After a luckless eight months on Tinder, 26-year-old Rachel Norwich finally swiped right on a profile picture of a jar of mustard this week.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Nope. That’s a jar of mustard,’” Norwich explains. “But the other matches I was talking to fizzled out, and every time I swiped through my Tinder feed, the mustard was just always there. Like it was waiting—waiting for me to give up.”
The stock photo of mustard intrigued Norwich because “it wasn’t a $2 squirty bottle of yellow hotdog mustard, but it wasn’t an imported stoneground, either. More like a popular name-brand Dijon. I’m probably reading into this choice too much.”
The owner of the mustard profile, who calls himself Rex, reportedly decided to change his profile picture to a jar of mustard after a picture of his face failed to garner likes.
“I don’t know what it was about my face specifically that wasn’t working out for me,” Rex says. “I tried a few different pics. One with my sideburns, one without. I even posted one of me next to my truck. But I still didn’t get much action.”
Norwich considers her swipe to be an act of openness. Though she says she has dated a variety of men in the past, she claims that kindness and intelligence are more important to her.
“I just kept thinking, ‘What if?’ Maybe everything I’ve been looking for has been right in front of me this whole time… and it’s some guy with a mustard profile picture?” Norwich paused to bury her head in her hands. “Or I’m getting involved with a guy who has a mustard fetish. I’m a disaster.”
After a Tinder conversation in which Rex expressed a taste for women who are “fun” and “no drama,” Rex offered to meet in person at the local Olive Garden, but Norwich decided to pass.
“I think I’m going to delete my Tinder account and try meeting men offline,” Norwich says. “I was holding out a hope that the mustard picture was meant to be ironic or clever, but I was wrong. And the thing is I don’t even really like mustard. Am I going to be alone forever?”
At press time, Rex was on a date with another “cool chick” who he likes enough to maybe “make things official.”
