Coffee Meets Bagel: Making Dating in the Big City Much Easier
By: Jessica Barone, @chai_haiku
Hey Big City,
It’s me again. I have a bone to pick with you. I need a date, badly. No, don’t try to distract me with your neon cityscape and food trucks. I mean it. You want to know why you haven’t seen me around lately, Big-C? I haven’t had a date in weeks, and I blame you. Who do you think you are? That coworker I met in the office won’t call me back. The cute barista who hands me my coffee every morning keeps getting my name wrong. My love life is a sham, Big City. And all you do is show off one attractive person after the other. Everyone is so goddamn gorgeous. On the subway, in bookstores, jogging past my apartment every Saturday morning. I don’t know where to start. What do you expect me to do, dammit?
What. Try a dating site? No thanks. I’m not like all those middle-aged couples on the commercials, holding hands and smiling from the TV in comfortable, stable bliss. It’s not like I haven’t tried human interaction. I mean, I can throw caution to the wind and approach a person, sure. I’ve done that before, plenty of times. (Possible side effects include pepper spray, black-eyes and bruised egos.) But that’s playing Russian Roulette. Don’t try to pacify me, Big City; dating is hard.
Yeah, I guess online dating couldn’t hurt – but I don’t want to get set up with someone who claims to be a Brazilian model online and then ends up being thirty years older in person. Big City, please. Don’t waste my time. You really think I should try internet dating? Stop being ridiculous. I mean – I never have before – well –
Okay, I admit it, I just tried Coffee Meets Bagel. Yes, it’s a dating site, but I signed up via Facebook, so the matchups are with other real people, maybe even friends of friends of friends (instead of that creepy guy at the laundromat with the glass eye). It was free to sign up, it’s not like I had anything to lose. Every day I’ll get a match at noon, and it’s kinda nice not having to rummage through multiple profiles. It makes life a little simpler. And face it Big City, you like to complicate my life. You taunt me with too many options. So since I’ve tried everything else in the book, yeah, I confess: I tried an online dating site.
CoffeeMeetsBagel.com isn’t as daunting as I thought it would be. At noon, if I dig the match I’m given, I can “like” it, and then I wait to see if my match will “like” me back. Easy enough. And yes, I’m kind of getting addicted to the little “coffee beans” virtual currency I earn for the site’s Coffee Shop. I can buy quirky e-gifts for my matches to spice things up. I’m too broke to get a latte at Starbucks, but I’m freakin’ rich in coffee beans for Coffee Meets Bagel. Browsing the Coffee Shop while waiting to see if my match today will “like” me back is a nice distraction. If it’s mutual, then the site’ll connect us through SMS. It’s like, bam, you’re already at first base of 21st Century dating – texting. (First base is texting, second base is coffee, third base is hooking up, duh.) Usually I have to make tentative small talk with someone for days [weeks] before we get to phone action.
It’s almost noon. We’ll see how my first match goes today. Who knows, Big City, maybe you’ll see me out this weekend after all.
This post is sponsored by the fine people at Coffee Meets Bagel. You interested in sponsoring a post or advertising on the site? Holler us at Info@BrokeAssStuart.com
