What an Adelaide preschool worker reminded me about waiting

The Vietnamese magazine VnExpress ran a profile last week that I cannot stop thinking about. It is about a woman called Tran Thi Thuy An who works at a preschool in Adelaide. She is 34, divorced, raising a son, and ten years into a country she moved to at 24. She spent three years on dating apps before she met the partner she now lives with in Brisbane.

I read the piece on a Friday afternoon and sent it to my podcast co-host with one line, “this is the kind of dating story we never report on”, and she wrote back, “yeah, do we even know how to”. I would say there’s a reason for that, but the reason is plain enough. Misery is more shareable than its absence, and I have made a moderate career out of treating the misery of single life in Sydney like it’s news. So has she.

What pulled me up about An’s story was the bookkeeping of it. Twenty conversations on the apps over three years. Five of those people met in person. The man she eventually picked, a 32-year-old Brisbane data analyst called Alexander Spanton, deleted his apps in front of her after their first date and started, somewhere around the third or fourth month of seeing her, learning Vietnamese. They bought a 150-square-metre house in Brisbane the month after that first date.

The number that gets me is the month of texting before they video-called. Then the video-calling before they met. By the time An walked into a Brisbane wine bar in early 2025 to put a face to the voice, she had already filtered for everything that the first date is normally asked, badly, to filter for: how he talks about his family, how he handles being told no, whether his texts taper off after eleven on a Tuesday or come back at seven on a Wednesday morning. Most of us are still doing that work in real time, holding eye contact at the Cricketers Arms in Surry Hills and trying to read it off someone’s face. An had already done the work, and the date was just confirmation.

“Love alone is not enough; compatibility in values is what matters.”

That’s the line An gave VnExpress International when they spoke to her. The line wasn’t, on its own, the part that surprised me. Anyone with a Headspace subscription has heard a version of it. The part that surprised me is that she put it into practice for three years. People who have actually waited for something tend to talk about it differently than people who haven’t.

A small, plain gesture

Spanton’s bit of this story is the part most of my friends will fixate on, including the ones who claim they don’t fixate on these things. He took out his phone after their first date and, in front of her, deleted his apps. Hinge. Bumble. The lot. There’s an extremely online word for this, “hard launch”, and an even more online critique of it as performative, but I’ll defend it. A 32-year-old man in Brisbane making a decision in front of the person who prompted it isn’t the same as a couple posting matching outfits at Lunar New Year. It’s just a small, legible gesture.

Then, somewhere in the months after, he started learning Vietnamese. Not for the trip he’d later take to her family, although he did take that trip earlier this year, and not for the sweet anecdote he could deliver about it later, although he probably will. Just because his partner’s family was going to be part of his life and the easiest way to be part of theirs was to learn what they were saying. I’m aware of how unromantic this sounds when I write it down. That’s the point. The romance is in how unfussy it is.

I should say, before I keep going, that I might be wrong about all of this. The article is short. Maybe Spanton is, in person, a charisma-vacuum and An is being generous in print. Maybe in fifteen months they’ll be fighting about the kitchen tiles in the 150-square-metre house and one of them will be back on Bumble before tax time. I don’t know them. The version of the story I’m choosing to read is the optimistic one, and I’m choosing to read it because the alternative reading is one we already do too well.

What I keep getting wrong

What I keep getting wrong, and what I think a lot of people I know in their thirties keep getting wrong, is the assumption that the longer you’ve been single the worse your odds get. The maths argues the opposite. An was 31 when she started, divorced, raising a son, working at a preschool in Adelaide, ten years into a country she’d moved to at 24. By any of the standard internet metrics, she should have been written off. The internet metrics are wrong.

Three years is a long time. I’m not pretending it isn’t. But it’s also less time than most of my friends spent on a relationship they knew was finished. It’s less time than I’ve spent in the same office. It’s certainly less time than I’ve spent listening to people, on my own podcast, swear off apps for the third time and reinstall them by the next episode. I’m one of those people. Hi.

There’s a moment in the VnExpress piece where An’s grandmother, Nguyen Thi Nhan, gives the relationship her approval. It’s a couple of lines. I could not stop reading it. There’s an Australian version of this scene where the grandmother is Greek, or Italian, or Vietnamese, or Lebanese, or any of the other generations who arrived here before our parents and now sit at the head of the family on the day a partner is presented. The approval, when it comes, lands like a verdict. I’d never thought of dating apps as having a relationship to that kind of moment. They do. The whole apparatus, the swiping and the chatting and the video and the waiting, is a long, distributed process of trying to get to the day when someone who’s been around long enough to know nods.

The bit I keep coming back to

I’ve already broken my own house rule about not making a hard takeaway out of someone else’s life. So I’ll only say this. The next time I open Hinge after a glass of wine on a Sunday, I’m going to remember the texting period. A month. Before the video. Before the date. Before the deleted apps. Before the house. The order of operations matters more than the operations.

And I’m going to send An’s story to the friend who unmatched the guy on Tuesday.