How a 25-Year-Old Guy on the West Coast Uses Instagram to Find Hookups

To find out what it’s really like to be a man dating in America, Cosmopolitan asked single guys to keep a dating diary for a week. Here’s one man’s story.

Cody, 25

Location: Los Angeles, CaliforniaLooking for: Fun hookups, but if I find something else, that’d be dope.Mostly meets people on: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I don’t work well with Tinder. There’s so much built up anxiety in that first message. People on social media already get me, they’re not just random.

Wednesday

9 p.m.: Alie* is a girl I met on Tinder almost a year ago, and we followed each other on all social media, so I felt like I knew her whole life. We’ve only met once – we were walking by a Whole Foods and recognized each other in passing. I don’t really have a physical type, I’m mostly into a sense of humor, which is why I meet a lot of people on the internet. She’s funny, and she’s an artist, which I like, so I decided to ask her out.

I was on Twitter and saw a guy post this Bitmoji that was him holding a sign that says, “Wanna go out?” and I was like, “Hmm, that’s a funny, cool way to ask someone out.” I texted his Bitmoji to her and https://datingreviewer.net/cs/zenska-volba-seznamka/ she knew exactly whose Bitmoji it was, which was weird, but she agreed to go out if I asked her out in a real way. She, like, had instructions on how to ask her out – without a Bitmoji and I needed a specific date plan. I couldn’t tell if we were joking, because all our conversations had a layer of irony in them, so I didn’t respond while I figured out if I was going to embarrass myself.

2 a.m.: I met a girl via Facebook a little while ago. We’re both in Weird Facebook, which is like a subculture of weird internet friends, and she commented a lot on my stuff so we started messaging, but haven’t met IRL. She called me to hang out, but I was, like, sleeping, so I offered to hang out Friday.

Thursday

5 p.m.: I e text chain. I just resaid everything again, without the Bitmoji this time, and made a plan to meet up over the weekend. She was down, which was a relief.

8 p.m.: A girl who makes memes slid into my IG [Instagram] DMs, and asked me to hang out. I’ve had a lot of awkward meetups with people from the internet, so I usually message with someone a lot before meeting, but she looked cool, and I don’t know a lot of girls who make memes, so it was exciting to meet IRL. I can never talk to anyone about memes – but we know all the same people, and she’s really funny and weird and cool. We got tacos and talked about our favorite accounts and people we hate on IG for, like, hours.

Friday

7 p.m.: OK, this sucked. I got stood up by the girl from Facebook. When I got near her place, she didn’t answer the phone, so I hung out at this, like, street festival thing near her place for a couple hours, then left when I realized she was never gonna answer. I felt like a dumb.

Saturday

2 p.m.: I made plans to meet up later with a girl whose name I still to this day don’t know because I know her only through IG. We’ve been DMing and I keep waiting for her to say her name, but she hasn’t, and now I feel dumb asking. In my head, I just call her by her screenname, but I can’t even pronounce it.

8 p.m.: Alie sent me a text that she was at her producer’s party (she’s a filmmaker), but asking to get dinner tomorrow. I misunderstood and thought she was saying her producer’s party was tomorrow and was inviting me to that, so I agreed but didn’t make any dinner plans for us.

9 p.m.: I met the anonymous girl from IG after a rap show and she was super drunk. I was like, I’m not trying to do that, that’s weird. So I was just kind of hanging out and watching out for her. Then this guy tried to lure her friend into a bathroom, and her phone was dead, so I called her an Uber. But she and her friend ran off and missed the first Uber, so I called them another Uber and finally got her drunk friend to get in the Uber with her. But then they remembered they had a ride, so I got charged $10 in Uber cancellation fees. She felt bad about the confusion, and to apologize, she said she would take me out sometime. I just went home by myself.

Sunday

8 p.m.: I got to Alie’s house with no plans for the date, but she was super cool about it, and we went to the market near her place, and got food, and listened to a band play, and talked about the movie she was making and art and memes. (I talk about memes a lot.) We had good chemistry. Anyone that gets me and gets my jokes and references is good – and we didn’t have any awkward lulls in conversations.

My attraction to someone is 100 percent personality. I try and meet people from the internet because I know they get my sense of humor. But normal L.A. people – and that’s who’s on Tinder, which is why I don’t really like Tinder – are pretentious. They like to name-drop a lot. They want to just tell you everything that is important about them right away, they’re like, “I’m Skrillex’s assistant,” or whatever. A lot of cool internet people live in L.A. now though, because you can get jobs in marketing or whatever.

Monday

10 p.m.: I wanted to know why the girl from Facebook stood me up. That usually doesn’t happen to me – when someone tells me to come somewhere and then just doesn’t show up. It’s only kind of happened on other time. I had a girl invite me over and when I got there, a guy answered the door, and it was really awkward, so I just went across the street and called an Uber and left. But I’ve never really gotten stood up before.

Anyway, I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I swallowed my pride and sent her a double text asking what happened. She said she’d gotten sick and fell asleep, but wanted to reschedule for this weekend. Which, OK.