Love Apptually: Leaving with a crop of dissatisfaction … and beans

Each week in “Love Apptually,” Daily Bruin staffers Nico Correia and Natalie Green will take turns attempting to find love in all of the wrong places: dating applications. To help thousands of loveless students, but mostly themselves, Correia and Green will test run and rate five dating apps over the course of one quarter.

Like any good millennial, the idea of an adult relationship terrifies me.

“Boyfriend” feels too “let’s watch ‘Seinfeld’ together and go to sleep before midnight,” so I’ve refrained from identifying anyone as such. My training bra adult relationship came this year with my foray into exclusive dating, a purgatory between casual and “Seinfeld.” I grew to want a “Seinfeld” situation with my training bra, but he decided to cancel the program. I made him end things over text because I knew I couldn’t express my emotions without virtual distance and angry and sad face emojis at my disposal.

However, I am proud to report that I had three successful “girlfriends” in ninth grade, if we are defining success as having almost a purely text-based relationship with one, having a first kiss with another behind a dumpster and making out with a third on some unfortunate soul’s lawn in the middle of the day.

What better candidate to try out the ultraserious dating app Coffee Meets Bagel than an emotionally immature college student whose longest official significant other lasted one month and a day during freshman year of high school?

There are probably many more qualified candidates. Marketed as an app for “singles looking for real relationships,” Coffee Meets Bagel already daunted me. The level of “daunt” became heightened by the bizarre terminology the app uses to describe its users. Here, you are a “Bagel” and every day the app matches you with other “Bagels.” The idea of a real relationship already scares me, but the prospect of taking a breakfast item on as my first boyfriend seemed even scarier and a lot sadder.

The app also gave me virtual coffee beans for accomplishing tasks such as signing in. Currently I have 1,032 coffee beans and, honestly, I am still very unclear what I am supposed to do with these beans. Do I offer them to potential suitors? Do I consume them myself? Am I supposed to buy a virtual blender and make virtual coffee? For now I’m just keeping them in my bean shop, a place that holds my fake beans. I am often confused whether or not I am on a dating app or starting a small business.

Overlooking my Coffee Meets Bagel bean enterprise, making a dating profile served to further sow my hatred for the app. Besides filling out age/sex/location, the app also encourages you to fill open-ended questions such as “I am …,” “I like …,” and “I appreciate when my date …” I felt like I was on some new-age yoga retreat for lonely, middle-aged aunts.

The anxiety of both running a new Internet business and trying to avoid totally heinous answers to the open-ended questions caused me to delete the app around two weeks after I downloaded it, following two underwhelming conversations with potential participants in my “real relationship.”

Only, I couldn’t even figure out how to do that. I only accomplished temporary suspension of my account. Maybe I have to pay off the initial investment of beans allotted to me.

I may not have a boyfriend, but at least I’m no longer employed as a crop farmer on a dating app.

What other pyramid scheme masquerading as a dating app have you tried out?