Page 3 of Swiped
Next.
Nat genuinely liked the pics of the second guy — a thirty-six-year-old named Adam with curly hair and a studious expression and, promisingly, no exposed nipples. He was an Australian, in San Francisco for work as a pastry chef, which checked two of Nat’s boxes: cool accent and cool, non-coding job. She knew from her nightly user searches that there was a myriad of interesting jobs among the field of eligible men, and so why not partner up with someone who could introduce her to the exciting world of forestry or neurology or lepidoptery —or pastry cheffing. Sure, Nat loved her work, but she probably didn’t want to talk about it at the dinner table, right? Especially when said table could be filled with chocolatey, creamy cakes from a dessert professional. And as for the accent thing, well, sometimes things were added to the wish list just because they were sexy, and accents were sexy.
Nat read on about Adam, the sweets-master from Sydney. Under the question of what he values in a partner, he’d written, “I want someone who won’t be afraid to absolutely roast me! Bonus points if it’s in front of my mates or my mum.” Nat frowned. She’d noticed that wanting to be roasted was suddenly everywhere in her users’ profiles, and she had to say that she didn’t get it. The desire to be made fun of in front of loved ones wasn’t enough for her to nix Adam from the running, but it did give Nat pause.
So, she looked at his user metadata. No use learning how much he loved The 1975 and wood-fired pizza if he was the kind of creep who only messaged women under twenty-five or, God forbid, sent eggplant emojis to try and get around her finely-tuned anti-dick-pic filters.
She scanned his usage records and saw right away that Adam hadn’t sent any messages in over six months. So why was he popping up as an active user? She scanned his swipe history. It was very active.
Now Nat was intrigued.
Like every dating app, BeTwo tracked which users got a lot of YES swipes and which ones got a lot of NO swipes. Unlike the other apps, however, Nat had opted not to use this information in her matching algorithm — she knew what it was like to be the nerdy, ostracized kid in school, and so put little stock in popularity to reflect anything about a person’s actual value. What popularity did tell her, however, was how other people saw a user’s value.
So, when Nat saw that Adam was only swiping YES on women who were ranked far above him, and only during work hours, it told her something very important. Coupled with the fact that he hadn’t sent a message in several months, she could safely guess that Adam was actually in a relationship with — she checked the name of the last woman he’d messaged — Gina, and using the app to fantasize and fish for the kind of capital-HHotwomen he knew he wouldn’t actually have a chance with. Hence, the only swiping during work hours, when he wouldn’t be seen by Gina.
Sure enough, Gina’s profile had been deleted around the time when Adam had stopped sending messages on the app. Nat quickly opened the old message thread between Adam and Gina, whose data remained accessible even if her profile had been taken offline. Their last exchange had been to confirm the time and location of their date at a wine bar and included Gina sending Adam her number in case he was running late. Nat squinted into the glowing pixels on her screen. She could even see the time stamp of that last phone-number-containing message from Gina: 6:35 p.m. The time stamp of the last activity in the chat, however, was 9:57 p.m. when Adam had added a heart to Gina’s digits message — a full three hours after her message was sent and, presumably, after their date. To Nat’s eye, this was a clear indication that Adam had re-opened the chat to get Gina’s number to text her that their date had gone well, and he was feeling so abuzz with the thrill of the good date and the wine they had almost certainly drank at The Beaut of the Vine that he had “heart-ed” the message.
Nat smirked at her screen.BeTwo, her app that launched a thousand ’ships . . . even if Adam was seemingly not a boyfriend for the ages.
Nat closed his profile with a satisfied sigh and drained her glass of pinot noir. She didn’t need any more information on thisparticular mystery. The data could tell you so much and, unlike people, it never lied.
After refilling her wine and skimming a few more profiles, tossing out the immediate no’s, and wielding her wish list like a weed wacker, Nat landed on her final prospect — a thirty-four-year-old man named Greg. He had sandy blond hair that swooped over his forehead in a sporty way, and wide-set blue eyes that shone with glee as he smiled over a meatball sub.
She skipped straight to his metadata.
Greg was a mid-active user, meaning he wasn’t one of the ones who lurked on the app all day long, swiping through hundreds of profiles every hour. She could also see that his typical activity happened in respectably short twenty-minute chunks during the high-traffic times. For instance, his almost daily check-ins were during the pre-work hour in the morning, and Nat could reasonably surmise that they were done while Greg was running on a treadmill, given the repetitive motion without distance registered by his phone. So, Greg had an at least somewhat stable routine, and no red flags for desperation or emotional volatility behind his usage — like only logging in during the middle of the night, or swiping patterns that showed a huge difference in left and right-swipe ratios when done in the day (likely sober and discerning) versus at night (likely drunk and DTF).
Now Greg warranted cautious optimism, and an even closer look. Nat opened the reports containing his messages and scanned the last several weeks. Like most men, he sent out far more messages than he received, so that wasn’t telling her anything. Nothing jumped out at her in terms of the number or frequency of his messages, and she could see that he hadn’t been flagged by anyone for inappropriate comments. She ran a formula to search his messages for ten-digit strings of numbers, a clear indication that phone numbers had been exchanged andan IRL date was at least attempted. Greg had a phone numbers-to-messaged-users ratio of 1:5, which was way better than the average. Impressive. Now she knew that unless Greg’s messages regularly contained random strings of numbers, a good number of women found him charming and desirable.
So, Nat began to read the messages.
The first time she’d shown Sara the amount of access she had into her users’ every move within the app, her friend had physically recoiled.
“Yikes, you can see what I write to people?”
“Of course I can.” Nat opened up a selection of Sara’s messages to prove how simple it was. “Why does this surprise people? The architects see the pipes inside a house, right?”
Sara turned bright red and thrust her palm over Nat’s computer screen. “There’s nothing I’m ashamed of,” she blurted. “But I just didn’t think they’d be read by anyone else. Especially not someone I have to make eye contact with every morning . . .”
Greg, however, didn’t have to worry about being embarrassed by his messages. True, he didn’t seem too concerned with the difference between “your” and “you’re,” but his messages were polite and good-natured. She read through several of his opening lines, which seemed like a cut-and-paste template with a few personal details from the woman’s profile inserted.Hi, it’s so cool that you like (hobby) and have visited (city)! What’s your favorite (food) in the city?But that was fine with Nat — a lot of people did it, and she honestly admired the balance of effort and efficiency.
Yet, as she read through dozens of threads where Greg asked only the safest of questions, like “Any plans this weekend?” and couched even the mildest of emotions with GIFs fromThe Office, polite and good-natured were still the only words she could grasp about Greg’s personality, or lack thereof. She started to scan his conversations for any kind of strong opinion— and the cutesy ones about “(blank) is the best brunch food, fight me,” did not count. She found nothing. And yet, here was Greg, milquetoast-ing his way to lots of IRL meetups, or at least agreements to meet up. Nat couldn’t understand it. Inoffensive became offensive at some point, if you asked her. Plus, based on how quickly he was back on the app, lobbing more softballs at new matches after an exchange of numbers, Nat could surmise that his meetups lacked the spark of staying power.
She closed her laptop.
Because it was her code, she could spare herself that effort of picking a coffee shop, choosing an outfit, and making conversation with a relative stranger. Because it was her code, she could pass on Greg without ever being on his radar — no hurt feelings, no wasted time. Because it was her code, she could accomplish all this in her comfy clothes and sipping her favorite pinot.
She felt like a genius.
It didn’t matter that this was how her search nights always went — she never found anyone whom she wanted to meet, or even anyone who motivated her to log in to her ancient beta-testing user profile (which was still blank) and send a message. The most she ever gained were new qualities to add to her mental wish list, and now she had “No excessive GIF use” courtesy of Greg, which was useful! Plus, there would almost certainly be a new crop of twenty to forty new prospects for her to look through the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that.
She rinsed her wine glass in the sink and shuffled into her bedroom in slippered feet. She pulled her hair back with a puffy headband, brushed and flossed, and slathered a thick, shiny layer of serum and moisturizer on her long, angular face. She slipped into bed, entered her bedtime in a sleep tracker app, and watched a little animated pillow tell her that she’d earned theSuper Sleeper badge for fifty-plus days of going to bed at the same time every night. She turned off the lamp, arranged her six pillows around her body in a fort-like formation, covered her eyes with a towel, wedged a lumbar pillow between her knees, closed her eyes, and was asleep within a few minutes.
And so, if Nat had gone to the dog birthday party with Sara, where she would have had a bit too much wine to calm her nerves, and someone had asked Nat how she felt about the fact that she was the creator of one of the most popular dating apps on the market, and yet hadn’t been on a date herself in almost two years, she would have answered honestly. She would have said she felt lucky because BeTwo made her feel completely in control of her love life, even if she didn’t currently, technically have a love life outside of her app.
And that would have been very, very bad for the BeTwo brand.
Chapter 2
