Truth Hurts: Delete Your Dating Apps

Our columnist answers the question “How did you meet your wife?”

I get asked every so often how I met my wife, most recently by my 11-year-old niece, who recently watched the 1997 romantic blockbuster Titanic for the first time, was devastated by the romantic tragedy, and then scandalized to learn that Ryan, her aunt, once had a teenage crush on Leonardo DiCaprio.

When friends or acquaintances—more often than not single—inquire as to how I met my wife, it’s usually out of genuine curiosity, but increasingly to find out which apps I used. Which is also a way of asking “How did you find someone?”

My answer is: I didn’t use an app. I have successfully dated in New York City for almost *long, melancholy sigh* 30 melancholy years without using Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, OkCupid, Match, or...or...or Friendster? I hooked up the old-fashioned way, at bars or crowded, smoke-choked parties in cramped, fifth-floor walk-up railroad apartments. I’ve met girlfriends at work: Once upon a time, clickbait factories were fluorescent-light-drenched bullpens of busywork staffed by 20-somethings sitting shoulder to shoulder, spending every waking hour of every day hunched over computers pecking at keyboards while flirting with one another. Where else were we supposed to meet people?

I have fallen in love without the help of Silicon Valley’s middlemen. I briefly downloaded an app in 2015, I think, while I was single and on vacation, and I almost got suckered by a flirtatious bot, which led me to delete it. I have been in long-term relationships otherwise, and have avoided swipe culture.

So, how did I meet Ryan? My wife? The love of my life? Well, I have Sammy to thank. If you can find a Sammy in your life, I highly recommend it.

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There is a legend in Jewish folklore that says a matchmaker must make three matches to enter heaven. The world to come. I’m not an expert in Jewish folklore, but I’ve been told this story by multiple people who are Jewish. I only knew one thing about matchmakers: the song ‘Matchmaker’ is my second-favorite in Fiddler on the Roof, which is my third-favorite musical.

I’m also not Jewish. I am a Catholic, which means I have always had a small obsession with Saint Joan of Arc and mothers superior and the Holy Mother. Strange, and powerful, women. My great-grandmother was born on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande, my great-grandfather near El Paso. The border was more permeable back then, but she was, according to family myths, possessed of shamanic powers. She could, for instance, cure curses. I’ve also always been drawn to witches, Bruja. Matchmakers are magical crone adjacent.

In the Talmud, God helps to bring soulmates together, like a matchmaker. The Yiddish word “bashert” means destined one, and I was destined to meet Ryan. I married late in life; I was a youthful 49-year-old with creaky knees. I didn’t long to get married until I met the person I was supposed to marry. I had loved and been loved by others, but I had never met someone like Ryan, a heart like a honeycomb, a brilliant, vulnerable, courageous world traveler who was so nervous before meeting me for the first time at a coffee shop that she didn’t eat, and then took me on an impromptu pizza crawl throughout the East Village. We floated up and down 2nd Avenue.

Ryan and I talked on the phone for hours before ever meeting. This was at the end of 2022, when the plague was still clawing its way into the lungs of thousands, every day, and the lines for the vaccine stretched around the block. We chatted about family and movies and politics as I chopped vegetables for soups, or slowly stroked the slumbering body of my one-eyed mutt Morley. I was the one who texted first because Sammy gave me her number. “Text her,” she casually suggested. Or not, no pressure.

I met Sammy years ago; she was one of my ex’s besties at the time. Sammy is a sunbeam, with bright, waggish eyes, an actor-photographer-singer-matchmaker-mother who loves breakfast foods and long rambling conversations. Sammy checked in on me after the break-up, which was amicable, but I was still tender.

She managed to get me out of my apartment at one point. We met for lunch at a trendy sandwich spot. She knows where to find the best cured meats. She asked me bluntly if I wanted to date, and I said “No,” and that was that. Sammy is a yenta, in the best possible sense of the word. Yenta is Yiddish for ‘busybody,’ but Sammy cares about her friends and family, and she was my friend.

A few months later, I felt a little lighter, and Sammy and I went out to lunch at a trendy Middle Eastern restaurant. There are two kinds of hummus: “Oh this is nice” and “Sweet Jesus, that’s good.” We had the latter. She asked me if I was open to dating, again, and I didn’t say “no.” I didn’t say “yes,” either. But I was…open.

She knew someone. A therapist. Adorable. Sammy approved™.

It turns out, Sammy had spent the weekend with childhood friends, and one of them expressed dismay about her younger sister, who was unlucky in love. She used the apps. Unhappily. Has anyone ever praised a dating app? Forgive the tangent, but anyone? I know a few couples brought together by apps, but they’re loath to discuss the process. Mostly, playing the apps is like a game of sexual Russian Roulette, only instead of one bullet in one of the revolver’s six chambers, it’s a lonely, horny, socially-awkward millennial with intimacy problems who will 100% ghost you after a night of sloppy heavy petting.

I don’t judge anyone who uses the apps; we do what me must to connect, but the world could use more matchmakers. People who care, maybe a little too much, but that is preferable to caring too little, I think?

There’s plenty of money to be made in romance, but love is sacred; it is quiet, sturdy, and more valuable than whatever it is you think is the most valuable thing—gold? Diamonds? Bitcoin? There is nothing more precious than a friend who tells you a joke when you’re glum, or the laughter of an 11-year-old who thinks you’re the funniest uncle she has ever met (you’re her only uncle), or a kiss from your supportive wife at the end of a long, dispiriting day.

Sammy immediately told her friend with the Tinder-hating sibling she had a single friend, and that friend was me. It was, or sounded like in the retelling, like a real eureka! moment. She had a friend who wasn’t on the apps. A friend with a dog. A friend who lived in Harlem, far from Ryan’s neighborhood in Brooklyn. Ryan admitted to me on the phone before our first date, the pizza crawl, which happened the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, that she had set her dating app’s radius to Park Slope, where she lived alone. Even if I had been on the apps, we would never have met.

Not without the help of Sammy. So when I’m asked how Ryan and I met, I tell them a friend set us up, which is what happened. Two more, and Sammy gets into heaven.

John DeVore is an award-winning writer and editor whose funny/sad memoir about grief, friendship and jazz hands, Theatre Kids, is now available.