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Do you have a healthy relationship with dating apps?
Probably a lot healthier than when they first came out – remember when they became a thing back in 2009? It was all exciting and new and then, as we’ve since realised happens with all social media, the toxicity of it started to seep out, people realised how much of a time (and battery!) suck they are and how easily it is to get carried away with the vapidness of it all… and yet.
External validation feels so nice!
Especially when it appears to be coming from the hot stranger less than 100m away (if you live in a city) or 100’s km away (if you live rurally) who you never would have had the guts to talk to if you had to approach them in a bar! Of all things! For the first time, insecure people realised that all body types were attractive to all types of people! We felt so liberated! So free! We’d been talking about human gaydar for years and yet now we didn’t need a natural sense of it, we had access to a pocket full of confirmed queers via the magic of our smartphone screens!
But if you’ve ever had a substantial break from the apps, you can’t help but wake to the kind of person you become when they are not a part of your life vs. when you are obsessively online. You observe in yourself the inability to focus on any task at hand without the voice in your head nagging you to check if anyone has looked/woofed/tapped or opened their album of naughty no-nos for your viewing pleasure.
But the dating apps do have their positive attributes, besides the above-mentioned opportunity to indulge your tendency to chase the odd pickle tickle – more often than not, the benefit of subjecting yourself to the possible minefield of emotional daggers is that you can also meet some really life-changing people on the apps that have absolutely nothing to do with sexual gratification!
Or maybe it’s good for a few goes and then that developed into beautiful friendships, which has certainly been my experience, though the very last message received on Grindr, ‘you chub’ – offered as a statement of fact, devoid of any punctuation, was enough to make me realise that, just maybe, I have enough friends for now!
