How To Get A Date In 10 Days (And A Stronger Friendship)

When my 19 year-old friend (who we will refer to as Amy) casually mentioned that she wanted to get married by 24, my immediate thought was: we need to get you dating A.S.A.P. Amy was, for lack of better words, inexperienced. Think Lara Jean from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, minus the embarrassing love letters. So what do you do with someone who’s shy, has zero experience, and is too busy drowning in university work to go out and meet anybody? The solution was obvious. I was to set up an online dating profile for my friend and, just because I’m a fan of the Hudson and McConaughey rom-com classic, get her a date in 10 days. How I was to pull this off as an equally inexperienced student who has never touched a dating app in her life? I had no idea. But, I had the power of my friend’s failed relationships and good intentions, so I prayed that was all I needed.

Day one’s challenge was selecting the perfect set of pictures. This was the hardest step, especially because Amy can’t take a serious photo to save her life. On Hinge (which is what my friends like to call “the more respectable Tinder” because it attracts a slightly more serious crowd) you can post six photos. The state of Amy’s phone gallery was so dire that we needed an impromptu photoshoot, but that’s when the fun really started. There’s something exhilarating about dragging your friend to the nearest wall and pretending like you’re on the set of America’s Next Top Model. While she struggled to not give a pained smile in between bursts of laughter and falling everywhere, we managed to snap the cutest candid. When that was posted, along with five other photos showing when she felt the most confident, the likes flowed in immediately.

Over the next few days, we approached the dating app systematically. Scroll through the guys, check that they don’t have a corny pick up line in their bio, use up all eight daily likes, and send a witty message. What became more and more apparent was that to get what you want, you need to be picky. If Amy didn’t let herself be selective, she would’ve never gotten past the weird likes of older men with women who look like their wives in their pictures. But being selective was hard, especially when they seemed like genuinely nice people. Sometimes it felt almost pathetic, scrolling through her likes and nitpicking every detail like “he has his Snapchat ID for a bio” or “he uses too many emojis' '. But when push came to shove and we had our occasional two-minute-long debates on whether to ignore a profile, sticking to what Amy truly wanted always left us feeling a little more relieved.

By the ninth day, Amy landed two dates. Our hard work of constructing simple, charming texts and sending our replies after five minutes to not look too available finally paid off. But as we stared at the sweet invitations on her iPhone screen and I saw her dejected expression, I knew it wasn’t the big success we were expecting. This was because she just had to fall for the one guy who couldn’t take a hint. A hint, as in Amy texting something along the lines of “hey I’m really craving Nando’s, haha”. The stress I felt reading his oblivious reply about how home cooking was better was instantly erased when Amy and I laughed at our semi-failure over two plates of Bella Italia pasta.

I thought I would leave this experience with a great revelation about dating or feel upset that I couldn’t get Amy the one person she wanted. The truth is that somewhere along the way it became less about getting her a date, and more about us spending time together. It was the moments between the messages where we would roll onto each other, exhausted after texting one guy, or when we would be so close to her phone screen, thinking the closer we looked, the faster they would reply. Those moments, along with the countless meals and off-topic conversations where we discussed everything under the sun, including her love for chocolate Wispas, brought a wider smile to my face than any of the online small talk did.

Is this a cheesy, “maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way” story? Sure. Do I think it’s cheesier than some of the profiles we came across? That’s debatable.