Each week in “Love Apptually,” Daily Bruin staffers Nico Correia and Natalie Green will take turns attempting to find love in all of the wrong places: dating applications. To help thousands of loveless students, but mostly themselves, Correia and Green will test run and rate five dating apps over the course of one quarter.
My first relationship began because of the original dating app: AOL Instant Messenger. For those not familiar, AIM is a now grandfathered, but at the time revolutionary, messaging tool beloved by middle schoolers and operating child predators in the mid-2000s.
I met my first girlfriend at a bat mitzvah while dancing with her to the 2007 hit song on the mitzvah scene: “Everytime We Touch” by Cascada. Impressed by my dance moves and somehow not sensing my tendencies from my feverish dancing to Cascada, she later messaged me on AIM and asked me to be her boyfriend. We went on to have a storied romance of sending each other virtual hearts over the service until my friend Jeremy started messaging her shortly after, at which point she AIM broke up with me.
Given initial early success in the dating app world, I envisioned having a greater sense of accomplishment with this column. Unfortunately, I haven’t been on, or even tried to arrange, a date meeting my online matches the entirety of this experiment. This is our last week and not only have I not found love apptually, but also I haven’t even been solicited by any strange middle-aged men. If anything, my tenure on dating apps this quarter has been polite and boring. Since when does the Internet treat people nice and why did it have to happen now?
I had some catching up to do if I wanted to talk about real, actual dating in my dating column, so I downloaded the group dating app Squad. The app is kind of like sharing a Tinder account with your friends. You can have two to six people in your Squad and everyone in it can swipe yes or no on other Squads. After enlisting my roommates Matt and Megann, my friends Noor and JP and a boy I met on Tinder the first week of my column whom I’ve since become friends with, I was ready to take over the Squad world. Until I realized everyone on Squad is, at a minimum, 2,000 miles away.
Even though I set our Squad discovery preferences to a range of 20 miles, apparently no one on the West Coast is into group swinging, because the only Squad I found in the area was Natalie’s. As Natalie put it, our “mixed-gender, mixed-sexuality” Squad had trouble making friends. We only managed to make a handful of lasting matches, matches that couldn’t withstand Noor’s inquiries about various obscene sex acts.
Further hindering our success was the app’s atrocious design. Messages from other Squads can take hours to appear, and the messages were often not worth it. I waited a day to receive a message that read “hahahaha.”
Luckily, Squad “taglines” almost made up for the prototype-like app. Similar to the way users can make a bio about themselves on Tinder or Bumble, users can make a tagline about their group on Squad. Most of the taglines are either vaguely misogynistic or immature statements about Squads having smaller than average genitalia. Others are just gibberish. We went with the winning “It’s easy to plan an orgy, but harder to get everyone to come.”
As much fun as I had, I just deleted Squad, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. I currently have no dating apps installed on my phone, something that hasn’t been true since the end of my sophomore year, save for brief hiatuses. I apologize if you were expecting this column to be a clone of “Sex on Tuesday.” That’s what I wanted too.
Instead I’m ending my junior year at UCLA with my first boyfriend, someone I did not meet online or even match with on one of the bajillion dating apps I have come to hear about. I met him in a way perhaps even more outdated than AIM: in real life at the UCLA film school. Having just one more year left at UCLA and being in a non-AIM relationship is both cool and terrifying, but overall I am in a really good place.
If there’s one thing I am going to miss about writing this column, it’s going to be texting Natalie about how bizarre dating apps are and how it’s even weirder that we got our diary entries published in an award-winning collegiate newspaper.
But then I remember I don’t need an app to talk to her. I’m living literally five seconds away in the apartment across from her next year, which I am going to love, actually.