For me, dating apps are further complicated by another of my identities: I’m fat. Advertisement When I say I’m fat, I’m not fishing for anyone to negate the statement and shower me with.

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Free Fat Dating is part of the dating network, which includes many other general and bbw dating sites. As a member of Free Fat Dating, your profile will automatically be shown on related bbw dating sites or to related users in the network at no additional charge. For more information on how this works, click here. Jan 06, 2021 Although online dating seemingly makes it easier to connect, for some of us, it’s more of a curse than a blessing. Being that I identify as a fat, Black femme, the way I navigate life isn’t. Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash. Most dating apps were built to attract a 25 year old straight-size woman and the average 30 year old cisgender, hetero man. I’m a 35 year old white, hetero, cisgender, Fat Woman, so my experiences on a dating app are going to be a little different.

Cheyenne M. Davis reviews the most popular dating app for Black singles and asks the question, is it fat-friendly?

Although Plenty of Fish didn’t garner the best results, it still reinvigorated a sense of hope for me in dating apps and even in finding love, period. Now that I am experiencing “Mainstream Dating App Fatigue” from using three platforms owned by the same company, I have started to look for dating apps that are more niche or specific to a certain subgroup. In the spirit of Black History Month, what better app to choose than BLK?

An app developed by, you guessed it, Match Group, BLK (which to be quite honest, I don’t know if it’s pronounced “B-L-K” or “Black” as I personally call it) is created for Black daters and gives them a safe haven to match, meet and find love. Even though BLK has been around since 2017, according to Jonathan Kirkland, their Head of Marketing and Brand, the app has gained more traction and user activity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Hearing this inspired me to give this app a try because it not only offered the impression that I will find like-minded folx, but I also felt that it would possibly be easier to date on this app being that it is specifically made with Black people in mind.

Infrastructure

At first glance, BLK is everything I imagined it to be, it almost looked like an upscale version of its predecessor SoulSwipe. For Black History Month, the app’s logo, which is normally white lettering on a black background, is spelled in kente cloth colors, and the interface of the app itself is on a black background as well. To add to the cheekiness of the dating app, on Sundays, it even sends you church-themed notifications to remind you to check it. Although this may seem corny or even cringe-worthy to some, I find BLK’s fun humor and incessant need to prove its affinity for “Blackness” to be quite entertaining.

My biggest issue with the app is its user-friendliness. Although it is a swipe app, navigating it as a whole isn’t as seamless as I would’ve liked for it to be. When swiping, all profiles are seen as a collection of pictures with the person’s name and age. In order to get more information on an individual, you have to tap on the small information icon. As a person who enjoys reading profiles, having to jump through hoops to find it is annoying and not so user-friendly at all. In addition to this, having only pictures and one’s name be the first thing you see initially, can give off the vibe that BLK is more of a hookup app and not necessarily one for dating. The app can also be glitchy at times with the occasional frozen screen slowing down the platform’s performance.

My final take on BLK’s infrastructure is that even though you can change your gender identification in your bio, which is very much unlike Plenty Of Fish where you have to make a whole new profile to change your gender, you can only choose between woman or man. This app is most definitely catering to cisgendered folx and isn’t inclusive of a-gendered, nonbinary, intersex, trans, and other folx who do not identify within the margins of the binary. This is super problematic to me because it paints a picture that only certain types of people, specifically those who are socially acceptable, are welcome on BLK, and y’all know that grinds my gears.

Creating a Profile

Similar to Tinder, creating a profile on this app was easy and didn’t require a lot of writing. The only thing it requires is your name, birthday, occupation, education, and a brief bio, and chile…do I mean brief. What sets my profile on this app apart from the previous ones is that I intentionally left out my work on fat activism or the fact that I support BLM. On other dating sites like OkCupid, Tinder, I tend to put these things on my profile because those apps cater to and have an audience that predominately white and non-Black. Having this information visible on my profile adds a level of protection in eliminating people who are ignorant. Being that BLK is a Black app, I felt a bit safer with sticking to my non-political interests because there is a greater chance of running into potential partners who have similar viewpoints as I do.

Source: Cheyenne M. Davis / Cheyenne M. Davis

Paid vs Free Subscriptions

In typical Match Group fashion, BLK offers free, Premium, and Elite memberships. In the Premium subscription, for as low as $9.99/mo, you can have unlimited likes, a monthly boost, and the ability to rewind on profiles that you’ve swiped left on. The step up to this is the Elite package, which for an additional $10 only allows you to see who has liked you already. To be frank, I find Match Group’s pricing system to be a bit of a scam when it comes to these paid subscriptions because they don’t come with enough incentives. Additionally, you would think that they would try to tap into some discounted or even free offerings for these features this month being that it is our month.

Membership aside, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised to see how astronomically more attractive the people on this app were compared to others. It was truly a breath of fresh air. However, once you remove the thirst and actually tap onto some profiles, you will definitely see a completely different story. I truly hate to say this, but a lot of the men on this app give off Black incel and “hotep” vibes. Most of them refer to women as “females” (big yikes), incorporate unnecessary rants about how they will block all folx who don’t identify as cis women for even telling them they’re attractive, followed by a few words about how they don’t support “gold diggers” and women with Cash App in their bios. I just swipe left on these types of men automatically because it’s super violent, and this type of thinking is late AF. Another thing that sends me into orbit is that most of these men in the NYC Metro Area seem to do the same poses, having the photographic trifecta of a “summertime fine shorts and fitted” pic, a “leaning against the car” picture, and the quintessential “sweatsuit and Jordans while standing in the stairwell” image to tie it all together.

Source: Cheyenne M. Davis / Cheyenne M. Davis

In terms of my personal experiences, I will note that BLK is the “perfect” marriage of the fat fetishism that I’ve endured on other platforms, but also with some pleasant surprises. Y’all know that I always receive messages like “U so thick (insert peach and smirking devil emoji here)” and some sexual innuendos here and there, and honestly, I’m pretty numb to it. However, I will say that I’ve gotten the most responses on this app from folx I would consider dating in the future. Despite having to weed out some chubby chasers, I am pleased to report that there are a few potential suitors I am interested in who I am currently talking to, so I will definitely keep you all updated as things progress.

The Verdict

Honestly, BLK has given me, even more hope in my dating app journey, thus receiving a fat friendliness rating of 3/5. Dealing with fat fetishists comes with the territory for every dating app, so I urge all of my fellow fat femmes, especially fat, Black femmes, to err on the side of caution when it comes to conversing with people who conflate having an affinity for larger folx and/or being fat amorous with fetishizing them. Despite this, I will say that my experiences, thus far, have been pretty positive and interesting. Now, to the many people who have relegated me to “niche” apps, I would like to make a note that platforms that are made for people and the groups that they identify with (i.e. racially specific or size-specific dating apps and services) are not utopian spaces for those folx to congregate and connect. They, too, are microcosms of the world that we exist in and are not devoid of critique.

In theory, BLK has the potential to be a great app for BLK folx to connect. However, I find it to be very performative in the way that it not only uses copywriting and design elements that feature African-American vernacular English but also includes things that may pique the interest of Black people. Keep in mind that this app is made by Match Group, whose executive and development teams are teeming with non-Black folx, so the app’s approach to dating and Blackness can come off as very disingenuous and lacking the progressiveness that they are trying to portray. All in all, BLK definitely has a lot of room for improvement, but I will say that it has given me opportunities to find new people to meet, talk to, and hopefully date.

I am a dating app professional. Tinder? On it. OkCupid? Got a profile. Lex? I’ve posted many an ad. But using a lot of dating apps doesn’t always translate to finding a partner. In fact, success on dating apps can vary due to a number of factors. Location, of course — my circles of real-life and online lesbian friends often commiserate about the lack of exciting, available singles in our area. But studies also show that Black women don’t fare as well on dating apps as their white or Latinx counterparts. These studies tend to be limited to heterosexual dating, but, from personal experience, I can say that race definitely factors into how dateable you are perceived to be, even as a lesbian. For me, dating apps are further complicated by another of my identities: I’m fat.

When I say I’m fat, I’m not fishing for anyone to negate the statement and shower me with compliments. I am fat; I’ve made my peace with that. I actually find myself and women with my body type quite attractive. The problem, however, is how other women perceive me and treat me.

I grew up fat. I’ve always been a bigger girl, with the exception of about six years of my life — from sophomore year of high school to senior year of college — when I struggled with an eating disorder. During that time, I noticed how well people responded to me as compared to when I was fat. Teachers who had known me as fat began to listen to what I had to say more. Even though I lost weight rapidly and dangerously, my gym and health teachers told me they were proud of me — all the while teaching units on the threat of anorexia and bulimia. I got attention from both boys and girls, men and women. What I came to learn from my experiences was that my weight was directly tied to my worth.

I struggled with the eating disorder for years without help because many people don’t believe that Black girls can have eating disorders. Problems like that are deemed “white girl problems” and dismissed with the flip of a hand and a reprimand to get yourself together. There was also the fact that I was a fat Black girl, and when you’re a fat Black girl, people don’t want to look at you. They are disgusted by you. They’d prefer that you shrink. So I did. The only person that said anything untowardly about my weight was one of my older brothers, who, concerned, asked my mother if I had cancer.

During my senior year of college, I started eating again. I gained weight, stagnated for a few years, then gained more after I quit smoking and started working mostly at home. Now, I’m what everyone would consider fat.

Back then, my feelings about my size were further complicated by my lesbian identity. I came out as bisexual at 12 years old, after years of sweating when beautiful Black women would come on screen in music videos. The first lesbians I saw had been the lovely, iconic, mostly white, and all thin cast of Showtime’s The L Word. Watching this show, all I could think was: That can’t be me. I don’t look like these women.

What I didn’t know then was that this invention of the lesbian as white and thin — and often rich too — was quite new. There are many archival libraries and projects dedicated to preserving lesbian life from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and earlier, where pictures of Black and brown lesbians abound. To some degree, however, our modern understanding of what a lesbian is still has not evolved beyond the stereotype The L Wordamplified in 2004. When you close your eyes and envision a lesbian, if you think of a thin, white woman wearing a flannel shirt and a beanie and driving a Subaru, you’re not alone — it’s what you’ve been force fed by mass media for the last couple of decades.

This still-ubiquitous stereotype often dictates what other lesbians are attracted to. The belief that straight women tend to dress more feminine and gay women dress more masculine, for instance, might lead a young lesbian to describe, and even internalize, their “type” as butch-lite. The idea that all lesbians are white and thin permeates a lot of pop culture, which further distances lesbians who do not fit into those categories. When the lesbians we see in the media look like Ellen Degeneres or Kristen Stewart, that becomes the coveted type. I won’t argue that all young lesbians fall for this trap, but many do — and where does this leave Black and Brown lesbians? The easiest answer is that we love one another. The city I live in is heavily segregated, however, so my dating options are mostly white and mostly thin, making it hard to connect with women who do look like me.

While I’ve accepted the way my body looks, and I know there are people that find me attractive, on dating apps, being fat and Black comes with the extra work of having to convince someone to be attracted to me. I do get dates from the apps, but I often have to spend a lot of time taking full body pictures that show just how fat I am so that, when I meet a date in person, they don’t feel duped or tricked. Sometimes I even have to add a note that I am fat to my profile as an extra layer of precaution.

The pandemic has made it even more stressful to date as a fat person. Being single right now is rough. I crave the intimacy and closeness of a partner, even just a casual sexual partner, but finding one safely takes a lot of time and energy. What’s more, thanks to every article about the importance of staying in shape during a devastating pandemic, weight gain has been a source of lots of anxiety for thin and average-weight people during this time. It’s become more socially acceptable than ever for them to say they’re afraid to look like me. Having people be openly disgusted by your body type on a mass scale makes dating especially fraught, but there are also the more everyday concerns: During the pandemic, most dates I’ve gone on have included masked walks. Living in a very hilly city, that comes with lots of heavy breathing and sweating on my end, which can be…not sexy, to say the least.

Fatphobia is still rampant and prevalent, and I would be naive to think that it doesn’t affect my dating life; I know it does. No matter how confident I am in my body, there will always be someone waiting to make me feel small. Luckily for me, I have a community of fat babes that I can turn to and talk to about these issues. When I have felt insecure about having a date with someone smaller, these women swoop in to reassure me that I’m worthy of love, and that if anyone shows or tells me otherwise, they are not worth my time. We can talk to each other about food, sex, dating, and the discrimination we face on intersecting levels. We champion each others’ bodies and show each other we are loved and attractive. Despite a world that bombards us with images of thin bodies and weight loss ads, we can feel protected and secure in each other.

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I love being single, but I’ll continue to date as I do everything else: voraciously. Slowing down now would mean letting fatphobic people dictate my dating life, which I have no interest in doing. I love the excitement of getting to know someone new, the anticipation of a kiss, all the rising tension of uncovering shared desire. But for my next date? I’ve got something more chill — and less sweaty — in mind than than a steep walk up a hill. And that’s okay, too.

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Welcome to The Single Files. Each installment of Refinery29’s bi-monthly column will feature a personal essay that explores the unique joys and challenges of being single right now. Have your own idea you’d like to submit? Email single.files@vice.com.