YG

out of boredom – or at least that’s what you told your friends – you’d downloaded this dating app called Unhinge. The concept was simple, apart from one peculiarity: like all dating apps, you could ‘like’ profiles and match with them if they ‘liked’ you back, which usually led to a conversation, and sometimes to a date. However, the twist here was that you could also have match with someone you’d ‘disliked’, if they’d ‘disliked’ you back. It was called a dismatch. And there you were, scrolling through that cursed app where every male profile was more hopeless than the last – between voice notes that made your teeth grind, photos taken from angles that should be criminal, and men who didn’t even make the effort to write a single line about themselves – you really wondered why men were surprised by the rise of the male loneliness. You were comfortably settled in your bed, in stained pyjamas and a frankly cheap sleep mask that smelled of tar, judging men and mocking them (maybe a bit meany of you but you wouldn’t admit that), when you stumbled across her profile.