Money gone to be ignored faster. I called it efficiency
It was loneliness with a receipt. The app took payment. It did not take me.
I did it on the toilet at work, which already tells you the quality of the decision. Warehouse radio on the other side of the door. Someone knocking because they needed the loo. Me sat there with my bank app open like I was about to buy something useful.
I was not. I was buying the idea that if I paid, I would stop being one of those people who get left on read by a man named Josh who likes hiking and his own jawline.
I told myself it was practical. Skip the queue. See who liked me. Stop wasting evenings on the free version like some mug refreshing a fruit machine. Very grown. Very organised. Very “I have a degree and a rota and I am not desperate.”
Then the payment went through and my stomach did that small ugly drop. Same drop as when the standing order for rent leaves and you already know the number is wrong.
I folded. That is the honest version.
There is a particular kind of pride you carry when you have always been the one who can pull. Not in a fairytale way. In a London way. Night out, decent face, filthy joke, someone clocks you. I know how to be wanted in a room with bad lighting.
Apps are not a room. Apps are a catalogue. You become a product with a prompt and a photo where your hair behaved for once. And the second you put money in, you are admitting the catalogue was not working and you are trying to buy your way further up the shelf.
People online say it constantly. Paid for premium. Still nothing. Forty eight hours. Zero. I used to read those posts and think, well that is them. That is not me. I am Els. I can talk. I can flirt. I do not need to tip the machine.
Then I tipped the machine.
The confirmation email was so cheerful it felt like mockery. Welcome. Enjoy. Your experience is about to get better. No it was not. My experience was about to include a line on my statement that I would hide from myself the next time I opened the banking app on the night bus.
What I thought I was buying
I thought I was buying time. That is the lie I sold myself, and it almost sounded clever.
Time not spent swiping after a late. Time not spent wondering if my likes were sitting in a locked box I was too skint or too stubborn to open. Time not spent doing that pathetic little refresh when I should have been asleep because I have a morning shift and a face that needs more than four hours.
I also thought I was buying information. Who had already liked me. Who was worth the effort. Who was not a time waster with two photos and a bio that just says “good vibes only.”
Information is catnip when you are thirty and still splitting a bathroom. You start treating dating like work. Targets. Filters. Outcomes. I do numbers all day on the floor. Of course my brain tried to turn men into a spreadsheet. Of course it failed.
What I was actually buying was a feeling. The feeling that I was doing something. That I was not just sat in the flat in a towel, one flatmate in the kitchen, the other one on the phone, me staring at strangers like a job I did not apply for.
Doing something is not the same as getting somewhere. That distinction arrived about ten minutes after the payment. It arrived wearing the first dry opener of the night.
The app took the money and kept the same men
You know the ones.
The gym mirror. The pint. The sudden interest in “what are you looking for” followed by an answer so vague it could be a weather report. The voice note that sounds intimate until you realise he is walking to the shop and you are just noise in his headphones.
Paying did not make them ruder. It did not make them kinder either. It just made the silence more expensive.
I got a handful of likes that would have been free if I had waited. I got one decent chat that died the second I said I work warehouse hours and cannot do a Wednesday 8pm in Shoreditch like I am unemployed and glowing. I got a man who asked nothing. Not one question. Just statements about himself, like I was a comments section.
That one properly annoyed me. Not because I need to be interviewed. Because conversation is the bare floor of this. If you cannot ask what I do with my days, you do not get access to what I do with my nights. I do not care what you paid. I do not care what I paid.
I sat on my bed with my makeup still on and thought, I gave this company money so I could be bored more efficiently.
Pathetic is the right word. I do not need a softer one.
Why it hit harder than a normal dry spell
Rejection on the free version is annoying. Rejection after you have paid feels like you volunteered for it.
There is a difference between being ignored and being ignored with a receipt. One you can laugh off in the group chat. The other sits next to Tesco and the overdraft and the lip product you did not need. It becomes part of the little pile of proof that you are not as sorted as your face suggests.
I am good at the face. That is not me being cute. That is habit. Mirror, product, smirk, out the door. People meet the version that looks like she does not care. The version that paid for Hinge cares. She cares in a small, private, slightly humiliating way.
I did not tell the flat. I did not tell work. I told the diary like a coward and then went to make tea like nothing happened. One of them asked why I was quiet and I said I was knackered. That was not a lie. It was just not the whole thing.
The whole thing is this. I can have sex. I can have a night. I can be chosen for an hour and still come home wanting someone who texts in the daytime. Paying for an app was me trying to skip the messy bit and purchase the daytime. The app does not sell that. It sells more of the same men with a nicer loading screen.
The statement is a snitch
Next morning I opened my banking app on the bus because I am a menace to my own peace.
There it was. Small. Neat. Named like a treat. Sitting under a Tesco and an Uber I could have avoided if I had left when I said I would. I had this stupid urge to rename it in my head. Call it “admin.” Call it “networking.” Call it anything except what it was.
It was me putting money on the idea that someone would pick me faster if I paid the gatekeeper.
I do maths for a living, in the unglamorous sense. I know what a bad spend looks like. This was a bad spend. Not because the amount would ruin me. Because of what I was trying to buy with it. Attention is a rotten product. It expires while you are still holding the bag.
I wanted a boyfriend. There. I can say it in writing. I will still make the joke in person. I will still say I do not do boyfriends, like that is a personality and not a flinch. The payment was the flinch with a card number attached.
What I should have done instead
Not a lecture. I am allergic to those, especially from people who have never stood on a warehouse floor at 6am with last night still on their skin.
I should have gone out with the girls and let the night be a night. I should have slept. I should have put the energy into the promotion I actually want, the one that would change the number in the account in a way Hinge never will. I should have left the app closed and let my pride stay intact for one more week.
Instead I did the modern thing. I tried to solve a feeling with a subscription.
That is why it felt pathetic. Not because paying is shameful. People pay for gyms and hair and therapy and Deliveroo after a row. People pay to make life slightly less annoying. I get it. I am not above it.
It felt pathetic because I already knew the app could not give me what I was after. I paid anyway. That is the bit that stings. Knowing and doing it regardless. Like watching yourself from the doorway and still handing over the details.
I cancelled. I did not feel noble.
I lasted long enough to prove the point and then I killed it. No speech. No “new era.” Just off. The kind of off where you still check if they took the next payment because you do not trust companies and you do not trust yourself on a sad Thursday.
Did I feel empowered. Please. I felt like I had put a tenner on a horse that was already lying down.
I still have the app. Free version. Obviously. I am not a monk. I am a thirty year old in London with a high drive and a low patience for men who think “you up” is aftercare. I will swipe when I am bored. I will not pretend the paid tier is a personality upgrade.
If you are hovering over the button tonight, be honest about what you think it will fix. If the answer is “this hollow bit on a weeknight,” save the money. Put it towards the cab home or the good mascara or the Friday that does not need a stranger to start.
The app will take the payment. It will not take you seriously. That part you still have to do yourself, in a room, with your actual mouth, like a person.
Which, for the record, I am better at. I just forgot for one evening and let a checkout screen convince me otherwise.
