on Feeld tended to be short on the poster’s penchant for tacos, love of travel, and avoidance of drama, and long on how they imagined actualizing their deep-seated desires.Jessica was Vietnamese, gorgeous with a great ass and a tiny waist. And – bonus – she lived just a block or two away. Unusually for Feeld, her profile wasn’t very specific about what she was…

I got on this dating app called Raya when I was around 25. Unlike Tinder, Bumble, or Hinge, you can’t just download Raya and start swiping. You’re referred, you apply, you’re vetted, and then you wait to see if they let you in.It has this reputation for being where celebrities, musicians, models, and other creative-industry people date, although there are plenty of regular, if conspicuously good looking, people on there too. The whole thing is intentionally private and selective, which naturally makes everybody want to get on it more. I got invited through someone I worked with in the music…