They wanted to join Raya. They have been on the waiting list for years

there The special agony of being in limbo, that eternal state in between, where time extends to infinity.

Today, this experience is especially true for people vying to join Raya, the members-only dating app. Getting a Raya account requires an invitation from a current member, and even after submitting the application, you cannot log in until your application is approved. This process creates a bottleneck similar to the line outside a nightclub, where a select few breezes flow in while the rest is left to wait. Behind the velvet rope, some 2.5 million people are waiting to reach Raya, many of whom have been forgotten for years.

“My application is stuck in purgatory,” Gabriella Mark, a 23-year-old law student and model in San Diego, told WIRED. “Like she’ll never escape.”

Mark was on the waiting list for five years. “I don’t know what their deal is, but there’s a reason I was on this waiting list and I needed to know what it was.” In January, after I had reached my limit, I decided to email Raya. “I’m starting to think you guys really hate me or are bullying me,” Mark wrote in a colorfully worded message. “Is my request floating in the abyss somewhere or is it a running gag for you guys???”

Mark never received a response, but her story became increasingly popular. The people WIRED spoke to for this story — who, despite their professional intentions, waited between two and seven years to join — watched friends being accepted, dropped, and navigated through the app while their status remained unchanged.

Originally marketed as a kind of SoHo House for people in creative industries, Raya launched in 2015 as an app built on ambition — but it has since turned into a platform where many people in those industries find themselves unable to participate at all.

“It’s kind of overwhelming,” says Jennifer Rojas, who was working as an actress when she applied for the job in 2020. “You start looking inward. Maybe it’s me. Maybe this or that. I would open it every day to check how I was doing.” Now a 40-year-old user-generated content creator in South Florida, Rojas is in the sixth year of the waiting list. “I have 17 referrals on the weird app.”

There is no exact science to jumping the queue. According to previous reports, the app — which charges users $25 per month, or $50 for a premium membership once approved — receives up to 100,000 requests per month. For potential users, the biggest benefit comes from referrals by existing members, who each get a small set of “Friend Passes” to share. The list is not first-come, first-served, which partly explains why some people have been on it for so long. It changes based on things like how popular your city is on the app or whether you’ve gotten a referral.

(Raya declined to comment. After an initial call to Raya’s communications team about scheduling an interview with Ifeoma Ojukwe, the vice president of global memberships who oversees the application process, the company stopped responding to WIRED’s requests. As is common in online dating, we were ignored.)

Like many people who want to get involved, Raya’s privacy initially appealed to Mark. She wanted to join because she heard it was full of “amazing, seemingly untouchable people.” The celebrity dating app is known for its good reputation, and everyone from actors Dakota Fanning and Channing Tatum to Olympian Simone Biles have achieved varying degrees of success on the platform. (Biles met her husband on Raya.) Mark tried her luck on the app circuit: Hinge was “just fine.” With Tinder, she continued to meet people who “looked like they literally wanted to cut up anything with a hole in it.” As for others, “it’s nothing but a trap of boys and creatures,” she says.