Unsolicited

A lamentation on Raya and the horrors (oh, the horrors) TᴖT

First things first: a heartfelt thank you to my brilliant, stunning sister for dragging this utterly ridiculous disaster back into my brain so I could fatten up my blog with it. Writing this was a delight. You are, as always, a delight to endure as well.

And also, a warning: To my darling Granny, who reads all my pieces religiously - this one might be a bit much for your tastes. Maybe give me a call for a quick, friendly summary instead. I love you very much.

---

I know I write about Hinge a lot - or more accurately, about my deep-seated, soul-curdling hatred for Hinge. An app so cursed, its notifications trigger a primal urge in me to chew on my own hair just to cope. Because dating on the internet makes people brave. Too brave. The kind of brave where boundaries blur, decency evaporates, and people behave as if actions don’t have consequences simply because they exist in a digital ether. Hinge, in particular, is a cesspool of this delusional overconfidence.

And yet, despite being the recurring villain in my ever-growing anthology of romantic misfires, Hinge isn’t the only app I’ve tangoed with. Nor is it the only one I’ve come to loathe with a righteous fury. The landscape of online dating is vast, bleak, and weirdly enthusiastic about icebreaker prompts - and I’ve wandered through most of it, against my better judgment.

If Hinge is the dating app equivalent of an overcrowded buffet on the Vegas Strip, then Raya is the velvet rope nightclub of online romance - glossy, exclusive, and full of people who list “entrepreneur” in their bios but seem to do very little besides wear matching linen sets in Ibiza. It’s a members-only app marketed as a dating platform for “creative professionals,” but it mostly functions as a curated ego-farm where everyone’s teeth are suspiciously white and nobody’s eaten a carb since 2016. It’s where celebrities, influencers, and a gaggle of overinflated egos go to find love (or, more often, a situationship with someone who has a blue tick). I’d always considered it the dating app for people who treat relationships like networking opportunities - which is to say, not for the likes of me.

But it was very much for the likes of my friend Kendall.

Kendall, who is gorgeous, hysterically funny and effortlessly magnetic, has men falling out of their own arses in a desperate attempt to get her attention. It’s genuinely marvellous to watch - like a nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough, only instead of wildebeests and mating calls, it’s insecure men in expensive shoes trying to emotionally negg their way into her DMs. When we lived in the same city, Kendall and I would have weekly dinner dates, during which she’d hand me her phone and we’d sip dirty martinis, scrolling through her matches on Raya: an investment banker in New York, a race car driver in Monaco, a “creative director” who, upon closer inspection, appeared to direct absolutely nothing. It was thrilling in a voyeuristic way - like window-shopping for boyfriends she had no intention of ever actually buying.

The men didn’t faze her. They were accessories - sleek, interchangeable, mildly entertaining - who filled her inbox with promises of designer bags, ski trips, and spontaneous flights to Saint-Tropez. She'd roll her eyes, laugh, and reply when she felt like it (which, to be clear, was not often). I was always intrigued by the whole thing - the exclusivity, the curation, the sheer absurdity of it all. It felt like dating via LinkedIn: polished, performative, and utterly devoid of emotional fibre. But there was a seductive glamour to it, like the digital equivalent of being invited to an exclusive afterparty where everyone is hot and totally dead inside.

Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I downloaded the app, made a profile, and waited to see if I would be let in. And after a waiting period (what kind of app has a waiting period???), I was. After coughing up what felt like a ransom for a monthly subscription - especially absurd since most dating apps are free - I found myself thrown into the Raya rabbit hole. And just like that, my experiment began.

The men on Raya? Well, it turns out they’re mostly the same faces you’d find swiping left and right on every other app - just with better lighting, more carefully curated bios, and a paywall to hide behind. It’s like seeing your usual cast of characters, but now they’ve been shellacked, polished, and pedestalled. Same questionable charm, just wrapped in an exclusive-looking package (that now we both have to pay for).

I moved through the app with all the grace of a newborn foal trying to frolic through a shopping mall. It quickly became clear that Raya wasn’t a place for messy charm or unfiltered personality. No, here you had to play the part: refined, effortlessly cool, probably rich. You were expected to exude the kind of detached sophistication usually reserved for people who use summer as a verb and drink wine with names that sound like antihistamines.

It all felt wildly inauthentic - and worse, I wasn’t even good at faking it. All my photos were slightly chaotic selfies. None of my clothes were designer. I didn’t have a single bikini photo to my name. I wasn’t lounging in Mykonos infinity pools or reclining against minimalist furniture in brutalist lighting - I was sitting in my rented flat, trying to crop out my laundry rack from the background of my images. I scrolled past celebrities I recognised, none of whom matched with me by the way - not even the ugly ones. It didn’t feel like a dating app. It felt like turning up to a fancy dinner party with a Tesco meal deal stuffed inside my bag.

I did manage to snag a few matches here and there, and one of them actually seemed sort of nice. Jasper was a swimmer - or at least, that’s what his profile said - and at the time, he mentioned he was heading to Paris for the upcoming Olympics. His photos backed it up: one of him seated at a fancy-looking, white-tableclothed restaurant, casually sporting a silver medal atop some nicely defined collarbones; another, a close-up of his smiling face mid–victory bite into a gold one (or maybe bronze - those colours conveniently blur together, don’t they?); and a final shot of him lounging on a sofa with a very cute Border Collie licking his chin. He seemed charming, successful, possibly house-trained. Fit by virtue of his profession, not an arsehole by virtue of his texting style.

Despite the usual polish, Jasper felt refreshingly straightforward. Our initial chats were easy, and for once, it felt like a glimpse of something almost genuine amid all the Raya theatrics. When I asked him about his swimming, he shared a little - but there was a curious reserve to his answers. I found myself expecting more enthusiasm, more pride, maybe a highlight reel or a trophy shelf tour. Instead, his replies were quietly vague, almost as if he was skimming over details he didn’t want to dig into. Not in a red-flag kind of way, just mysterious enough to make me wonder what wasn’t being said. Honestly, it was kind of refreshing; sometimes dating apps are so aggressively in-your-face that a little subtlety felt like a breath of fresh air.

We exchanged Instagram handles, followed each other despite Jasper having approximately zero images on his page, and - as the age-old adage goes - promptly forgot the other existed. Or at least, that’s what happened on my end. It was the quintessential modern love story: a fleeting flicker of mutual interest, sealed with a polite follow and quietly buried beneath the algorithm. You match with someone, get the sweet, hollow validation of knowing they too would hypothetically snog you, gain a lifelong lurker of your grid… and never ever speak again, as long as you both shall live.

Except, unfortunately, that’s not what happened here. Jasper didn’t vanish into the interweb like so many well-lit men before him. Instead, he popped back up - just when I least expected it.

About a month later, with Jasper so far out of my mind he may as well have been an extraterrestrial or the Year 9 P.E. teacher that I had a strangely persistent crush on, I was leaving the gym - sweaty, starving, and balancing my water bottle, work bag, car keys, and phone like an overworked circus act - when I felt a buzz in my hand. A notification. Innocent. Unassuming. And yet unmistakably ominous. A harbinger of what was to come.

On the escalator down to the car park, I glanced at my phone. An Instagram message. From someone whose name I didn’t recognise at first. I stared, puzzled, until the mental filing cabinet clattered into place - ah yes, the Olympian. The swimmer. Medals. Puppy.

I was curious. I was concerned. I was, against my better judgement, about to open it.

And then… Horror. Absolute, unadulterated terror. There was so much skin - an alarming, borderline medical amount of flesh - and it felt like I’d somehow stumbled into the forbidden back room of a wax museum, where all the half-finished, disassembled mannequins were kept hidden from polite company. The pale, uncanny expanse stretched across my screen in a way that was grotesque, a visual assault that made my stomach churn violently and my eyes plead for mercy. It was incredibly unsettling and utterly impossible to unsee.

It was, to put it bluntly, his penis.

I think I screamed. Then I proceeded to drop everything: my water bottle, work bag, car keys, and phone - which, of course, was still displaying the picture in disgustingly high definition. Panic surged through me as I scrambled after my belongings, which were now clattering down the escalator like a rogue percussion section in a particularly untrained symphony. People turned to look - some with concern, others barely suppressing laughter.

Eventually, I snatched up my phone, heart pounding and cheeks burning. Hands trembling, I locked the screen, my brain begging me to un-see what I’d just glimpsed. It was gross. So. So. So gross. The kind of gross that had no business showing up unsolicited on anyone’s screen, least of all mine.

I wiped my clammy hands on my yoga pants, took a shaky breath, and seriously wondered what on earth had made this relative stranger from Raya think it was a good idea to send a picture of his bits - out of nowhere, with no context, and mind you, after a solid month of radio silence.

I thought of the men Kendall had matched with on Raya. Sure, they were wildly self-important douchebags and prone to narcissism, but at least they weren’t leading with photos of their junk. At least they had the decency to open with a dinner invitation, not a full-frontal assault. Woe is fucking me.

As I slumped into the driver’s seat of my car, I found myself stewing in a blend of shock and fury. The sheer arrogance - and let’s be honest, the audacity - of some men. The way they seem to genuinely believe that women are just sitting around, phones in hand, breath bated, hoping to be ambushed by an unsolicited display of genitals. Like we’ll cheer, clap, maybe frame it for the mantelpiece. Spoiler alert: we’re not. We NEVER are. There’s a fine line between confidence and delusion - and Jasper hadn’t just crossed it. He’d sprinted, or rather, swum, at full pelt, all the way past it. Goggles on, dignity nowhere in sight.

I unlocked my phone to get rid of the image and pull up some much-needed Spotify therapy, but of course, was privy to another unwanted viewing. And the photo really was appalling. Almost impressively bad. But, then I noticed something was off about the image - I mean, besides the obvious. I realised that something was missing. Something other than his clothing and his common sense.

… Brace for impact…

Jasper didn’t have any legs.

I’m not joking. I wish I was. I stared in shock. There was his penis, clear as day, but he didn’t have any legs. It didn’t make any sense at all.

I raced back to his Raya profile. The white-tablecloth dinner shot, the close-up of his smiling face, the casual selfie on the couch with the puppy - every photo conveniently cropped just above the waist. I scrolled back through our brief conversation, remembering how he’d been really quite vague about his swimming career. I jumped back to his Instagram which was suspiciously barren. No pictures, no updates, and it now made perfect sense as to why that was.

Jasper wasn’t an Olympic swimmer. He was a Paralympian.

And, you know, that’s fine. That’s absolutely fine. It’s fine to not have legs. I have zero opinions on people without legs.

I do, however, have opinions on legless people who send unsolicited dick pics.

I blocked Jasper. Drove home in a daze, barely able to see the road ahead. All I could picture was the haunting mental image of the stuff between Jasper’s legs. Well… no, not quite. Jasper didn’t have any legs. Penis. No legs. Penis. No legs.

And then, on top of that, a secondary panic set in because what if he thinks I blocked him because he doesn’t have legs? He’ll think I’m a monster. Even though he’s the monster. The dick pic monster. The dick pic monster that doesn’t have any legs, oh my god.

I pulled the car over, and because I’m a glutton for awkwardness, and also desperately wanted to make it absolutely clear that I am not ableist, I unblocked him. Fingers trembling, I typed out:

“Hi Jasper. I wanted to let you know that I am blocking you for sending me that image. It’s not okay to do that. I am not blocking you for any other reason. Have a good day.”

Then, just to be clear, I blocked him again. Hard and fast.

I did my best not to gouge my eyeballs out in the process.

The next month, I cancelled my Raya subscription.

---