Does It Bring You Joy?

HOW MEN BECAME MATERIAL

by Frankie Hernez / @thatsmyhommegirl

If you are a man who dated in America this year, there is a decent chance you are a page in a document you will never see.

The page has your photo on it. A professional headshot if one could be found, an Instagram grab if it could not, and the difference between those two sourcing methods is itself a ranking. Under the photo, your full name. Under your name, two columns. Pros and cons. And if you are no longer a contender for an end goal that may never have been defined, there is a red X over everything, applied in seconds, visible to an audience you were never told existed.

Hans Holbein the Younger (B. 1497) Portrait of Anne of Cleves

The men in these documents are called the "roster." The document is called the "dating spreadsheet," and by now it is common practice in online dating culture, a fully established meme with standardized column headers and viral anecdotes. Attraction level. First date rating. Occupation. Height. App of origin. The entries read like reviews because that is what they are. The same scoring instinct that rates restaurants, serums, and every film on Letterboxd, turned on a man across a table. Some women compile their year of data into slide decks and present them to friends. That genre is called Dating Wrapped. The year in men, visualized, with charts. This practice does not consider itself cynical about any of this. The word that keeps surfacing in comment sections, with no irony anywhere near it, is empowering.

Left: Dance card of Clara E. Lane, Christmas Day, 1896. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Right: @im.ayeshab/ Tiktok, 2025

Before it was declared empowering, it was a scandal. In April 2012, a New York man named David Merkur kept an Excel workbook tracking the women he was seeing from Match.com, with notes on each interaction and numerical scores for online appearance. On one particular date, he mentioned the spreadsheet. The woman asked him to send it. He actually did. In shock, she then forwarded it to her friends as Monday morning entertainment, the file went national, and Merkur became a byword for a particular male pathology, the romantic life administered like a portfolio. The women in the file gave horrified interviews. The one scored 9.5 for her personal online appearance was fielding calls from strangers congratulating her on the number. Merkur shared the document because he was proud of it. He mistook the workbook for a flex, the system for something a woman would admire. He was wrong about the audience, not the appeal. That was thirteen years ago. The same document, kept today by a woman, with the same scores and the same notes, is now supported by a comment section saying she is wasted on dating and belongs in project management. What is worth noting is that the document itself did not change. Only the permission to produce it did.

Harmen Steenwyck (b. 1612) An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life

That permission has been productized. The dating spreadsheet now has its own app market, crowded enough that the products compete on features. Take Spread, for example. Released by developer Sampson Ezieme, it bills itself as the first roster app in the world. Users log their matches, sort their behavior into green, beige, and red flags, and the app calculates a compatibility percentage against your own entered dealbreakers. The listing says it is built on the psychological principle of "cognitive offloading," which is a clinical way of saying your heart has too many tabs open. It also says, one feature after the percentage, "This is not about rating a human being." The percentage disagrees. A second app, RostrDating, is pitched in its own words as "Built for the Group Chat." You log the date, you rate the date, you share it to a private circle of trusted friends, and at the end of the year the app generates your Dating Wrapped automatically. It even comes with an AI dating coach for those who want to improve at the sport. A third, called For Girlies, asks in its marketing whether you are struggling to keep up with your friend's roster, and offers to organize the surveillance. The homemade Google Doc, shared between friends who cannot keep track of each other's men, is being enclosed by venture capital in real time. The shared doc is the folk tradition. The apps are the factory.

Spread, Apple App Store listing, screenshot.

Academics saw this coming fifteen years ago and even gave it a name: "relationshopping." Sociologist Eva Illouz spent her career warning that internet dating had imported the principles of mass consumption into the romantic encounter, abundance, endless choice, efficiency, standardization, and that the result would be intimacy conducted in the emotional register of procurement. She was not speculating. She was early. The apps are what her footnotes look like when they get a VC backer. Even the vocabulary confessed before the software did. Roster. Bench. Starting lineup. Drafted. Cut. Cuffing season. The language of sports management and supply chains entered the mouth first. People described their love lives as logistics for years before anyone built the logistics. The dating spreadsheet just renders the grammar visible.

Entomology Display, 19th century.

Around that grammar, an ecosystem has grown. The document now has a defensive wing, and it operates at every level of visibility. There are private groups, city by city, where women post a man's photo and ask the crowd for intel, and the crowd returns receipts. There is a public tier above them, where the vetting runs as content: callout storytimes, date reviews, the occasional convergence on a single man, the way TikTok converged on West Elm Caleb in 2022 and turned a stranger into a citywide episode in under a week. In 2025 the private tier became an app called Tea, women reviewing men at scale. It went to number one on the App Store, and then it breached, leaking its users' selfies and IDs. The safety infrastructure had a safety problem. This is the roster's twin: not a scorecard but a background check, vetting as collective labor, safety as spectacle and infrastructure at once. It exists because the risk is real. It is also, structurally, a shared document about men that the men have not seen, which means the genre now runs from flirtation to due diligence without changing file format.

Left: Thomas Byrnes' Professional Criminals of America, 1886.
Right: Are We Dating The Same Man group directory, screenshot, ca. 2020.

The columns also file a double bind nobody says out loud: romance was proceduralized for safety, and the procedure now generates data that penalizes the procedure. The evidence is a recurring con, found in real documents, verbatim: asked for permission to kiss me. A decade of discourse instructed men, at volume, to ask. The asking was the entire curriculum. And the asking is now logged, in shared documents, as a deduction. The behavior the protocol demands is scored as a failure of the instinct the protocol was built to restrain. The con is not wrong. Chemistry is not a syllabus, and the author is allowed to want what she wants. A recurring pro in the same documents, for scale: suggested a Michelin-star restaurant for the first date. The spreadsheet does not resolve the contradiction. The spreadsheet files it.

In hindsight, Merkur was not an aberration. He was an early adopter. The manosphere has kept rosters for as long as it has had a vocabulary. Spinning plates is the canonical term for keeping multiple women in rotation at once. Sexual market value is a literal scoring framework, sometimes with actual charts. So the spreadsheet is not a symptom of the manosphere, and it is not a response to it. It is a convergence. Both sides of the gender cold war independently arrived at portfolio management. Everyone is running the same software. They just hate each other's dashboards.

Reality television has been running the format at broadcast scale for years. Love Island does not depict modern dating. It depicts the interface. The recoupling ceremony is the red X performed as ritual, live, with lighting. Casa Amor is an A/B test with a villa attached. Love Is Blind puts the daters in literal pods, compartments as set design, and the audience watches the sorting the way the group chat watches the doc. The shows keep romance visible for people who are not currently experiencing it, which is most people, which is the business model.

The men are not the audience of these documents, and they are not really the subject. The men are the material. Notice what is missing. The men are evaluated. The evaluators are absent. There is no column for how she showed up, what she performed, what she withheld, whether she was any good at the date either. The scoring runs one direction. On paper this looks like vanity, and maybe it is, but the one-way mirror is the point. The document is not a tool for choosing a man. The document is a text friends write to each other. It has recurring characters, running jokes, a shared editorial voice, a red X that lands like a punchline both authors get. The doc is a love letter between friends, written in men.

Sophie Calle (b. 1953) Take Care of Yourself.

That is the joy, if the title question gets an honest answer. The joy is not in the dating. Everyone involved seems to agree that dating is a grind. The apps now advertise relief from dating burnout. The dating tools are marketing against dating. That is how the war is going. The joy is in the audit. The joy is in the deck. The joy is the Sunday debrief, the co-authorship, the friendship that has a shared file and a private language. Romance has been demoted from the thing itself to the raw material of a different intimacy, one that actually functions. The date is the content. The doc is the work.

Marie Kondo, of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019), whose question titles this essay, has a protocol most people forget. You do not just discard the object that fails the joy test. You hold it. You thank it for its service. Then you release it. The gratitude is not decoration. The gratitude is the entire ethics of the method, the acknowledgment that the object gave you something before it stopped. The roster doc keeps the question and amputates the thank-you. The red X is Kondo-ism with the gratitude removed, tidying as pure elimination, the man written off like dead stock with no exit interview. He had pros and cons, and the page he lived on will outlast his relevance, crossed out but never deleted, because the doc is a living document and living documents keep their dead.

Severan Tondo, c. 200 AD; the face of Geta erased following his damnatio memoriae.

The loneliness researchers would say all of this is coping architecture, and they would not be wrong. When connection feels scarce and risky, inventory feels like agency. The spreadsheet is what hope looks like after it has been to project management training. That is sadder than any statistic, and also more human. Nobody builds a filing system for something they have given up on. The doc is meticulous the way prayer is meticulous.

So does it bring you joy. Yes. Wrong noun, though. The men do not bring the joy. The men bring the data. The joy is upstream, in the friendship, in the format, in the red X applied with a co-author watching. The spreadsheet did not kill the romance. The spreadsheet is where the romance filed a change of address.

Hold the roster. Thank it for its service. It will not be doing the same for you.