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On a laptop, I had a full keyboard, a larger screen, and the dignity of a man doing a task at a desk. On a phone, I’d have two thumbs the size and dexterity of bratwurst and a keyboard built for a child. Unfortunately for my nail-clad sausages, the website was immovable on the subject. Reluctantly, I retrieved my phone and began the long, humbling process of doing everything wrong one letter at a time.

“Fine,” I told the phone.

The phone said nothing.

I downloaded the app, and a little yellow mask logo appeared. I didn’t think too hard about it, because a mask seemed like a fun, mysterious, date-night sort of thing, like Mardi Gras but online. It asked for my location, which I granted, because how else would it find me the nice single men of Tampa? It asked me to make a profile, and here, at last, was familiar ground. It gave me a form. I love a good form. I cracked my knuckles, an entirely ceremonial gesture for a touchscreen, and got to work.

I want to be clear that I put real work into this. I’d watched every person I love fall into something good. I’d watched Benji coach half of them through their profiles. I’d absorbed, I thought, the principles:

Be specific.

Be warm.

Show, don’t tell.

I wrote three careful sentences about owning a bar with my best friend, about fixing things with my hands, and about being a homebody who’d been told he should get out more and was, as evidenced by this very profile, doing exactly that.

It took me nine minutes to type three sentences, because my thumbs hit the wrong letters with the consistency of a curse. I wrote “bra” for “bar” twice. I wrote “hlmebody.” The little autocorrect, trying to help, changed “fix things” to “fox things.” I didn’t catch that until I’d already read the whole thing back once, at which point I had to hunt down the tiny word and stab at it repeatedly while the cursor leaped around like it was avoiding me on purpose.

But I finally got it.

I read it aloud.

It was honest, a little dry, and sounded very much like me. Oddly, I was proud of it. I nearly texted it to Finn for approval, then decided a man should be able to describe himself without a committee.

Then the app asked for a photo.

This took forty minutes.

The problem with photos of me is the same as the problem with the rest of me. I photograph like a mugshot of a man who’s done something illegal to a smaller man.

I’m aware of this bug in my system.

I’ve spent my life aware of this.

I didn’t want the first thing a potential date saw to be a wall of graying menace. I wanted something softer, something that said, “Yes, I am large, but I have a beagle-shaped hole in my heart, and I’ll remember your mother’s birthday.”

I took eleven photos.

In the first ten, I looked like I was about to repossess someone’s Oldsmobile. In the eleventh, I caught myself half laughing at how badly the other ten had gone; but my face had done something human, so I used that one.

Then there was a field, a little box, that said, “Looking For.”

It was a dropdown.

I clicked it, expecting the usual descriptions of relationships and dating: long-term, short-term, friends, something like that.

The options were not those.

I stared for a while.

I didn’t even know what several of them meant.

I searched for the one that seemed most like “a nice dinner and seeing where it goes,” which was none of them, so I left it blank and told myself blank was mysterious.

When I hit “Done,” the app took my careful little foundation of a profile and dropped me, without ceremony, into the grid.

It was a wall of torsos.