Priya swore the apps were dead and everyone left on them was awful. Then a friend at a birthday do in Didsbury asked her one deceptively simple question.
Priya, 34, from Stockport, had her dating app set to a ten-mile radius for the best part of two years.
She hadn’t chosen ten miles. It was the number already sitting in the box when she first downloaded the app, and she’d never had a reason to touch it. Ten miles seemed sensible. Ten miles meant someone who could get to hers on a Tuesday without it becoming a logistical negotiation. Ten miles meant she’d never have to explain to her mates why she was on a train to a town they’d have to look up.
It also meant she’d been fishing in the same shallow pool since 2024.
By February she’d stopped noticing how thin it had got. The same faces came round again like a carousel. The bloke holding the fish. The one leaning on a rented Audi. A man she was almost certain had been two years above her at school, still pulling the same face in every photo. She’d swipe for eleven minutes on the sofa, find nothing, and put the phone face down feeling personally slighted — as though the app had decided she’d used up her allocation of men and that was that.
She said as much to her friend Cara at a birthday do in Didsbury. The apps were finished. Everyone left on them was awful. There was nobody out there.
Cara asked her what her settings were.
Priya didn’t know. She had to open the app at the table to find out, which is how she discovered she’d spent two years filtering out every single person in Macclesfield, Glossop, Bolton, half of Manchester and the entirety of Cheshire — on the strength of a default number she had never once looked at.
She changed it to twenty. It took about four seconds.
Nobody talks about this part, because it isn’t romantic and it doesn’t make a good story at a wedding. Most people don’t have a personality problem or a matching problem. They have a settings problem. Wisp data shows that 61% of users have never once changed their distance filter from the default, and that people who widen their radius past fifteen miles go on 40% more first dates in the following month. Not because there’s a better calibre of human nine miles further out. Just because there are more of them.
Rob was nineteen miles away, in Macclesfield.
He asked her out in his second message, which she found so disorientating that she read it twice looking for the catch. No three days of establishing that they both liked Greek food. No slow drip of questions designed to pass the time rather than get anywhere. Just: there’s a place on Mill Street that does the best Sunday roast in Cheshire, are you free a week Sunday, and if the train’s a pain I’ll come to you instead.
She said yes before she’d properly decided to.
The date was three days later, not a week — he moved it forward because he had Wednesday off and she did too. They walked up to the top of the hill behind the town because he said the view was worth it and then apologised for most of the climb in case it wasn’t. It was. She got the last train back at ten and texted Cara from the platform, one line, all in caps.
Here’s the thing that stayed with her afterwards. In two years of complaining, she’d revised almost everything about herself. Her photos, twice. Her bio, four times. What she wore on dates. Whether she was being too keen, too cool, too picky, too available. She had interrogated her own personality like it was under caution.
She had never questioned the number ten.
That’s how it usually goes. We assume the invisible decisions were decisions. The default radius, the age range that stopped making sense three birthdays ago, the app you downloaded in 2023 because your sister was on it. None of those were choices. They were settings someone else picked for you, and you’ve been living inside them ever since, wondering why the room feels so small.
Priya and Rob have been seeing each other since March. He drives over on Fridays. She’s on the train most Sundays. Nineteen miles turned out to be nothing at all — about the same as crossing Manchester in traffic, and considerably more pleasant.
She still thinks about the two years, though. Not with regret exactly. More with a kind of disbelief at how long she was prepared to blame an entire generation of men rather than open her own settings menu.
If dating feels like it’s gone quiet lately, it’s worth checking whether it’s actually gone quiet — or whether you’ve simply drawn a circle around yourself and forgotten it’s there. Open Wisp. Look at the numbers you never chose. Move one of them.
It takes about four seconds, and it’s a lot easier than changing your personality.