There is a special agony to existing in limbo, that state of eternal in-between, where time stretches into infinity. Today, that experience is especially true for people vying to join Raya, the members-only dating app. Obtaining a Raya account requires an invitation from a current member, and even after you’ve applied, you can’t log in until your application is approved.
The process creates a bottleneck akin to the line outside a nightclub, where the chosen few breeze inside while the rest are left to wait. Beyond the velvet rope there are some 2.5 million people waiting to get into Raya—many of whom have been idling in limbo for years. “My application is stuck in purgatory,” Gabriela Mark, a 23-year-old law student and model in San Diego, tells WIRED. “Like, she’s never escaping.”
Mark has been on the waiting list for five years. “I don’t know what their deal is, but there’s a reason I’m trapped on this waitlist and I needed to find out what it was.” In January, having reached her limit, she decided to email Raya. “I am beginning to believe you guys genuinely hate me or are bullying me,” Mark wrote in a colorfully worded letter. “Is my application just floating in the abyss somewhere or a running gag to you guys???”
Like so many people who want in, Raya’s exclusivity initially appealed to Mark. She wanted to join because she’d heard it was full of “cool people who seem untouchable.” Reputationally known as the celebrity dating app, everyone from actors Dakota Fanning and Channing Tatum to Olympian Simone Biles have had varying degrees of success on the platform.
“Even so, she was OK with the reputation that came with Raya. ‘It definitely appeals to people who think they’re above other people, like I think it appeals to a demographic that thinks, “Oh I shouldn’t be dating the average person, I should be dating like an elite subset of people,”’” Mark says. “But they are also good at building mystique, which makes people want to join, so I clearly fell for the trap. And I didn’t even get on it, which is probably worse.”
