Comedian Ginny Hogan has joined, then deleted, and then rejoined just about every dating app.
While working in the tech world in her early 20s, Hogan said she would run data analytics on these apps and actually got into comedy while conducting tests on them.
That led to publishing her comic study, “How I Used Tinder Smart Photos to Prove Once and for All That I’m More Attractive than a Plate of Cold Refried Beans,” which originally appeared on mcsweeneys.net in 2017. In the piece, she made five different Tinder accounts to test whether she’d be more appealing than a cold plate of refried beans. She was delighted to learn she was.
Now, Hogan has combined her love of data and humor for her newly published book, “I’m More Dateable than a Plate of Refried Beans: And Other Romantic Observations.” It’s a collection of short stories about modern romance interspersed with quizzes and speculation about how famous rom-com characters might fare on dating apps.
“A lot of people are saying that it hits very close to home, which, you know, is good and bad,” Hogan said during a recent phone interview about the book. “I wanted to write something that was relatable, but not trigger anybody. I think it’s a fun read and it’s short enough to be summery and people have been really enjoying it.”
When Hogan initially pitched the idea for the book, she says she was single but was in a relationship while writing it early on in the pandemic. That romance fizzled by the time she handed in her final copy. Writing from the different perspectives of being single and being in a relationship, Hogan said she pulled from her real-life experiences, such as when exploring topics like people who are on dating apps but not really single.
“I wrote that part [‘Creatively Justifying Not Mentioning Your Partner When Sandra Calls You Out’] in, like, a fit of anger,” she said with a laugh. “I’d been talking to this guy for months and he didn’t mention he had a girlfriend. When I called him out on it, he got so defensive and said, ‘I didn’t know you wanted to know.’ He was so crazy. He couldn’t even just apologize.”
She also touches on TV shows to watch while in different phases of relationships.
“By the end, we were watching ‘Game of Thrones’ because it had to be a thing that was really captivating that we could discuss a lot because we could no longer carry a conversation with each other,” she said. She also shares tips for shows to watch before moving in together, during the honeymoon phase and even post-breakup.
Hogan said she’s fine being single. She doesn’t mind friends and family inquiring about her love life, but loathes the idea that “all single people are looking for relationships.”
“I know it’s the kind of thing that we are taught to want, but I don’t think it’s the thing we have to want,” she said. “I’m fine with someone asking me if I’m dating in general, but what I don’t like is if I say that I’m not dating, they want to set me up with someone. There are dating apps out there if I want to find a date and I can find a date, but I can also actively choose not to do this, too.”
She’s lived in San Francisco, New York City and currently resides in Los Angeles, but said her favorite place to date was in New York.
“I felt like everyone in San Francisco worked in the tech industry and it was easy to feel like I was going on the same date over and over again, kind of like a ‘Groundhog Day’ situation,” she shared. “In L.A., everyone works in entertainment, but in New York, people come to New York for so many different reasons and it felt like a much broader selection to me.”
At the end of the day, Hogan said she’s a comedian and just wanted to make people laugh with this book. She had a good time writing it, too, noting that it helped get her mind off the darkest days of the early lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was fun because I was in my house all day and I would fall into a fantasy world writing,” she said.
She dove deep into a story titled “A Match Made in Heaven,” in which God is a woman and She’s building a dating app.
“I think I spent a week on that and it felt like an escape,” she said. “It’s been really nice when people send me a DM and they say things like ‘I was having a really bad day but then read your book for half an hour and it cheered me up.’ That’s so nice.”
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