The Algorithm Doesn't Know I've Been Married

The first time I opened a dating app after my divorce, it asked me to describe myself in six photos and a hundred and fifty characters. I sat on the edge of the bed we used to share — the one I had kept, out of some misguided sense of thrift — and tried to compress a decade of marriage into a bio that would sound casual.

I wrote: Recently divorced. Two cats. Love hiking, cooking, and long walks through Home Depot on a Sunday. Then I deleted it. Then I wrote it again. Then I deleted the word divorced because I had read, somewhere, that the algorithm penalizes you for it.

What the algorithm does not know is that I am not the person in these photographs. I am the person the photographs used to be taken of — by a man who is now a stranger, in a life that is now a museum.

The problem with fresh starts

There is a specific kind of loneliness in being new to something you thought you were done with. Everyone else on the app has been swiping for months, calibrating their preferences, learning the shorthand. I am learning that "fwb" is not, as I first guessed, an airport code.

The men my age are all divorced too, mostly. We can tell. It's in the way we phrase our bios — cautiously optimistic, past tense, with the word "kids" doing a lot of unspoken work.

What I keep from the last life

The playlist. The mattress. A slow-cooker I have never once used. A vocabulary of small marital jokes I now have nowhere to put. When someone new asks me what I do for fun, I hear my ex-husband's voice supplying the answer, and I have to translate it into something I can say out loud without crying into my drink.

The algorithm doesn't know any of this. It sees a woman, 42, one photo of a mountain, one of a dog that isn't hers. It swipes on my behalf. It matches me with a man whose bio says "Just here to see what happens." Same, I think. Same.