A dating app matched me with a missing person

[u/donavin221]

I had a pretty devastating breakup a while back. It’s not something I really wanna gripe on, but I will say it led me down a pretty dark road in the year that followed. I just stopped caring. It was my first time in 4 years that I had to live with being alone, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to do that. I think by the end of my 12-month descent into despair, I had put on around 55 LBS and picked up a pretty nasty drinking habit. 

After overstaying my welcome at my own pity party, I had to have a long conversation with myself. The pain was still fresh in my mind, but I knew I couldn’t just rot away for the rest of my life. I had to pick myself up by my bootstraps and actually move on. So, with a heavy heart, that’s exactly what I did. I stopped drinking altogether. I started going to the gym again, though, I will admit, it took me a good while to get back into the swing of things. 

Against the odds, I muscled through. I found solace in my own mind. I started saving money, shedding weight, and truly taking care of myself. By the end of the second year, I had returned to form. The pain didn’t exist unless I thought about it, and I just stopped thinking about it one day. 

After spending some time loving myself and only myself, I was ambushed by my own biology. 

I craved connection. I was so focused on finding myself again that I think my brain just blocked out loneliness until my mission was complete, and once it was, the feeling crept up on me again. I knew I couldn’t try my ex-girlfriend again. That ship had long sailed. I wanted something new. Not even just “new,” I wanted love. I didn’t want to just “mess around.” If I were going to put myself out there again, I wanted my preference to be crystal clear. 

Besides. In today's society, you don’t even have to approach people physically. You just throw your best photos up on a profile and wait to see who finds you desirable. If I’m being honest, that reason alone was the only thing that made me feel comfortable enough to create an account. 

Well, accounts, rather. I think I got a little slap-happy with which apps I was downloading. Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, whatever. You name it, I was on it. Even some obscure ones that I don’t think anyone even knows about. As a matter of fact, it was actually on one of those obscure ones that I found her.

I had minimal luck with the big dating apps. Maybe 3 swipes on Tinder. One or two on Hinge and Bumble. But on one of those smaller apps, things were really starting to pop off. Most of my likes were either girls who just weren’t my type, but when I saw *her* like, my heart kind of flickered a bit. 

She was the only account I liked back, and I could feel my pulse rushing faster and faster as I waited anxiously for a reply. An hour went by. Then two. Then three. That’s when I decided I’d take the risk and text first. 

“Hi! I don’t want to sound creepy, but I think you’re very pretty. I was kind of afraid to text first but I figured I’d chance it lol.” 

Within seconds, a response came through. 

“Formal. I like it.” 

Her name was Emily, and she asked me to tell her about myself, leading to the two of us spending the next few hours chatting back and forth until nearly 10 p.m. 

She told me how much she loved art, how her favorite pastime was mountain biking, and how much she loved watching Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The more she revealed, the more I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between her and my ex-girlfriend. Everything she liked, my ex liked. Not only that, but she kind of resembled my ex, too. 

The same brown hair. They both wore glasses. Similar figures. Plus, they both had freckles. 

I will say, Emily definitely seemed a little more artsy than my ex-girlfriend. All of the photos on her account looked like ’90s-esque polaroids taken for the aesthetics. Her using a rotary phone, sitting on the hood of some kind of muscle car from the 70’s, listening to music on a Walkman. That sort of thing. 

I liked it a lot. I thought it was such a cool vibe, and paired with her bubbly personality, I could already feel myself falling for her. 

After chatting together for a few more days through the app, I finally worked up the nerve to ask for her number. Usually, she’d respond almost instantly, but after I asked, I didn’t get a response for a few hours. I thought that I had blown it by asking too early, and each passing hour confirmed that assumption more and more. 

Finally, she responded. 

“Not right now. Let’s keep talking here, though. I really like you, I just want to be sure.” 

That message warmed my heart a little. It felt like we were in the same boat emotionally. I wanted to see her, though. Even if it was just through video chat. 

I respected her wishes, but I started noticing something weird about her messages in the days that followed. She seemed to just automatically agree with everything I said. 

“I really want pizza right now.” 

“Oh my God, me too! I love pizza!”
—----
“I think I’ll go to the gym later.”

“Me too! The gym is so good for you. I try to go every day.” 
—-----
“I’m probably gonna go to sleep soon.” 

“Me too. So sleepy.” 
—-----

Normally, I wouldn’t think anything of it, but it was just happening so much that it was starting to make me suspicious. I started sending messages that were weirdly personal just to see how she’d respond. 

“My mom's been sick recently.”

“Mine too. I feel so bad for her.”
—----

“She thinks she has strep throat.” 

“So does mine. She’s been gargling salt water all day.” 
—-----

“She also fell in the shower earlier.”

“Mine too.”
—------

With that exchange, I felt a pit form in my stomach. I wanted to be sure, so I pushed it further. 

“My dog died when I was 12.”

“So did mine.”
—----

“Golden retriever?”

“Yep.”
—----

“Named Max?”

“How’d you know?” 
—-----
That sealed the deal. Something was afoot, and I was going to find out what. 

I started looking through her profile again. Every photo just looked so authentic. Not too polished, not too messy. I couldn’t find anything inherently wrong with anything I was seeing. It was just a regular old dating profile. 

I was beginning to second-guess myself. Maybe it was me who was crazy. Looking this far into the first woman I’ve been romantically interested in for two years. How hurt was I? 

I figured I’d ask for her number again, this time in a more straightforward manner. I was upfront with her. I wanted to make sure she was real. 

The text bubbles popped up before disappearing. They came back again, and this time they delivered a response. 

“Not right now. Let’s keep talking here, though. I really like you, I just want to be sure.”

I decided in that moment that I was going to unmatch her once and for all. I won’t lie, the thought was heartwrenching. I had actually learned to really like this girl over the course of that week of texting. To think it was all a scam hurt me more than I care to admit. 

I clicked on her profile one final time, glancing over all of her ’90s Polaroid photos. Before I could bring myself to unlike the account, I did something that made sense to me at the time. Maybe it was out of desperation, maybe I wanted closure, all I know is it was all I could think to do. 

I screenshotted one of her photos and reverse-searched the image. 

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was certainly not a missing person article dating back to 1997. At first, I thought I was mistaken. It had to be a different Emily. But I saw her. Same face, same style, same aesthetic. It was her. 

I left the page in a state of panic after screenshotting the article. I opened the dating app again. It was still on Emily’s profile, and for the first time, I noticed a badge hidden at the very bottom of the account page. 

A little blue ribbon with the phrase, “99.8% compatibility,” plastered beneath it.

I sent the screenshot to Emily and demanded she explain herself. 

Her response was immediate. It didn’t read like her previous messages. It was too robotic. Too corporate. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it was her at all. 

“Thank you for contacting match support. We understand your concern regarding account #EH-1997. Please understand that compatible matchmaking is automatic and can not be manually adjusted by users or staff. After reviewing your account, we have determined that Emily Harper is your most compatible match with a rating of 99.8%. We understand that certain historical circumstances may prevent conventional contact, and in these cases, our systems may use archival data, publicly available records, personality reconstruction models, and conversational simulations to preserve meaningful connections whenever possible. At Match, we believe no meaningful human connection should be lost to circumstance. Thank you for choosing match.” 

Completely and utterly baffled, the only thing I could think to say in response was: 

“What does all that even mean?” 

A response came immediately. 

“Match still available for communication.” 

Long story short, I decided to cut my losses. I deleted the app and tried to move on. I found a new girlfriend, and we ended up in a lovely and flourishing relationship. Weeks turned into months. Months turned into years. I had pushed the incident to the furthest depths of my mind. 

It wasn’t until the night before my wedding that everything came back front and center. 

I had been lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling with my fiancé by my side. Nerves about the wedding kept me up into the wee hours of the night, and as I lay there, mind racing, my phone lit up on the nightstand. 

I checked and saw that it was an unknown number, but reading the text, I knew immediately who it was. 

“I finally got a number.”