There is a special agony to existing in limbo, that state of eternal in-between, where time stretches into infinity.

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’ve applied, you can’t 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—many of whom have been idling in limbo for years.

“My application is stuck in purgatory,” Gabriela Mark, a 23-year-old law student and model in San Diego, tells WIRED. “Like, she’s never escaping.”

Mark has been on the waiting list for five years. “I don’t know what their deal is, but there’s a reason I’m trapped on this waitlist and I needed to find out what it was.” In January, having reached her limit, she decided to email Raya. “I am beginning to believe you guys genuinely hate me or are bullying me,” Mark wrote in a colorfully worded letter. “Is my application just floating in the abyss somewhere or a running gag to you guys???”

Mark never received a response, but her story is an increasingly common one. The people WIRED spoke to for this story—who, despite their professional bona fides, have waited anywhere between two and seven years to join—have watched friends get accepted, break up, and cycle through the app while their own status remains unchanged.

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

“It’s a bit of a mental fuck,” says Jennifer Rojas, who was working as an actress when she applied in 2020. “You start to look inward. Like, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s this or that. I was opening it every day to check my status.” Now a 40-year-old UGC creator in South Florida, Rojas is going on year six of the waiting list. “I have 17 referrals on the freaking app.”

There is not an exact science to making it past the waiting list. According to previous reporting, the app—which charges users $25 per month, or $50 for a premium membership once approved—receives 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 “friend passes” to share. list isn’t 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’ve snagged a referral.

(Raya declined to comment. After an initial call with Raya’s 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.)

Like so many people who want in, Raya’s exclusivity initially appealed to Mark. She wanted to join because she’d heard it was full of “cool people who seem untouchable.” 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 “just OK.” With Tinder she kept running into guys that “just seemed like they wanted to literally bone anything with a hole in it.” As for the other ones, “nothing but trap boys and creatures,” she says.

Even so, she was OK with the reputation that came with Raya. “It definitely appeals to people who think they’re above other people, like I think it appeals to a demographic that thinks, ‘Oh I shouldn’t be dating the average person, I should be dating like an elite subset of people,’” Mark says. “But they are also good at building mystique, which makes people want to join, so I clearly fell for the trap. And I didn’t even get on it, which is probably worse.”

Most applicants are waitlisted before gaining access to the app’s pool of daters—the admittance rate is just above 8 percent, and Gen Z accounts for 40 percent of applicants and new members—so Mark didn’t make all that much of a fuss at first. But a week turned into a month, and a month has turned into five years. In January, hearing that a frenemy had been granted access, Mark was livid. “This sounds so bad, but I have 12,000 followers, and I’ve been modeling for quite some time. She has maybe 1,000. Not to be like, this is a hierarchy, but I feel like Raya has been about status and followers. But she got in somehow after a week of being on the waitlist with one reference. I was pissed.”

Mihai Vasile, a 32-year-old creative director and filmmaker in New York, has been on the waiting list for two years. He mostly appreciates the keep-it-small approach Raya takes, but says that it has come at a cost to creative professionals. “After a certain point, every one of these curated spaces open their doors for others outside said communities, which is not a bad thing, but it dilutes the original purpose of curation. Everything becomes homogeneous.”

Even with 54 referrals, Los Angeles actress JJ Khadivian hasn’t been able to shake the waiting list in five years. She first wanted to join because everyone in the industry was using it. “And not just in the industry; literally every friend has it now. That’s why I get so many referrals, because they’re like, oh, poor thing,” she says. “If there are several of us out there that haven’t been added onto this app, then we should just start our own. We need a support group.”

The trend, which has become a punch line on TikTok, has gotten so pervasive that it has also created a booming black market for referrals across social media. It is common practice for Raya users to sell invites on subreddits—r/RayaReferral gets 4,800 weekly visitors—charging anywhere between $75 to $150.

“Rates for referral? Are the girlies really down bad?” one waitlister posted in March.

Despite Raya’s occasionally polarizing reputation, the broader dating app landscape is beginning to mirror its approach as platforms move away from endless swiping to business models centered around AI-powered curation. Platforms like Tinder and Grindr have invested in smaller, curated, and often members-only experiences, many of which are controlled by AI. (Grindr is currently testing Edge, a $500 per month membership fully powered by AI that guarantees “less scrolling, better conversations, and stronger follow-through.”) What once made Raya unique—its exclusivity—has become a new norm that could dictate dating’s next era.

Rojas has given up on trying to get on Raya for now. She doesn’t think about the app most days, though she admits that for a time “it became a personal vendetta. I was like, no, I need to get accepted. It feels like they’re dangling a carrot because it keeps me coming back to the app. But then you realize, this is not good for my mental health. I would rather just be rejected.”

After Rojas posted about her five-year-long purgatory, a competitor reached out and asked if she could make a video for its dating app, which the company was positioning as an alternative to Raya. (She declined to say which app.) The competitor wanted to pay her $300. “It actually kickstarted my journey as a creator,” she says.

It turns out, good things do come to those who wait.