Hinge is Hell on Earth

Let’s set the scene.

You’re single, maybe freshly heartbroken, and you’ve convinced yourself you’re ready to “put yourself out there” again (whatever that means). You’ve healed, journaled, and watched enough movies to believe love is still possible.

Enter: Hinge.

Sleek. User-friendly. Everyone swears by it. The app designed to be deleted. Cute, right?

Yeah, well—so is a Venus flytrap.

Where Tinder is slutty chaos and Bumble is beige, Hinge is purgatory. It’s where emotionally unavailable men go to pretend they’re self-aware. It’s the only place where a guy will say he wants kids and a “non-committal relationship.” 

Pick a struggle. Please.

Within five minutes of scrolling, you’re questioning everything you know about attraction. There’s the finance bro holding a fish, the “sarcastic gym guy” with his post-workout selfie, and that one dude who thinks his personality is traveling (He once backpacked through South America. In 2018. And yes, he’s still talking about it.).

So you went to Machupicchu—big whoop. 

You scroll, you judge, you laugh—but then you catch yourself doing the same thing. Suddenly, you’re overanalyzing your own profile: is this photo too desperate? Does this prompt make me sound emotionally stable or emotionally available? It’s like a job interview for affection—except the interviewer ghosts you before you even say hello.

Every profile is a riddle:

“Just looking for something casual” (translation: I’ll trauma dump on you and vanish).

“My love language is physical touch” (and probably zero communication).

“6 '0 because apparently that matters” (it really doesn’t, I don’t know why guys are still hung up on this).

And then, there are prompts conjured by Satan himself:

“What if I told you…”— that your bio reads like a red flag seminar of dating don’ts?

“I get along best with people who…” — enable your bad habits?

“Most spontaneous thing I’ve done…” — joined a cult called crypto?

That, right there, is the thesis of modern dating: I want the benefits, but not the responsibilities. 

People on Hinge are walking contradictions. Scroll long enough and you start to realize Hinge isn’t an app—it’s a psychological experiment. One where you, the unsuspecting participant, juggles attachment issues, micro-rejections, and men who think their gym mirror selfies constitute personality.

Newsflash: they don’t. Put a shirt on.

It’s honestly equal parts exhausting, funny, and horrifying.

It’s Hinge—and there’s no place like it.

You match, exchange a few dry messages about favorite pizza toppings, maybe even graduate to Instagram. Then, suddenly, he’s gone. Poof. Vanished. Ghosted.

No explanation, just vibes.

And the worst part? You take it personally. Like somehow your entire worth is tied to whether Chad-with-a-chain replies to your witty response about “two truths and a lie.”

But that’s the trap, right? Hinge has convinced us that dating is just another algorithm to crack. That if you tweak your prompts just right—funny, but not too weird; confident, but not intimidating—you’ll unlock your soulmate. 

Spoiler alert: you won’t. You’ll just end up analyzing why a grown man wrote “pineapple belongs on pizza” like it’s his entire personality. And radically incorrect opinions about heinous food preferences are not defining markers in a man’s personality. 

At some point, you start to feel like an unpaid therapist, part-time comedian, and full-time hostage to the dopamine hit of a new like. Still, we persist.

We complain about it to our friends, delete the app, then re-download it two weeks later like feral raccoons searching through digital garbage for scraps of affection. We can’t get enough of it. And why is that?

Because we’re starving for affection, for connection. And we’ll go to insane lengths to feel it. Sift through guys with the emotional bandwidth of a wooden spoon? Done. Go on a date with a guy who calls himself an “entrepreneur” but sells protein powder? Sure. Pretend to laugh at a man who unironically quotes The Wolf of Wall Street? Been there (literally). Entertain a situationship with a guy who says “I don’t do labels” but wants you to meet his dog? Absolutely.

Despite the emotional damage, there’s still a sliver of hope. Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe this time he’ll actually text back. 

(He won’t. But there’s a level of romance to the possibility of it all.)

We hold out hope that maybe—just maybe—this random face glowing on your phone screen will offer something real. But we can’t help but wonder if online dating has just turned romance into a marketing ploy, a rat-race we can never escape from. 

So yeah—Hinge is Hell on Earth. It turned something natural completely artificial. And we gobble it up. Every time.

We’re all trudging through the trenches together—armed with red flags, low expectations, and a vague sense of delusion that we’ll find a relationship worth keeping. But at least it’s a shared experience.

And honestly? There’s a beauty to that.

But maybe we should stick to the old-fashioned way—making eye contact, flirting, and then calling it courage. 

I know. Meeting someone organically? The abject horror. 

Get over yourself—and go find something real.