• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, August 28, 2024

By now, the ego-deflating -- and sometimes dangerous -- complications of online dating are well-documented.

 At this point, even 20-something daters aren’t feeling the feels for the oversaturated dating app business.

But Hinge is a relatively young service and stands behind its hopeful tag line, “The Dating App Designed to be Deleted.”

And for a new campaign aimed at Gen Z, Hinge picked six success stories -- young couples who met via Hinge and started committed relationships -- and then commissioned six well-known writers to tell their stories.

There’s quite a roster of respected writers: Roxane Gay, John Paul Brammer, Isle McElroy, Brontez Purnell, Oisín McKenna and R. O. Kwon. Their pieces are collected in an online anthology titled “No Ordinary Love,” a beautifully designed dedicated website  where the stories come together with inspired photos of each couple today, as well as anecdotes and images from the beginning of their relationships.

The  dating app collaborated with Dazed Magazine’s in-house creative agency, Dazed Studio, to create the site as well as a “physical artifact” an 80-page ‘zine, which will be distributed in New York and London starting Sept. 9.

Why tell these stories? Jackie Jantos, Hinge’s CMO, said the work was “built to show the next generation of daters”  the “uncertainties” and “misunderstandings” that people meeting online face from their initial connection onward.

Jantos said the company was inspired by the growth and popularity of BookTok, the buzzy new TikTok community devoted to romance novels.

“We wanted to show the imperfect ways that people can meet in a format that allowed for that level of honesty. We are also really fascinated by the rise in romance lit. The long-format storytelling approach of a ‘zine was interesting to us, and we wanted to lean into trying to work with creators in a new way.

“For us, reimagining this and bringing more realness to 'we met on Hinge' stories was important to giving dimension to what relationships can look like," Jantos added.

Roxane Gay, the professor, essayist and author of “Hunger” and “Bad Feminist,” writes the kind of personal stories I’ve admired.

In “Work in Progress,” one of the six stories, Gay profiles Chianti and Najib, who met on Hinge in May 2022.

Here’s an excerpt: “Chanti lay in bed, alone, staring at the ceiling. She had been in the dating game for a minute now, and before she met Najib, she made herself a promise, one she intended to keep. She was not going to spend any more of her precious time teaching a man how to love her right. And, she thought with a sinking feeling, that did not bode well for what she and Najib had going on. She was down bad, even though she didn’t want to admit it. But she wasn’t down so bad that she wasn’t going to take care of herself. She knew that for damn sure.”

It's the kind of writing that makes you want to snuggle up with a good zine.

With this, Hinge has made a successful foray into Couples Lit. Enjoying these sophisticated stories might get would-be daters stoked about the erotic possibilities out there.

But as for a date that will actually lead to deleting a dating app -- that’s a goal that would seem to be as difficult as ever.