I'm Leaving Grindr!

PROCLAMATION:

I'm Leaving Grindr!(And This Time, It's Not Just For The Summer)

Muscle memory goes: unlocking my phone > scrolling thrice > open extras tab > swipe twice to page 3, to my secret stash of paraphernalia dating apps. Alarms hardly work and coffee’s a chore to make when keeping your eyelids from meeting is pushing against a boulder, but a dick pic? I’m wide awake.

But this morning had been different. There had been no third page under ‘extras’, the second page springing back in position after I swiped it for the second time. This would be the first of the few times when I would absentmindedly pull out my phone, tune down the brightness to do a sonar scanning of the gays around. In Starbucks, at a part of town I'm not accustomed to, a cute guy in the vicinity and me with a dream to find him there.

Oh shit, I forgot, I deleted it.

It was 4:56 in the morning on the last day of the year when I wrapped up my last conversation with yet another Grindr stranger. Unlike the the more usual days, this would be the last for awhile and not for the day.

We exchanged telegram before I bid the app farewell for good. He was pleasant to speak to, no sex-fueled innuendos that seemed to suggest escalation to sexts and #dickpic exchanges. Until now, I don't know his name except for his initials H.Y-and that was to the thanks of telegram username- but I know that he is 23, lives in the east, and were just less than a metre apart in the same theatre 2 days ago watching Jumanji. We didn't see each other; and I hadn't checked in to the app till much later. He studies environmental Studies in Australia and had a night with a friend out for drinks at Tantric. His objective that night hadn't been to find a willing partner to end the year off with a bang, and he's delightfully optimistic on love, despite being in a scene that seems to find joy in just one night stands. You would think a name usually prefixes a verbal exchange, but the wonders of the internet can't stop keeping us mere mortals on our tippy toes.

True to my own words, I had deleted all my dating apps by the last day of 2017, today. The trinity was first broken by Tinder weeks ago, then Jack'd and after much delay, Grindr. I was free from the realm of digital exchanges.

I had some time to ruminate on what prompted the motivation to eschew dating/hookup apps suddenly, all at once to add. I knew it can't possibly in the name of the a new year resolution,, it simply couldn't be, the 'new year new me' trope isn't anywhere powerful enough to tower over a gay man's raging hormones. Besides, the tally of this contemplation and the onset of the new year is no more than coincidence, right?

I digress.

But I believe with quite determined conviction it all began when some swimmer dude hit me up to quell the friskiness Christmas has brought him. He was by definition what attractiveness was, tanned, muscles popping in all the right places and extremely sexually charged. I had been too slow in my response, so he conveniently found someone else to fuck for the night. The next day we continued to chat. Our conversations barely left the confines of sexting, and we knew nothing more about each other than our age, where we lived, dick size, and favourite two-man sport position that just like the olympics, is our gold medal move. Our conversation abruptly ended 4 days in, when I refreshed the app and he was gone. *For those who don't speak dating app, I was block'd.

To my -and soon yours, keep reading- bemusement, I was nonplussed at my reaction. Usually the sting of rejection hits hard and fast with these kinda things -if you think the entertainment business and Yale's rejection rates are high, try being an aging Asian twink on Grindr- except it didn't. Maybe it was that precise aging that led to a slower reaction to sensations. I'll give it another 3 days.

And still nothing. I had enough time to refresh the app(home button twice, swipe up, reactivate kind of refresh) and the app even thought of playing a festive prank on me, glitching with his profile reappearing and then *poof* again and yet after these episodes I had felt nothing, not in the empty depressed, puppy eyed why-does-nobody-want-me kinda way.

I had thought the dreaded MANopause hit me like the new Hyperloop train by Elon Musk that goes up to 700mph. But as of last night, porn still turned me on.

We've got that much figured: I'm neither impotent or have ambitions to become a myrtle, so what is this indifference I'm feeling?

I assume the little exchange with swimmerguy25 -let's call him Nicholas- had been the most literal manifestation of what had been wrong with the way I've been using the said app, responding only to sexual advances to then feel objectified to nothing more than a human masturbation sleeve if one is out of stock, in waltz in another eager one. 'A million girls would kill for the job', said Nigel Kipling in The Devil Wears Prada, though I now wonder if he really was just projecting his own situation as a gay bottom who just for rejected last night on Grindr onto getting a job in fashion. Maybe he meant both.

I expressed my exasperations to a friend of mine. (The discussion ranged from how did you manage to find love to wondering if mirrors had been a lie and I actually look like Shrek, hence the prolonged singlehood.) while he agreed that the sex agenda takes precedence on hookup apps, you just need to know what you want, he says. The conversation carried me on to contemplate why I always respond the most readily to sexts when I lament how bad I want something more substantial. Am I just confused on what I want? Am I a masochist or am I really just a slut who refuses to accept that he is just like the rest. *gasps, am I really just not special?*

But no, I do know what I want. Except they change with the tides. At 12pm while I'm brunching out I want a 35 year old expat who works in the CBD to tell me I'm cute, but at 3:30 on a lazy afternoon I want some hot blooded university basketball kid to tell me they want to fuck my brains out and send me all sorts of unsolicited nudes and tell me how much I turn then on and by 2 in the morning, I want a full blown intellectual conversation with a 25 year old accountant inundated with slapstick humour and dry wit like a good champagne.

I was late to the game in realising it but it was not the apps' or headless torsos' responsibility to cater to my sporadically-changing needs, and everyone else is playing the odds too, trying their luck at getting it. Of course you odds are in your favour if you happen to be stunning. Lucky boy. I may have no rights to demand the horny population to go along my heart and something physical desires, but allow me the right to feel someway about it.

I'm still in the midst of pinpointing what specifically in me changed that ignited a series of more 'mature' decisions, but it was apparent being validated by how much I was desired by men was no longer the tide that rocked and dictated the direction of my self-esteem ship. More than that recognition, an augury that I'm done with looking at love and relationships as child's play is owning the truth, separating needs and wants, followed by taking hardened, concrete actions on them.

In a society where sitting on the wrong side of the sexual orientation fence can make you a transgression and object of taboo, I spoke to a few friends across gender and orientation spectrums on the matter. I expressed my heavyset disgruntlement but also verbalized that my trust issues and neuroticism would have me on chewing on my already stubby fingernails, spending any time away from potential lifelong partner thinking he’s probably re-downloading Grindr and cheating in between lunch breaks. Or what if he never deleted it at all? *hyperventilates in panic*

That course of monologue had led my eventual confession: I want to meet the person of my dreams organically like every rom-com chick flick ever. The kind where you happen to be in the same environment where you start off as friends, fall in love gradually but unknowingly.

‘If you’re not going to use the app, how else are you going to find your species then?’ Spending Friday nights hunting in the club is as good as pulling my online dystopia into an untouched realm, and I clearly lack the confidence and sexual prowess of Jessica Rabbit to have drinks offered by a bevy of men.

The aforementioned anxieties are not at all my current concerns as they are prescience to what I’ll be mulling over on months where relationship dehydration takes place. This frustration will probably manifest itself in other ways but for now, I’ll just stop thinking and enjoy being able to celebrate my autonomy of being singlehood, rejecting sexual advances and feel perfectly adequate even after rejection.

I doubt this will be the last time I’ll be on Grindr, but let’s just go along this ride of staying drug-free.

With that, Happy New Year.

Whatever.