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What it’s like to be a man in the top 0.01 per cent on dating apps
Amid men who claim to be perpetually unlucky in love are the chads, jocks and Disney princes of life, whose dating app profiles prove far more successful than those of mere mortals. Ben Bryant meets them
Men who haven’t settled can be unsettling to us. But does that mean every chad is a cad?
Brad* is a 35-year-old project manager from northwest London. He does not drink, enjoys walking his dog, and was once one of Hinge’s five most popular male users in London. He was even scouted to be the eponymous bachelor on the UK version of the US dating show The Bachelor – although, after an initial flirtation, he declined to take things further. Intelligent, confident, unusually handsome and financially secure, Brad is not chronically online enough to know what a chad is (another good sign), but on paper he is one of the most eligible men in the country. Is he having fun? “I’ve lost the will to live on apps,” he says. “But I feel caught in that place. It’s how people date nowadays.”
Brad has mixed feelings about apps. He’s clearly wary about sounding arrogant, and I get the impression he’s even more successful than he lets on – but the numbers speak for themselves. His version of Hinge is brimming with likes and messages from women. He is also routinely sent virtual gifts called Roses, which signal intense interest from admirers and are rationed to one per user per week.
Brad receives anywhere between five to 10 Roses every time he opens the app, which is typically once every two or three days. “I started deleting them,” he says. “I’ve never really understood those things.”
After more than a decade of using apps, he now feels like he’s getting “a dirty takeaway” every time he opens Hinge. The activity of dating itself is like “a prepaid monthly subscription”, he says – although not, he stresses, because of any of the people he dates.
Brad says he finds it difficult to believe that any connection he makes is made to last. “I don’t think it’s anything to do with how anyone looks,” he says. “I think there’s enough of every type of shape, size, colour, creed, background. I think it’s that apps condition us to want new people, and more people.”
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