I use the same app, the same photos, the same opening lines everywhere. The only setting I ever change is the city.
Matches are not the problem. I get them, in Vienna as anywhere else. What never happens here is the third message. A question, an answer, then the chat goes quiet, and a day later the match is gone. Not an argument, not a bad date. Just silence, in the same shape, every time, for years.
Then I set the location to Germany. Conversations ran for days. People asked things back. One wrote me a paragraph about her week. Nobody disappeared after my second message.
In April I spent three days in Berlin. My notes from those days say my mood was better the moment I arrived and dropped the moment I thought about Vienna. I did not plan that observation. I just wrote down what I noticed, as I do every day.
I do not know what this means about Vienna or about me. I know what it did to me: it told me the wall is not only inside my head, because the same head got different answers in a different place.
So I want to move. The door is a permit I do not have yet, the long-term EU residence that would let me live in another member state. I am applying for it. Until it comes, I am here, and I am writing this down.