‘And there’s a dance floor I can throw you around on if all goes well.’

I had been on Linx for three weeks, but my drink with Max was my first date. This was not through lack of trying. I had, in total, twenty-seven conversations on the go with twenty-seven different men. Which sounds like a lot, but given that I had initially spent approximately four hours of each waking day on the app, green-lighting hundreds upon thousands of men, to know just twenty-seven of them wanted to match me back seemed meagre. I asked Lola if this was normal. She said it was and informed me that her matches halved when she turned thirty, as lots of men put their preferred age limit to thirty and under. She said once she found that out, she was much more accepting of how few matches she got. For a while, she said, she combed Reddit threads for her name because she was convinced there was ‘a rumour’ about her online that was rapidly mutating without her knowledge and was putting men off. I thought Lola’s ‘rumour on the dark web’ theory was quite a self-aggrandizing paranoia to have about yourself, but I was reminded that she also was long-convinced she would die by ‘assassination’ and I didn’t have the heart to tell her only famous people get assassinated. Normal people just get shot in the open.

For the first few days, I was totally enamoured with Linx. I fell under its enchantment. I’d cheated the system of romance – all these handsome and interesting men, just waiting for me in my pocket. For years, we’d been told finding love was like an impossible quest of endurance, timing and luck. I thought you had to go to awful pop-up events and specialist bookshops; keep your eyes peeled at weddings and on the tube; strike up conversation with other solo travellers whenever you were abroad; get out of the house four nights a week to maximize your chances. But none of those strategic man-hours were needed any more – we didn’t have to put in the time like we used to. As I flicked through prospective love interests on the tube, on the bus, in the loo, I realized how time-efficient this method was. Looking for love didn’t have to be factored in to my schedule in the way I’d dreaded – I could do it while watching TV.

Lola told me this was a completely normal reaction for a first-time dating app user – that the dreamy haze would plateau in a couple of weeks and then dull to a despondent ennui and ultimate deletion of the app in about three months’ time. She said it worked in this cycle until you met someone. Lola had been on and off dating apps for seven years now.

She also warned me that the way the apps initially hook you in was by offering up their best produce to new users. She seemed to think there was an algorithm that determined this – the most-ticked people were offered up as bait for the new user’s first month, then they leave you with the rest of the riff-raff. She said it worked because you’d wade through the bottom-dwellers indefinitely, always holding out hope that you’d find the chest of buried treasure again.

The most common type of conversation I’d had on Linx were stilted chit-chats as insubstantial and fleeting as a summer breeze. They always began with an anodyne: ‘Hey! How’s it going?’ or an emoji of a waving hand. There was a minimum of three hours’ delay in their response; three days was more common. But the anticipation was never rewarded with quality of content. ‘Sorry, been insane at work, food writing that’s cool. I work in property,’ was all the long silence afforded. These conversations also revolved a lot around the mention of days – How’s your day going? What does Tuesday look like? How’s Thursday treated you? What are you doing this weekend? – which didn’t carry much topical relevance anyway as the day he was referring to or I was asking about was only addressed a full week later.

I had also quickly identified another, very different, type of nuisance, but a nuisance none the less. This was a type of man I labelled ‘pretend boyfriend man’. Pretend Boyfriend Man used his profile to push an agenda of a dreamy, committed reliability. His photo selection always included an image of him holding a friend’s baby or, worse, stripping wallpaper or sanding a floor with his top off. His profile included supposedly throwaway phrases such as ‘on the lookout for a wife’ or ‘My dream evening? Snuggling on the sofa while watching a Sofia Coppola film’. He knew exactly what he was doing and I wasn’t having any of it.

Equally as useless, but earning slightly more respect from me, were the men who were unabashedly forthcoming about the fact they wanted a night of sex and nothing more. I had one of these virtual encounters early on with a bespectacled primary school teacher called Aaron who I exchanged pleasant small talk with for half an hour, before he asked if I wanted to ‘go on a date tonight’. It was half eleven on a Tuesday. I asked him if he meant a date or whether he just wanted me to come over to his flat. ‘I suppose I could force a quick pint down,’ he replied sulkily. That was the last of mine and Aaron’s dialogue.

There were a number of effete subgenres of language employed by many of the men I spoke to. ‘Good evening to you, m’lady – doth thou pubbeth on this sunny Saturday?’ one asked. ‘If music be the food of love, play on, but if a food writer love both love and music – shall we go out dancing next week?’ another wrote in an incomprehensible riddle that reminded me of those questions I got in my GCSE maths papers (Shivani has ten oranges, if she gives the square root of them away, how many does she have left?). It was a unique style of seduction that I hadn’t come across before – wistful and nostalgic, meaningless and strange. Humourless and impenetrable.

Some, on the other hand, made a spectacle of their tonal plainness. ‘U ENGLISH??’ a red-headed mechanic asked as his opening gambit. A few of the men’s messages had the manner of an unedited, tedious, all-day stream of consciousness, with ramblings such as: ‘Hey how’s it going just had a cold shower so annoying the boiler’s broken!! Oh well now on my way out for coffee might get a bacon sarnie you only live once. Later going for a swim was planning on meeting my friend Charlie for a drink but he’s having issues finding a dogsitter, the pub we want to go to doesn’t allow dogs how’s your day xx.’ ‘Fantastic profile, Nina’ was the opening sentence from one man, in the manner of a headmaster handing out end-of-term reports.

And the more men I saw, the more I pieced together categories of humans that I never knew existed. There were the men who were incredibly excited about the fact they’d once been to Las Vegas. There were the guys who were obsessed with the fact they lived in London, which made me nervous that they would forgo a pub or bar for a first date and instead choose hiking up the Millennium Dome or abseiling down the Natural History Museum. I kept seeing Festival Man – a bloke who worked in IT by day, wore glitter on his face by night; who saved up all his holiday allowance to go to five festivals a year. There were the men who lived on canal boats, enjoyed fire poi, had had a taste of harem pants and looked like they wanted more. There were the hundreds of men who feigned indifference to being on Linx – some of whom said their friends had made them do it and they had no idea why they were there, as if downloading a dating app, filling in a profile with copious personal information and uploading photos of yourself was as easy to do by accident as taking the wrong turning on a motorway.

There were the men who wanted you to know they’d read and continued to read a lot of books, and not just the ones by Dan Brown – real ones, by Hemingway and Bukowski and Alastair Campbell. There were graphic designers – Jesus, there were so many graphic designers. Why had I only ever met a handful of graphic designers in real life and yet I had seen at least 350 of them on this dating app?