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There is a<\/span> special agony to existing in limbo, that state of eternal in-between, where time stretches into infinity.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve applied, you can\u2019t 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\u2014many of whom have been idling in limbo for years.<\/p>\n \u201cMy application is stuck in purgatory,\u201d Gabriela Mark, a 23-year-old law student and model in San Diego, tells WIRED. \u201cLike, she\u2019s never escaping.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark has been on the waiting list for five years. \u201cI don\u2019t know what their deal is, but there\u2019s a reason I\u2019m trapped on this waitlist and I needed to find out what it was.\u201d In January, having reached her limit, she decided to email Raya. \u201cI am beginning to believe you guys genuinely hate me or are bullying me,\u201d Mark wrote in a colorfully worded letter. \u201cIs my application just floating in the abyss somewhere or a running gag to you guys???\u201d<\/p>\n Mark never received a response, but her story is an increasingly common one. The people WIRED spoke to for this story\u2014who, despite their professional bona fides, have waited anywhere between two and seven years to join\u2014have watched friends get accepted, break up, and cycle through the app while their own status remains unchanged.<\/p>\n Originally marketed as a kind of SoHo House for people in creative industries, Raya launched in 2015 as an app built around aspiration\u2014but it has since shifted into a platform where many people in those industries find themselves unable to participate at all.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a bit of a mental fuck,\u201d says Jennifer Rojas, who was working as an actress when she applied in 2020. \u201cYou start to look inward. Like, maybe it\u2019s me. Maybe it\u2019s this or that. I was opening it every day to check my status.\u201d Now a 40-year-old UGC creator in South Florida, Rojas is going on year six of the waiting list. \u201cI have 17 referrals on the freaking app.\u201d<\/p>\n There is not an exact science to making it past the waiting list. According to previous reporting, the app\u2014which charges users $25 per month, or $50 for a premium membership once approved\u2014receives up to 100,000 applications per month. For prospective users, the biggest advantage comes from referrals by current members, who each get a small stash of \u201cfriend passes\u201d to share. list isn\u2019t first-come, first-served, which partially explains why some people have been on it for so long. It changes based on things like how trendy your city is on the app or whether you\u2019ve snagged a referral.<\/p>\n (Raya declined to comment. After an initial call with Raya\u2019s communications team about scheduling an interview with Ifeoma Ojukwi, the vice president of global memberships who oversees the application process, the company stopped responding to requests from WIRED. As is common in online dating, we were ghosted.)<\/p>\n Like so many people who want in, Raya\u2019s exclusivity initially appealed to Mark. She wanted to join because she\u2019d heard it was full of \u201ccool people who seem untouchable.\u201d 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. (Biles met her husband on Raya.) Mark had tried her luck on the app circuit: Hinge was \u201cjust OK.\u201d With Tinder she kept running into guys that \u201cjust seemed like they wanted to literally bone anything with a hole in it.\u201d As for the other ones, \u201cnothing but trap boys and creatures,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n