One Swipe, Ten Years Later

By Luca Bonafede · July 29, 2026 · 

There's a version of me, sitting on a park bench in 2016, who made a promise he didn't fully understand yet.

Back then I'd already been using dating apps for a while — this was more than ten years ago now, when Tinder was still fairly new and everyone was on it. And I'd been using it too much. Not in the way people warn you about — no doom-scrolling, no hundreds of matches — but in the sense that the meeting itself had started to feel manufactured. Every match felt slightly pre-approved, slightly rehearsed, before we'd even said a word. I liked people. I just didn't like how fast and how flattened it all felt.

So I made myself a test. If I was still normal — whatever that meant to me at twenty five — I should be able to walk into a park in the middle of a weekday and meet someone. Not swipe. Not match. Just walk up, in daylight, and see if I still had it in me.

I did. I met someone that day, by chance, on that bench. And something in me settled. I kept the app a little longer out of habit, then deleted it, and made a quiet promise: no more shortcuts. If I was going to meet someone, it would be on the street, at work, in a park, on a ferry, in a supermarket line — anywhere except a screen.

That promise held for ten years.

I don't say that to sound disciplined. I say it because I mean it literally — a full decade of meeting people the slow way, on purpose, from Asia to North America and everything between. Some of it was easy. Some of it wasn't. There were long stretches in new cities where I knew no one, where it would have taken thirty seconds and a swipe to fix that, and I didn't. I waited for the ferry conversation, the coworker's friend, the person next to me at the counter ordering the same thing I was. Sometimes weeks passed before anything happened at all. That was the deal I'd made with myself, and I kept it even when it was inconvenient — maybe especially then.

It became less of a rule and more of an identity. I'm the guy who doesn't need the app.

Then, at the very end of June this year, sitting in St. John's, I downloaded one again.

Not out of defeat. More out of curiosity — a "let's see what happens" kind of mood. I put up a few photos, pretty basic, wrote a bio just as basic, and within minutes I did something I hadn't expected: I swiped right on the very first profile I saw. No scrolling. No second-guessing. Just — her.

The next day was Canada Day. I was at work when the messages started. A few lines back and forth, and instead of stretching it into days of small talk, I said what ten years of organic approaches instead of park benches and ferries had trained into me: let's just meet. Spontaneously, that day.

She said yes just as fast as I'd swiped. No week of texting to build up to it, no careful choreography of who-texts-first — just two people willing to turn a normal Wednesday into something else. We met downtown that afternoon, and I remember thinking, within the first ten minutes, that this felt nothing like a first date usually feels. There was no performance to it.

We did. Seven hours of getting to know each other and laughing later, Canada Day had quietly turned into one of those days you remember by feel more than by detail. We moved from one place to the next without really planning to — the way a good day does that, pulling you along instead of you dragging it forward.

Here's what strikes me about it now. I spent ten years proving to myself that I didn't need the algorithm — that I could meet someone through nothing but attention and chance. And the one time I let the algorithm back in, it didn't undo that decade. If anything, it confirmed it. One swipe. One match. One person, and it mattered, because for once I wasn't hunting for options — I was just curious what would happen if I said yes to the first thing that felt right.

It hit me like April in July. Out of season, out of nowhere, and somehow exactly on time.

I think that's the part I didn't expect. I'd spent a decade assuming the app and the organic version of meeting people were opposites — that choosing one meant rejecting the other. But maybe they were never really in competition. The app didn't do the work for me. It just opened a door, the same way a park bench or a ferry ride would have. What happened after was still up to me, and to her.

Maybe that's the lesson ten years took to teach me: it was never really about the app. It was about not needing it. And once you don't need something, you get to choose it again, on your own terms, instead of it choosing you first.

Thank you, and ciao for now. 

Luca Bonafede