$350 in Seven Days, and Two Canceled Dates
I installed Hinge again less than a week ago. I spent $99 for the fourth time on the HingeX membership for three months — they've got to learn my lesson now. I spent $200 buying 100 roses and sent them to 100 women. And I also paid $50 to boost my profile for two days. After all that, I had two dates in person that got canceled. One, because Hinge sent me an email saying that she'd been banned from the platform for fraudulent activity. And the other one just canceled last minute and was like, "Oh, my meeting ran late. Don't mean to flake, but can we do another time?" Then she didn't follow up after that — and that was via text message from her phone number.
So I dumped $350 into Hinge this time using it. I also tested roses and boosts and the premium last time, so I spent at least $250, if not $350, before on it. Then I bought the premium membership the last time. All in, I've spent at least $700, if not $800 or $900, on Hinge in the last year since I got separated. And how many quality dates did I get out of Hinge? One. I got one quality date. And I probably put 100 hours in.
Now, I refuse to work for less than $100 an hour unless I'm doing my own content — and then I'll just do videos like this all day for free. If you join the Jerry Banfield Family and you want to not just be a number on the screen to me, I'll work my ass off for you. But I'm not taking a paycheck for less than $100 an hour. So if you'd have charged for my time that I put into these dating apps, I effectively blew over $10,000 worth of time I could have theoretically worked for. I've got some valuable skills, and I just blew that. I wasted so much on Hinge. And I tried other dating apps and blew more money on Bumble and Tinder as well.
Why? Because I met my first wife — my ex-wife — online. I'd like to have a second wife, but I'm going to take my time to make sure it really works and not jump into anything. And I got one decent date, and I didn't even need a rose or a boost on my profile for it. I did have the HingeX membership. I sent a like, she liked me back, and we met the same day. That just looks like some nice luck now. She seemed like she wanted me to kiss her at the end of the date, and I didn't. And then she watched my YouTube videos, got mad, and didn't want to go out with me again. Out of a thousand or so dollars on Hinge and a hundred hours or so on Hinge, I got one date that was decent.
Getting Catfished by Someone I Knew in Real Life
I also got catfished. There was a girl I knew in real life. She had beautiful profile pictures, and I didn't recognize her from real life. She says, "Oh yeah, here's where I know you from." I'm like, "Really? I don't recognize you." Then I met her in person, and I'm like, oh my God, I do know you — you put on like 50 pounds since the pictures you took. I told her to her face: this is dishonest. She's like, "Well, my friends did it." I'm like, I don't care who did it — it's dishonest. She's like, "Well, it wasn't that much." I'm like, it was that much. It was. I think the pictures are at least five years younger and at least 50 pounds lighter. This is dishonest. And she wasn't too happy after that.
I deleted my Hinge profile and made a new one, and she's still tricking on Hinge to this day — even though I called it out to her face, which seemed a bit painful, she's still tricking on Hinge with the same profile. She also told me that a dating app offered to pay her to have a profile and to match with dudes and go out with them. So maybe that's what she was doing on this app. I don't know.
Who Dating Apps Actually Work For
What I can tell you from my experience is that Hinge is a disgusting environment — an absolutely disgusting environment for most men. Now, I know somebody with an impressive job title and a car that costs $60,000 or $70,000, and he can show that stuff off. Actually, I know multiple people that fit this description. One of them pays like $1,000 a month to obsessively boost his profile. He sends this huge message, filters constantly, and is getting dates with women 30 years younger than him. Now, would I go out with them? Some of them are like train wrecks — alcoholics, drug addicts. I don't know if I'd go out with them. But he's going out with women 30 years younger than him. So yes, if you're the kind of guy that can show off all this stuff on your phone, on your profile, then it can work. But what kind of women are going for that? Not the kind of woman I want to be my queen, my second wife. She would not go for that. She would not be interested in that.
So if you want to be a guy that does anything heartfelt — that's not just superficially signaling — which is probably 90% of guys, because 90% of guys are regular motherfuckers, then in my experience you're going to just waste your time. I have a friend. This guy is good looking. This guy has slept with a lot of women. He's got a girlfriend now that I think is very attractive, and he's met a lot of attractive women — I know at least one of them personally, and I've seen several of the women he's been with. They're all very hot. Not that he hasn't chased one that wasn't as hot. But this guy said he couldn't do anything on dating apps. He spent more time and more money than I did, and he got two dates: one with a girl he said there was something really weird about, and the other one was a catfish. This guy put more time and more money than I did into the dating apps. He's crushing it in person, and yet the dating apps are miserable for him. What I've come to believe is that if you're not the top 10% on dating apps, you need to delete them.
Dating Apps Don't Reward Depth
Now, I realize they work for some people. Maybe if you're the kind of guy that can check a dating app just once a week and go through and see if anybody likes you, it's different. And dating apps are overwhelming for women too. Like, I paid to boost my profile, and I experienced decision fatigue myself — I got about 20 likes at once. I got a better profile. I got professional photos taken. It still didn't matter, because I wasn't out there with a Lamborghini or something in my profile, signaling money out on a yacht. I wasn't doing what the top 5–10% of guys are doing on these dating apps, so women are just scrolling by me. And I showed some depth. Dating apps do not reward depth. Depth, to me, is what is special. Depth is special. And yet I try to send voice memos, and women can't stand it when a text is more than a sentence or two at a time. I can't stand that. How am I going to get to know you in one or two sentences?
When I matched with my ex on Match 15 and a half years ago, my opening message to her was like three paragraphs. Back then, we didn't have all this texting stuff — well, it was there, but you had to T9-type it on your phone, and it took a while. I sent a three-paragraph message. She sent a three-paragraph email back. I sent a longer one. She sent a longer one. We only exchanged three messages each before we met up, and the depth was there immediately. The Match profile made so much more depth possible — there was so much more on it. These dating apps today suck by comparison, and if you're in the 90% of guys, in my opinion you have no business being on there. You're going to waste your time. You're going to waste your money.
The dating apps are very much pay-to-win. Maybe it would be different if I had my profile set up to do some superficial signaling, which I just can't stand to do, because it feels dishonest. I feel that if I meet a woman with dishonesty, I'm going to set up the relationship for dishonesty, and I'm a guy that's about living an authentic life. And the one date that I had that I enjoyed on Hinge instantly blew up, because while in person a woman might not take the time, on a dating app you've got a picture of me — you can put that in a Google image search. Which this woman did. She did not know my last name. I said I was a YouTuber on my profile, so she screenshots my face, puts it into Google, finds my YouTube videos, doesn't like them, and then gets angry and doesn't want to see me because of that. So I can't date on dating apps without any woman being able to instantly go look at my YouTube videos. Maybe there's some woman on earth who would just get really excited and be kicking down my door after seeing these videos — one that I'd actually let in — but that's not likely to happen on a dating app. And I've tried.
Dating Apps Felt Like Drinking Again
I swear, I'm sober 12 years in AA. That doesn't mean I'm a dead person that just goes out with no emotions. That means I'm a fully alive human being, and I can handle and face life sober. And to me, these dating apps have felt like drinking. Before I got sober, I'd be out at the bar after two weeks sober, and I'd be like, you know what, this time I'm just going to have three and then drive home, and it'll probably be all right. And then I'm walking home and left my car, and getting in fights with people, and kicked out of bars, and passing out all over the place, and face-planting — just all kinds of stupid stuff. And then I wake up and I'm like, well, let me try this again and see if it works. No. In my experience, dating apps for most men not only do not work — they make you feel like a loser.
And that's the thing to me: if you are a winner, you are generally not spending time on dating apps. If you've actually got all those cars and you've got the house, can't you be meeting women in person? You should be able to just drive down the street with your fancy car, slide the door up, and — okay, maybe that'd be creepy, asking a random person — but you should be able to be meeting people out of your car, or after the workout class, or wherever you're at. Like, "Oh look, this is my car." You should be able to be meeting women in person. Dating apps are a shit environment for most men. They leave you feeling like shit. Because I'm sitting there thinking: how did I just send a hundred roses?
A Hundred Roses and Feeling Rejected by Women I Know
How did I send a hundred roses to women on Hinge? One woman matched me who I knew in person already. I'm like, hey, we'd love to reconnect — I lost your phone number, because I deleted it when she had a boyfriend, and I didn't see the point of keeping the number. So she's on Hinge, I send a rose to her, and she's like, "Oh, you know, we can be great friends, for sure." No. I'm deleting that match right now. I'm not on Hinge to find friends. I've got friends. I just talked to one of my boys for like thirty minutes before recording this. I'm going to go play tennis with friends in a couple of hours. I was hanging out at yoga earlier. I've got kids. I've got family. I do not need a friend on Hinge. I'm not on Hinge to try and find a friend.
Then I texted another woman. I'd seen her profile on Hinge, and I've known her for like six months. She had been trying to tell me before that she wasn't dating — and then I see her profile on Hinge. So I send her a rose on Hinge. No response. Then she texts me the next day, like maybe she didn't see it. So I text her and ask her on a date. No response. That was Monday. It's Friday. I've had so many women that I've known in real life — I've sent them a rose, and I feel rejected. There was this beautiful woman I saw at an AA meeting. This is a woman I have respect for from seeing her in person — she's been sober a while, she's beautiful, she seems like she's got her life together. Then she's on Hinge in a bathing suit, looking desperate, and then not responding to my desperate rose. And I'm just like — where did I go wrong? I went wrong installing this app. Not the first time, because I wanted to try it — they didn't have Hinge, they didn't have Tinder back when I was dating 15 years ago, and I wanted to install it and try it. But these apps suck if you're not the top 10% with signaling and superficial nonsense — a six-five guy, or you've got your pictures set up like these dudes are showing you on YouTube: "Yeah, I have my crossbow, I got my top photo with my crossbow pointing at the ground, and I'm kind of looking away like this."
What Kind of Guys Are You Actually Picking?
And then women complain that all they find are guys that just want to sleep with them, and superficial guys that are already married, looking for ethical non-monogamy on the apps and lying to them. I'm like, what kind of dudes do you think you're picking on dating apps, when there's a bunch of decent men sitting right there? Are those the guys that are really attracting your attention, or is it the assholes that are the flashiest, biggest liars?
I know a guy in person, too, who is struggling to connect with women that are attractive and that like him in person. He's signaling all that money stuff, and he's just going out with girl after girl from these dating apps. But he pushed away a woman where they seemed to really like each other — so he could go out with all these women on dating apps. And I knew a guy that was in a pickup community, and his body count was over 500. He's not with us anymore. If he'd had a great relationship with a woman, I believe he'd still be here. And that's sad.
I Literally Wrote the Book on This — and Went Back Anyway
Please, do not ever let me install one of these again. Because I literally wrote a book called It's Not You, It's the Dating Apps before I was back on YouTube. And then my dumb ass — or my optimistic ass, which is a nicer way of putting it — my optimistic ass, a week ago, thought I'd come back and try. I was telling a friend: this feels just like the bar, man. I feel like I'm sitting down at the bar and I'm trying to take a drink, and I'm like, this time it's going to be different. This time, when I install Hinge with professional photos, and this time, when I use the new version of ChatGPT to optimize everything on my profile, it's going to be different. But no. Because when I meet a woman in person, she's not as likely to filter me out for being a divorced single dad. She sees that I look good in person, that I've got a confidence about me, that my voice is deep. She sees that there's more to me — that I'm wise, that even though I come off intense, I'm calm. I can help a woman who's nervous calm down on a date, relax, and feel safe with me. But that doesn't get communicated over a dating app.
It's Better to Be Hopeless in the Right Environment
So I hope my experience with Hinge will help some other guy out there to uninstall this thing. Because hope is great when there's real possibility — but it's actually better to be hopeless in the right environment. Like, I'm hopeless about drinking alcohol. I'm absolutely hopeless. There's no way I'm going to drink alcohol and have it work out without a sad ending. And I'm hopeless about dating apps. For me, these apps are so broken that they are not going to work — I can't use them without feeling addicted. I can't keep fiddling around on my phone, looking at Hinge, going: why do I only have one match? Why isn't this woman messaging me back? This doctor matched with me, we sent a few messages, there was a little energy, and then the messages just stopped. Why? Because she probably has 20 other guys that she's messaging, and one of them said something funnier than I did, so now she's paying attention to him and she's forgotten about me. Forget that.
I go to yoga, and it's the opposite. I go to yoga and the women are like, damn, who's this attractive man that's strong? I want to talk to him. I wish he'd talk to me. I have women at yoga starting conversations with me. And the last woman I dated seemed really happy to be picked up at yoga. So forget these dating apps. Never — never ever — am I using one of these shithole dating apps again.
If you want to be more than a number to me, get in the Jerry Banfield Family. I want to know your name. I want to know your story. Share your name and your story with me, and tell me what these videos have meant for you. There are other people from all over my YouTube channels in there. I just started it, so it's the best time to belong.
And if you want to follow the whole saga of me and these dating apps — every install, every deletion, and everything I'm learning about meeting women in person instead — it's all in my Dating playlist.