The Chart

‘The Chart’ from The L-Word (2004)

As has happened since the beginning of time and will continue to happen until the heat death of the universe, I was introduced to The Chart by a Hinge date. In the early months of my first year at uni, my friends and I muddled through Melbourne lez Hinge with crudely-drawn texta circles on screenshots. We’d just cracked our first big case: a girl who had ghosted me was known to my new friend’s new girlfriend — and had started talking to my other new friend’s oldest friend — and was, reportedly, really lame. 

My date contextualised it for me. “Have you seen The L-Word?” she asked, after I presented her with this hopefully funny anecdote. “It’s like Alice’s chart.”

“Oh.” I was crestfallen: I’d only seen the first episode. “I don’t think I’m up to that yet.” The Chart, I would learn, was introduced in the second.

The L-Word (2004) is a seminal noughties series about crazy lesbians living in LA. In it, Alice makes a chart of her friend (and later girlfriend) Dana’s romantic experiences to see how many people it takes to link them. The answer is four.

Under a YouTube video of this clip, @tomwotton9 commented,

And so a legend was born! The legend of The Chart!

So goes the legend of The Chart. I was embarking on a queer rite of passage. I was eighteen, in a new city, horny, inexperienced, and had terrible taste. In my imagination, an inner-city Arts university promised a cornucopia of gay people. So where the fuck were they? 

In the olden days, I would be forced to go to a gay bar in real life. Or at least skulk outside a queer bookstore. But a quarter into the 21st-century, my formative romantic and sexual experiences were taking place via my iPhone. 

Hinge’s 2025 LGBTQIA+ D.A.T.E. report (Data, Advice, Trends and Expertise... Hinge, you are clever!) identifies that users on the platform are experiencing increasing “label fatigue.” I find this an interesting conclusion, not just because I don’t trust their self-reporting, but considering that dating apps are predicated on the use of recognisable labels.

The Hinge report muddies — or misunderstands — the reasons why our community uses labels. They can be helpful, historically-grounded signifiers. They can also be restrictive. The beautiful thing about them is that you can take what’s useful and discard what isn't.

In the report, Hinge advocates for a “label-fluid approach.” What is fluidity on an app where you use a slider to select your age range of interest? Does it justify showing profiles of straight cis men to those only interested in women and non-binary people? Of the 14,000 people surveyed for the report, the split between LGBTQIA+ and heterosexual respondents was not specified. 

Queer theorists tell us that sex — not biological sex, but having sex — is terrifying, because it destabilises our notions of identity. This is what the Hinge report fails to understand. Love and sex are scary and fluid enough. You still need the age slider.

But I was in the thrall of The Chart. Sure, my first-year Gender Studies lecture was like my Hinge explore feed come to life, but I wanted more. I wanted something different. I wanted… a soccer player. 

It was 2023 and World Cup fever was at an all-time high. I wanted Lucy Bronze and if I couldn't get her, I was going to die trying. This was the regrettable period of time when my Hinge prompt was that a life goal was to be a WAG. Against all logic, self-preservation and feminist ideals, I was single-minded.

This is how I found myself talking to someone who said she’d been signed to Melbourne Victory. In my pure and noble heart, I believed her. Three weeks later I was ghosted. I moved home. Jumpscare! Now she was on Sydney Hinge. 

The Chart will never be observed so acutely as in the dating lives of professional female soccer players, generally in the UK Premier League, but now extending to Australia. The amassed fandom means that by now everyone’s seen an edit of Leah Williamson.

And why not, if you discovered, like I did, that Irish players Katie McCabe and Ruesha Littlejohn dated for seven years while playing on their national side, and that pretty immediately after they broke up, McCabe started a PDA-heavy relationship with Australian forward and Arsenal teammate Caitlin Foord — and that Littlejohn might’ve snubbed Foord’s handshake when Australia and Ireland played each other in the opening round of the Cup?

When absolutely everything, from podcast interviews to post-match pressers to Insta posts and replies in the comments, has been documented?????

You try to resist it. But the celebrity and the athleticism and the high buns cast a heady spell. And to watch something so recognisably painful and banal — just another Wednesday night at Birdcage — play out for international sports stars is a particularly sweet kind of catharsis.

Hinge is its own universe. But the machinations of The Chart will occur, whether or not you're brave enough to subject yourself to the possible ridicule of strangers on dating platforms. This is just what dating within a specific community is like, though it is easier to feel connected to and more forgiving of that community offline.

Cultural knowledge of The L-Word is also generally useful. It was the first thing I talked about with my now-girlfriend when we met (in real life!) at a PULP launch party. Predictably, we had many mutuals. You can imagine my embarrassment when I found out we were on Hinge at the same time; abject horror when she said she might have sent me a like. After everything, that was the last straw. So fuck you, Hinge.

Designed by Sophie Wishart