Early & Alone #20: The League
If you’ve seen Insecure on HBO, you might be familiar with The League, a dating app that markets itself as “elite.” On the show, Molly, a beautiful, successful lawyer, is frustrated with being single. Her life plan includes getting married, and she’s not getting any younger. She becomes obsessed with The League, believing that once she gets off the (ridiculous) waitlist, she’ll finally meet a man who is as successful and ambitious as she is, and they will fall in love, and all her problems will be solved. Spoiler alert: While Molly does eventually get accepted into the League, things do not play out in the way she’d imagined.
One of the taglines on The League’s website reads, “We’re not saying Tinder doesn’t have its uses (hello Vegas!) but why not spend your time a little more...intelligently?” Now, if there’s anything I value in a man, it’s intelligence. So, of course this idea of dating “intelligently” is appealing. Another draw of The League is that everyone is “vetted,” which means you must be approved before anyone can see your profile (hence that waiting list). So what are they vetting for? The criteria is hazy, but it seems that the most important thing is you have a job, a college education, and LinkedIn profile.
“What does a job and a college education have to do with dating?!” you might be asking. And you’re absolutely right! I have no idea. My best guess is that people tend to feel most comfortable with others who have similar experiences to them. Ideally, I’m looking for a partner who reads books and enjoys long conversations about culture and thinks critically about the world around him. I’d also like someone who can financially support himself. However, I also understand that those qualities are not necessarily only found in someone with a college education and a LinkedIn profile.
One of my friends happened to use The League, and though she didn’t love it, she “endorsed” me (I’m still not even sure what that means), and after a couple of months of frustrated Tinder swiping, I decided to try it out. When you first sign up, even with an endorsement, you create a profile and receive a message from your “concierge” (some model-looking dude whose profile says he’s a “real person” who went to Harvard Law and loves “wingmanning”) saying that though there are, somehow, TWENTY THOUSAND people in Boston ahead of you on the waiting list, if you just log in every day and keep checking, you will probably someday be accepted! But in the meantime, you can absolutely pay for membership and get right in! Also, there are WAY too many emoji in these messages...it’s practically a crime.
I’m ashamed to say that I considered, briefly, paying for a membership. I was curious, and like Molly from Insecure, I was tired of dating subpar dudes who were boring and unmotivated. I had no idea what to expect from the app, but it seemed as good a bet as any, and none of the free apps I’d used (Tinder, OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel) had yielded many good results.
Luckily, I was “accepted” before I ponied up the money because so far, The League has been super disappointing. Like Coffee Meets Bagel, the app sends you a few prospective matches each day, which you can like or pass. You can only message each other when you both like one another. Each profile consists of a name, age, and a few pictures, as well as the person’s job and where they went to school. There’s an optional “about me” section, but most guys I’ve seen don’t fill that out. So, basically, you’re making a completely superficial decision on whether to like or pass. This isn’t radically different from most other dating apps, but it somehow feels grosser, being that everything feels so tied to the person’s job and education.
There is a reason for this--unlike Tinder, which requires that you have a Facebook account to sign up, The League requires a LinkedIn account. So swiping through your batch of matches each evening feels like networking rather than dating--there is no space on a profile for a person to say what they’re looking for: a serious relationship, marriage, friendship, a networking opportunity, a friend with benefits.
It only adds to the confusion that is modern dating, turning dating into some kind of business transaction...which, I guess it is, when you pay for a dating app, which I’m now 100% decided I am not going to do. On the one hand, paying for something that’s a priority in my life seems like it would make sense, but on the other hand, so many of these apps are useless at this point, and most people are on all of them--free or premium.
And yet...I still find myself swiping through my daily batch of clean-cut businessmen, despite the fact that the concept of this particular app makes me feel completely disheartened, and despite the fact that I have only matched with one dude in the entire two months I’ve been on the app--a match that resulted in a boring conversation where the dude told me he equated “working from home” with “napping,” and I thought, “hmm, must be nice to be a fancy businessman,” and stopped talking to him.
The dating landscape seems only to become more surreal and nightmarish with each new “innovation,” and yet, the apps seem like my only option, since I’ve met roughly 2 straight, single men organically in the last five years. So I will keep swiping and trying new apps, despite the disappointments, despite the frustrations, despite the overwhelming feeling that none of this has a point because we all die alone.
Haha, kidding! Mostly! I will probably delete The League though, because you gotta draw the line somewhere.
Tell me: Have any of you used The League? What did you think? Are there any other apps you’ve found success with?