I tried Raya for a month. I liked it, but it wasn't the celebrity-filled paradise I expected.

I always thought Raya was an exclusive club, saved for the most elite daters. Then I got accepted.

Raya is a members-only dating app. Daters must submit an application to get behind the app's golden gates, which includes linking your Instagram profile. Getting a recommendation from a current Raya member can be helpful.

I had all of that: the public Instagram, the referral from a friend, and a willingness to pay Raya's $24.99 monthly fee (or $49.99 for premium features).

It still took me months to get accepted.

The anticipation made Raya even more appealing, the elusive app that I was almost in, if only they reviewed my application. Maybe I'd meet a celebrity on there. Maybe I'd match and fall in love with one of the "Heated Rivalry" stars.

Then I got in — and I encountered hardly any celebrities.

I saw influencers. I saw interior designers. There was an endless parade of creative directors. But no famous people.

Maybe it's my fault for assuming it would be brimming with them. I grew up feasting on tabloids, later transitioning to the endless funnel of talk show clips and Pop Crave updates on X. I saw that Dakota Fanning and Nikki Glaser were on it. I heard that Andy Cohen signed up through John Mayer's referral.

At one point, I saw a solidly C-list actor. I gushed to a friend. Their response: "Oh, was he in 'American Horror Story?'" (He wasn't.)

I see TikToks all the time of women listing the A-list men they've swiped through on Raya. Maybe, I wondered, it's because I'm gay. But there weren't even many celebs in the big gay niches, from what I could see; I only spotted two Broadway actors.

Still, I kept swiping. Raya's main feed resembles Tinder, with left and right swipes determining matches. Raya users care less about bios, though; I found that most users didn't even write one. The most important elements of the profile were the daters' jobs, their Instagram, and their photos.

Requiring users to link an Instagram proved helpful, especially on a status-driven app. It was a good smell test: Is this person really a "director," or do they just direct their TikTok days-in-the-life? I could normally decode it from an Instagram profile.

My biggest frustration with Raya's swiping algorithm was its location policies. It often showed me people who were only briefly traveling to New York, or people who were out of state entirely. Maybe that'd be nice if I were one of Raya's wealthier customers, willing to book a plane ticket for the right guy. I can't afford a boyfriend in Los Angeles.

It didn't take long before I started matching — not with celebrities, but certainly with some successful people. I matched with a music video director and a ballet dancer. I spent some time messaging with a Big Tech engineer.

I'm being purposefully vague here, not giving names or companies. That's mostly my personal ethics, but also because Raya has a strict confidentiality policy.

At one point, I saw a friend's former flame on the app. Without thinking, I screenshotted the profile to text it to them. Raya scolded me. If I took another screenshot, it said, I would be booted.

Anyways, writing this story in the first place will likely get me kicked from Raya. Sorry!

Having spent the last two years reporting on dating apps, I've tried many of them. There are currently seven dating apps downloaded on my phone. (And I'm still single… maybe that's a sign.) Of them all, I thought Raya was pretty solid.

The UX was clean, the profile set-up was easy, and the users were fairly active. More than anything, it filtered the pool by status. The Raya application process felt more like a "no scrubs" test; it slimmed the pool down to users who had rich friends and were willing to pay the subscription fee.

How different is it, then, from other paid apps like The League? Not much. But the allure of being on Raya was strong, if only for something to brag about at cocktail parties.

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