<p>Contemporary American society has shifted from face-to-face interactions to digitally mediated networks of romance and intimacy, where Black women are acutely rejected, excluded, and sexualized. This study explores how Black women find love and potential partners on dating apps and how they navigate interactions through their profile curation, self-presentation, and evaluation of matches. This study draws on 32 semi-structured Zoom interviews with Black American women, aged 21 to 40, across the United States. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using a reflexive, inductive thematic analysis. The findings reveal that Black women seeking heterosexual partnership develop a repertoire of micro-strategies of impression management, including selective disclosure, self-surveillance, and selective self-presentation. These practices shape Black women’s front-stage performances across various domains such as education, politics, relationship intentions, and gender expression, while participants remain acutely aware of how algorithms and user preferences govern visibility and perceived desirability. Although dating apps increase visibility and expand access to potential partners, they reproduce a racialized and gendered sexual order that constrains Black women’s possibilities for romantic connections and intimacy. These everyday online realities reflect how, for Black women, first impressions are predetermined by dramaturgical rules and controlling images, situating impression management as both a strategic practice of resistance and a form of racialized and gendered labor.</p>