“UNHINGING” by Caroline Rothstein

Seven months ago, I got back on a dating app. Just one. Only. Hinge.

I had—previously—sworn off dating apps. For good. 

I am someone who—in general—thrives on the IRL meet (cute). The guy I met at a bar. The guy I met at a bar. The guy, the guy, the guy I met at a bar. The guy who asked for my number at a coffee shop. The guy who asked for my number on the subway (I slipped it to him on a page of a Broadway Playbill). The guy who was working the voting polls for the 2022 primaries and asked if I was single when he handed me my ballot and then came over and handed me his phone when I was in the booth. The friend of a friend’s girlfriend at her birthday party (a guy I met at a bar). The guy who slipped me his number on the back of a receipt while I was at brunch with a friend. The guy who asked for my number in the tea aisle at Whole Foods (PLEASE CALL ME!). The guy who called me “gorgeous” from his motorcycle, got off his motorcycle, parked his motorcycle, and followed me into the restaurant where I was picking up take out to ask for my number (I SHOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN HIM MY NUMBER! HE HAS BEEN BLOCKED!). Even my ex of four and a half years—we met at an event. And on. And on. And hence.

I’ve been single for a decade now. But I’ve had hookups. Situationships. Multi-month dating jaunts. Multi-week messes. Multi-year yearns. The first few years of this single stretch, I did plenty of online dating—Tinder, Bumble, How About We (RIP), JSwipe (also RIP), Hinge. Even in my early 20s, I was on JDate for a few years. It’s not like I’ve never given dating apps a try. 

But at some point, pre-pandemic, I swore off dating apps for good. It was multifold, but some reasons included: I felt like I got compulsive when swiping, which reminded me of the decade-long eating disorder from which I’ve now been recovered for 20 years; and I felt like I couldn’t quite translate myself onto a 2-dimensional app, which wasn’t self-deprecating, just kind of like a fact (I’m a loud, vivacious curvy woman with curly hair; it felt like I wasn’t presenting myself well). 

Thus, instead of dating apps, in addition to the IRL meet cutes, I leaned into other ways of opening my heart. I was set up. Signed up through a spreadsheet my friend made during the early pandemic for virtual dates and set-ups (I must have had like 10 or more FaceTime and Zoom dates in summer and fall of 2020). Joined some hyper-conscious website dating platform that centered around—well—being conscious. Set intentions at a bonfire. Called in my spirit guides. Wrote out spells. Put them on my altar. Sent mass BCC emails to friends asking for more setups.  

I was certain I would never be on a dating app again for the rest of my life. And now, here we are. As I continue looking for someone with whom to be in a relationship for the rest of my life.

Do I think I’ll find him on Hinge? I’m not sure. Do I think he exists? Yes. Of that, I am sure.

***

It’s early November 2024. One week before I (re)join Hinge. 

I have been getting texts and going back and forth with a guy I used to fuck. I could say it more gently, gingerly. But we never went on any actual dates. We had sex; we never made love. He would come over to my apartment, we would have deep and meaningful conversations about our lives, about our work, about our attachment styles, and social identity, or systemic oppression (listen, we all have a different kinds of linguistic aphrodisiacs, okay?!), and then, we would fuck.

He had made it very clear: he wasn’t looking for a relationship. This was casual. Just sex. Cool. 

But then he got too flakey with my time. I ended things. Said I was down to be friends if he ever wanted to do that—watch basketball, grab a drink, hang out. He said he was down. Cool. 

I didn’t hear from him again. For a year and a half. When he slid back into my texts, and asked about catching up IRL, I made it clear: gone were the days of him coming over just for someone (ideally both of us) to cum. But drinks? Coffee? Dinner? Cool. He said he was down. Cool. 

This is the backdrop of my otherwise tepid and uneventful “dating life” when I am away for a friend’s 40th birthday in early November 2024. I am in the basement of the house, updating my beloveds on the text exchange. At first, they are excited. But ultimately, after giving the full rundown, everyone’s like: No. You deserve more than this. While I knew I did, something deep inside me said there was some kind of unfinished business with him. I could feel it in my gut. 

One friend had brought a bunch of oracle card decks to the birthday weekend, and somewhere into the second night, we are in the kitchen—prepping for or cleaning dinner, I can’t remember which—and talking about my dating life, the deck holder and me. I am updating her on this dude’s return to my text inbox, and how that is—basically—all I have going on at the time. 

She stops what she’s doing, looks at me across the kitchen island, says: We need to pull a card. 

We go into the other room and sit down next to her decks. 

She goes for the Rebecca Campbell “Work Your Light Oracle” deck. 

She does a two-card pull: one thing I need to release; one thing into which I need to lean.

To release? 

“LEAP. You go first. The Universe will catch you.” 

It might seem silly to be making space for finding your life partner and then a card says to scale back from leaping. To let go of being out there and taking so many brave and courageous leaps. 

But that’s where the next card comes in. That of which I need more, into which I need to lean. 

“IMRAMA. Where are you being called to journey to?”

“The Celtic word Imrama means a journey of the soul,” it reads. “A voyage on which we don’t know where we are going, but our soul knows the way. If you pulled this card you are either being called on a soul journey or are already on one.” 

Sitting there, beloveds all around, fire crackling, it’s starting to make sense. 

“When we journey to places that our soul remembers,” the card continues, “a shift takes place—both within us and to the planet as well…If a physical voyage isn’t possible, journey through the portal of your heart…Whatever your circumstances, your soul is ready to journey deep.”

***

One week later, my best friend is visiting from out of town, along with another close friend of ours. We end up as a duo—my best friend and me—as our beloved goes to see another friend.

We have a conversation that—in retrospect—I can only describe as a loving intervention.

Here I am, 41 years old. I want a life partnership. I want to have a biological child. 

And what am I doing about it, she asks me. What?

I tell her: I’m out here. Out here in these streets. Trying. Being open. Meeting people IRL. I tell her, nearly in tears, but feeling it in my bones, that I’m going on a hope and a prayer.

It’s a hard conversation. But the thing that sticks with me most, is a moment where she talks about the dualities of my being both a dreamer, and also sometimes being extremely rigid.

She says “the dreamer” is one of her favorite things about me. But sometimes, I get so rigid, I block myself from accessing my dreams. Perhaps, she suggests, there’s a balance somewhere.

The next day, after she and our other friend leave, I begrudgingly—after swearing off dating apps for the rest of my life—download and sign up for the dating app Hinge.

I think back to the cards. Only one week prior. 

I am being called to release being out there out there. Let go of taking action. Let go of the leap. 

I am being called to journey into the depths of my insides. Deepen. Touch my soul. Embody me. 

I know all of this when I still choose to join Hinge. 

I tell myself: joining Hinge doesn’t have to be about leaping, it can be about going within.

I tell myself that joining Hinge will expand the lens by and through which I am making space for said existing person to make himself known. I am hinging my bets on unhinging my grip. 

This is the first rigidity I decide I have to undo. 

***

What I’m most aware of my first few days and weeks back on Hinge, is not only how much I’ve grown in being able to quickly clock what’s happening, feeling that I’m giving myself an opportunity to truly fine-tune being clear and direct on who I am and what I want (and feeling more confident that I now translate online), but also how quickly we can embody various tropes.

There’s the dude who’s so hungry for a relationship that he is texting like we’re already in a relationship. When we have not authentically arrived there. Or met! Be busier, my dude!

There are the dudes where we write each other novels. Back and forth. Long and lengthy chunks of text. Reminds me of an early JDate guy with whom I went back and forth sending MULTI-PAGE-LONG WORD DOC ATTACHMENTS TO OUR EMAILS. We finally met. We were NOT A MATCH. But we’d written literal novels. Anyhow. Pen pals. Still a thing.

There is the dude who sent me a message and clearly didn’t remember me, but I very clearly remember him from Bumble in 2019 because he canceled our date AN HOUR BEFOREHAND. 

There is the dude who keeps popping up in my feed (fix the algorithm, y’all!), with whom I went out on a date from JDate in 2007, who made two rape jokes and a self-harm joke at a restaurant in Alphabet City, and I still made out with him in the stairwell of the apartment I was subletting! 

There are the convos where it’s smooth and easy breezy—this stuff I like. Can you keep up with me? Can I keep up with you? I’m fast on the thumbs (double entendre intended!) and I get bored if you’re not able to engage in a back and forth, back and forth exchange (also one here too!). 

The dudes who tell versus show. Tell you what they want. Don’t show you who they are.

The smooth talkers.

The shit talkers.

The apathetics.

The movers.

They ask you out, but don’t follow up or through.

The dudes who most likely need therapy, not Hinge. 

Please show up more fully cooked!

Not raw. Not medium rare. Not even medium. 

I need medium well at the very least. 

Because I know well done can be a lot to ask. 

But just like, medium well needs to be the baseline. I’m not eating prosciutto. And it’s not because I’m a vegetarian of 18 years. It’s because I’m doing the work. I am cooking. Marinating. Stewing. Roasting. I am literally grilling myself. I need you grilling yourself too. 

A friend recently noted right after I (re)joined Hinge: we are all showing up doing our best.

There is—hopefully—someone out there for all of us, if we want it.

We are all doing our best.

Which I know. I feel. I truly believe.

Which I think is, in part, why I had long so appreciated—and favored—the IRL meet (cute).

Because when we are literally in body with one another, we have to be embodied with one another. Our actual body language becomes another dialect by and through which we connect.  

I’m not saying this can only happen IRL. This is not an indictment for being online.

This is about being in our bodies.

About being embodied.

With each other.

With and in ourselves.

It’s not online versus IRL that is determining a binary of good or bad.

It’s: ARE WE ABLE TO BE EMBODIED WITH EACH OTHER, OR NOT?

That’s what I’m hinging on here. 

***

When I started going on Hinge dates in November and December, I found myself way less in my head than I’d ever been about dating, sex, and men. I found myself actually listening to the wisdom of my body. The wisdom it has been gathering, holding, and carrying for four decades.  

And I don’t even mean this sexually. I mean literally. Baseline. Primally. What my body is able to do in saying: yes—keep exploring with this one; or not—gracefully, easefully let this one go. 

I don’t want to give Hinge all the credit in this new chapter, era, awakening, if you will. And that’s no offense to Hinge. But as I said to someone on a recent date, one of the things I really love about the Hebrew calendar and its annual and weekly rituals and things is that there’s a marker to mark time. An intentional opportunity to check in with myself and take stock of where I’m at, as compared with and to the last time I experienced that holiday, ritual, moment, etc. 

Being back on a dating app, a landscape and ecosystem of which I have not been a part in so many years, has allowed me to take stock of where I’m at in this particular arena of my life.

It’s not to say that I wouldn’t have been able to take stock like this out in the wild, raw-dogging it IRL. But I think sometimes it’s physics. A body in motion stays in motion. A body at rest stays at rest. A body only taking stock in one landscape might be witnessing the view from only there. 

Recently I was trying to explain to my therapist that my friends—from every chapter of my life—are exceptional, and that’s what I’m looking for in a partner. Someone who is exceptional.

And that’s a high bar and a high task.

She asked me to define what I meant.

I used three friends I’d been texting with shortly before our session. The resumes and CVs are inconsequential. What I ultimately realized is that all three of them—and most of the chosen family and friends in my life—are actively spending their days making the world a better place.

Many of them show up like nobody’s business. They are ride or dies. Loyal to the bone. They are smart as fuck. Talented as shit. And my people can be profoundly dedicated to the betterment of the planet and society, while still knowing how to get down and take over a dance floor and rage.

They are my people. Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of them. I am painfully good at keeping in touch and sticking around when collected and collecting, and feel intoxicated by how incredible a bond I have with so many of the people that I know and love.

Why would I expect anything less of a lover?

But while it seems I have made so many exceptional friends, I don’t understand why it’s so hard to find an exceptional love.

I think back to the card reading. How she said something about the going inward piece being about aligning with my soul so that my person can recognize me.

And maybe that’s the unhinging too. Unhinging myself from a self too rigid. Not my standards of what I’m looking for in and from a partner. No. But perhaps how I’m willing to find him. Unhinging the rigidity to let the dreamer take up more space. To let another dreamer find me too. 

***

I have a stupid amount of knowing, trust, and faith. I will not settle for anything less than what I want. And I know it’s possible—he’s possible, this person of mine—who and what I want. 

Years ago, I was sitting at dinner with an ex. Years past our breakup. Years into friendship. 

He was in his second relationship since our breakup. I was still single. Feeling relatively desperate at the time and maybe a little bit forlorn in my quest to find love. 

You don’t settle, he said, looking at me across the table at the diner in Chelsea. He wasn’t implying that he was. He was acknowledging that I have standards worth holding. Even years later, other meals in other boroughs at other moments in my dating journey and life, this would remain a refrain when we’d discuss my heart. That it was worth waiting for that which I want. 

I believe in a magic kind of living. 

In every regard. 

And at some point, I have to let the abundance mentality grow to meet the idealism. 

I have to trust that abundance is part of that math too. 

I have to unhinge myself from the scarcity mentality. 

I have to hinge, perhaps, on how idealistic—and certain—the dreamer really is. 

***

In March 2025, over Facebook messenger, I tell a friend: “In many ways I am editing / fine tuning / providing feedback to myself for my dating desires / wants / needs / growth edges.”

She asks if I am giving myself in life what I give my students in the essay writing class I’m teaching where I provide editorial feedback for everyone’s respective essay pieces. 

“I suppose so,” I type. “But it’s very hard to kill your darlings lol,” I add. 

I take a beat and stop messaging with one guy from Hinge to sit with whatever I’m accepting from the tracked changes I’m applying to my soul. The darlings I am willing to kill. The self I am willing to accept I always was. I often tell students in my writing classes that the piece already knows who it is. It tells us who it wants to be. Our job, as writers, is to listen to its pulse. Its breath. Its voice. Help craft and edit it into who it needs and wants and is meant to be. 

I have worked so hard to reclaim so much. My body. My life. From sexual assaults. Other violations of consent. A decade-long eating disorder and behaviors of self-harm. Bouts of depression and suicidal ideation. An insurmountable amount of grief and loss and death. 

Learning to trust my intuition has been a profound part of that reclamation. Learning too to trust and listen to my body—nothing short of seismic and profound. 

I like that I go on deep and mystical journeys to find and discover parts of myself. I like that I often live inwards in order to be my truest self on the outside. I like that I do my best to listen to the antenna that is my own personalized dialect that I have worked so hard to embody and attune. 

I wonder if that’s the journey I’ve been on here, being back on Hinge. 

Allowing for a deepening—fine-tuning, editing, adjusting—within. 

***

My body is a vessel. This I know and have long known. And yes, it feels good to be told I’m hot or beautiful or pretty or sexy or cute or any word that honors the frame and face in which I live.

But what I actually want is for someone to see my insides. To look into my eyes and not only lust after my body while we’re touching or kissing or fucking or making out or making love, but to like actually look into my eyes where we’re sitting. Somewhere. Anywhere. Fully fucking clothed. And silently, without uttering a goddamn word, understand what’s in my soul.

And it isn’t just wanting someone to see that in me. It’s being with someone to whom and with whom and for whom I want to share that. Who, also, wants to share that part of himself with me.

And that’s the part that gets so desperate. That’s the part of the inward journey that can sometimes feel so impossible to find.

And yet, it’s not impossible.

And of course, it’s also not something I have to find.

It’s already here.

All of me.

I’m already here.

And he. Him. Whoever he is.

He’s already there—here—fully too.

She said: the card said I had to become my deepest self, so he’d know how to recognize me.

And I get it. Now. Months, and months, and months into being back on Hinge.

Not just intellectually.

But in my soul and in my bones.

***

Several years ago, I dated someone who really messed me up. We were standing at a concert together and I had this epiphany that he wasn’t dimming my light. He had fucking blown a fuse. 

I thought back to past relationships where I felt like the person I was dating dimmed my light, or I dimmed my light to better meet his shine (or lack thereof). And I thought that was what was happening with this dude. But I realized that this dude was basically plugging all of his power chords into my surge protector (this isn’t a sexual innuendo or double entendre, but it is a fucking metaphor) and blowing a goddamn mother fucking fuse. Because he was trying to suck and steal and take away my light and use it for his own. And I was left wilted. Listless. Lifeless. 

I was left totally depleted. Power outage. Nothing left to give. Him, let alone myself.

And I realized then and there that what I’m looking for—maybe what many of us are looking for—is someone with whom when our lights cross paths in the sky, we help each other shine. 

Like picture one of those grand opening events and shit. Where there are two huge spotlights blasting into the sky. And what happens at the point where the spotlights intersect? The light gets even brighter. They don’t diminish each other’s light. They help each other shine even more. 

That’s what I want. 

And so I think—I’d posit—that for someone to see and witness and recognize my light—my soul—they’d likely have to be able to experience their own. Their own spirit. Their own light. 

Because it’s not my job to save someone. 

Or fill their cup. 

Or fill their power cord with enough electricity to subsidize their own dimmed light. 

And finding—encountering—someone (a man!) who is a little more fully cooked and baked (In this patriarchy?! This fascist uprising?!), can be harder (no pun intended!) than one might think. 

And yet. 

There was once a man. After only days of knowing each other, I asked him (after telling him it was clear to me that he was a workaholic—I mean, same, we can smell our own), I asked him one thing he’d learned to be true about me. “You’re intuitive,” he said. And this was two days after I had watched him look me up and down in such a way that his eyes scorched the mitochondria of my every single inner organ. And this was one day before I would watch him watch me dance, and know—with the fervor of a thousand sails holding sturdy in an afternoon wind—that he was interested. In watching me. My outsides, no question or doubt. But at that moment, when he not only watched or checked me out, but actually saw me, and up lifted the kaleidoscope of butterflies that had taken up residence in my stomach to burrow in my throat, there was something otherworldly about a man knowing so quickly what my insides could do. 

I am looking to be undressed from the inside out. An unhinging of my insides and truths. 

I wonder if sometimes I hold back my insides. My tenderness. My softness. My generosity. Because I give it too willingly. So willingly. To so many people in my life. Not my life, too. 

And part of what I know I both want and need in partnership is someone who can give that too. 

***

I have revisited, over and over on this journey, what it is from which I need and want to unhinge. 

At first, I was divesting from the stronghold I’d had and onto which I’d doubled down on meeting someone in person, IRL. On that being gospel. On that being the only way. 

But many more moons into the Hinge journey, I realize it’s also about finding, clarifying, and amplifying that on which I want a potential—and eventually lasting—connection to hinge. 

In the wake of another mirror (guy) that lets me know not what I’m looking for in someone else, but who I am looking to feel like and be—inside me—I tell my mother I am annoyed.

Whatever she says is so potent, so poignant, so profound, that I make her say it again so I can thumb it out on my phone while she talks, her voice on speaker, blasting into my apartment. 

“I said, you are so healthy,” my mother says. “I love that you’re annoyed with his wishy washiness. Instead of feeling deflated or upset or rejected you are doing what you need for a change, instead of worrying about what someone else needs or wants.”

My thumbs type furiously into an email I will email myself and copy and paste into this. 

“And it’s just so refreshing that it’s about you and what you need,” she says. “It’s just beautiful. It’s just beautiful. I’m very happy. It is a huge turning point for you,” she emphasizes “huge.” It sounds huge, as she says it: HUGE. “Whatever you’re emerging to, from it is beautiful to witness. Because it’s about you. And you are standing up for what you need.”

A breath. 

“Seriously, Caroline, x months ago you would have been really upset. You would have been analyzing it. I just love this. It’s the healthiest thing. Yay you! It’s just wonderful. I’m telling you, months ago, it would’ve been a little bit different. And that’s my two cents. That is my two cents. Something shifted. I think all of these different guys wanting you has been good for your ego. And I think that’s wonderful. Why shouldn’t you feel like that? You just went back on Hinge. And you know that you’re great. The good news is that you know you’re great. The harder news is that it’s harder to find someone when you’re so special.” 

I do believe that we’re all special. I really do. Even the people who are very much not for me. 

I think it’s about finding the special that works with my special, and vice versa. 

Maybe that too is the hinge. 

***

As a noun, “hinge” can mean “a jointed or flexible device on which a door, lid, or other swinging part turns,” or “a determining factor: turning point.”

Am I opening a door? Am I closing one? Both?

If we play with the “turning point” definition, I find myself hungry to say that rejoining Hinge has been that: a turning point. Making space to unhinge myself layer by layer, date by date to go deeper and deeper into the depths of myself is helping me get clear on what—and who—I want. 

I feel like with each person I meet, whether we actually go on a date or several dates or not, I am getting closer and closer to the depths of what it is I want. Which is merely a mirror for going deeper and deeper into the depths of myself. Like I’ll meet someone, and I’ll be like, “yes,” this. This is what I asked for. This is what I want. And then there might be a thing that’s empty or not clicking or off. And I’ll say—to the universe, to myself—ok, this is close, but not quite right. And then—like clockwork, like a door unhinging or a single consideration upon which something, or someone, might hinge—the next person arrives, and they have that missing thing. 

“Stay in this,” I’ll say to myself, “You’re gonna learn something.” 

And I do. 

This knowing, this ushering myself to stay, this too is the journey of IMRAMA. This too is it. 

And so closer and closer and closer I get. 

The joke is—of course—that it all ultimately hinges on me. 

Like the IMRAMA card asked: “Where are you being called to journey to?”

And yet—like the LEAP card from which I was supposed to release myself—hasn’t the universe still been catching me? Hasn’t the universe been sending me what I ask for with each deepening? Or, perhaps, have I been catching myself? Have I been deepening instead of leaping? 

I think, maybe, yes. 

But I think, in the past, like my mother said, I would have leaped. I would have leaped into something, even if it wasn’t what I wanted, even if it wasn’t healthy or good for me, even if I was annoyed. I would have leaped. Lily pad to lily pad like an overactive frog.

Instead, I’ve been the lily pad itself. Sturdy, floating, held both on the surface, and also from the depths underneath. Allowing whatever has leapt onto me to do its leaping, while remaining steadfast on with whom and for what and when and why and how it is I want to ultimately land. 

Remember the guy who slid back into my texts? We did eventually have coffee in December, while I was in the midst of lots and lots of other dates. And this finished the unfinished business. Perhaps unhinged another hinge that was too rigid. Helped loosen a screw (no pun intended). 

Because I had listened to my gut. And I also realize in retrospect, I set some really clear boundaries and guidelines with him. What I wanted. What I was willing to put up with, and what I was not. And that set the tone for the way I entered the Hinge-ing. How the soul journey began. 

Perhaps that too is upon what things hinge. 

Trusting our journey. Going deep within. 

Being clear with the people I date—and the universe, myself—instead of leap-frogging about. 

***

At this exact current moment, exactly seven months and one week into rejoining Hinge, my roster is clear. My profile is currently paused. I am metabolizing and integrating the deepening, the journey. I am letting myself hinge on the lessons of the unhinging. I am sturdy, without leap. 

And it’s tempting, really, to text someone. To leap, instead of journey to my soul. Like this guy with whom I had a kinetic first date, with whom I made out so wildly outside the subway a stranger yelled, “Get a hotel.” How tempting it is to summon that from which I have already unhinged myself because it seems easier than hinging my bets on waiting for that on which I want the doors of my life to open, on which I want the houses I inhabit and live to hinge.

But that guy wasn’t and isn’t my person. I know this. For many reasons. I know it in my bones. 

Before I paused my profile the other day, after swapping most of my pictures and tweaking some of my profile prompts, I swiped right on plenty of new men. Wrote cute messages to some. But something has felt fishy when I’ve been in the app these days. Not like something is off. Quite the opposite. Like something is especially on. Maybe it’s my light. Shining from deep within. 

But instead of being an extremist about it, instead of swearing off Hinge and dating apps for the rest of my life, or deleting it and shutting down my profile altogether, I’m listening to the dreamer dream. Something is brewing. I feel closer and closer than perhaps I have ever been. Although, isn’t that how every moment in life works? Isn’t that how every single breath we get to breathe breathes? That we journey towards, and also in. We are forever closer and deeper merely by breathing our way around and around the sun. And I feel the deepening I’ve deepened. I feel the unhinging on which it hinges. Begin.

***

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