What happens when a single gal about town takes to the Jewish dating app du jour and gives her profile a little Hanukkah makeover? Apparently, a whole lot of weird.
Welcome to my story.
What started as a joke — “Let’s buy this ugly velvet Hanukkah dress from Target!” — turned into another joke — “Wow, this is actually amazing, let’s go take a bunch of professional-looking photos of me wearing it around Bryant Park!” — turned into one final joke/investigation/life choice: using the photos on my JSwipe profile, changing my bio to some cheesy Hanukkah pick-up line, and seeing how the nice Jewish boys react.
And react they did:
I’ll start off by saying that a surprising number of men messaged me with just simple hi, hello, how are yous, as if it was totally normal that I was posing like a Hanukkah stock photography model in every picture. Bless their hearts.
But let’s get to the good stuff. I shall divide the responses into categories.
First up: Penis jokes/sexual innuendo.
And one that I thought was sexual innuendo but then kinda took a bizarre turn:
People concerned with my personal hygiene:
The genuinely interested:
The genuinely confused:
The genuinely disgusting:
Then I switched up my profile to look for those commitment-minded:
This got me a whole new slew of fun matches and messages! Like…
The gross:
The fashion curious:
Those looking for drugs:
The nice guy:
My last ditch effort for a fun bio was perhaps my most honest:
It garnered some more confusion:
And one good sport:
Last but not least, I would be remiss not to include my disappointing interaction with David Yarus, the founder of JSwipe, who matches with everyone.
Reader: he did not respond. What a tease.
So, you ask, what did I learn from my Hanukkah JSwipe experiment? No love connections were made, no dates set, no interests piqued. I pretty much found that whether you’re wearing a velour Hanukkah dress in every picture or go with the standard assortment of mirror selfies, pictures from weddings, and vacay pics, you’ll probably get the same result, which is mostly pretty bad messages from pretty skeevy dudes. I did make it out alive without receiving any dick pics, though! That, my friends, is a miracle.
