I don’t wanna be alone in my bedroom

Writing messages you won’t read

I don’t wanna be alone in my bedroom

On the internet, waiting to say…

Hi.

Hannah Diamond succeeds at being really slick and cool with a flawless aesthetic, while contemporaneously hitting on an important point of social commentary with regards to dating apps. But enough about my infatuations – I wanted to think about what dating apps feel like as an LGBT+ student.

As a queer student, even more so than for my heterosexual counterparts (for all their complaining) it can often feel like datable humans are few and far between. I think this is part of the reason why some queer circles have such an attachment to dating apps, and why the queer community has created so many apps of its own like Her, Scissr, Grindr etc. It isn’t uncommon for gay guys in particular to have more dating apps than I’ve had response articles to my column (one, with rumours of a second). In using these apps to meet one another we’ve created an exciting and varied new set of challenges for ourselves. Go team!

Back in the olden days before apps (the early 2000s), tracking down other queers may have proved difficult – especially if you went to university somewhere with a less-than-lively queer nightlife scene. Can you imagine? Today you can see any app-using queers around you with the touch of a screen. As great as this is, my own experiences and conversations with friends have left me wondering whether this is an entirely good thing.

The lack of humans that pop up if you’re looking for same-sex dating can make you feel as though there are hardly any queers around. Even when this isn’t the case, by showing you a few people, it can almost feel worse if you are unable to find ‘what you want’, an idea that will be considered later in this article. Is it necessarily the best thing to be instantaneously connected with every potential partner the internet can offer you, without even leaving your room? Of course this isn’t quite the case, as many queer people don’t use these apps at all, and I wonder whether the chance encounters of these ‘off-grid’ queers are a better option than dating apps, however rare they may be. 

It can feel difficult to back yourself enough to go out and take risks without the assistance of apps, and this is something I’ve had to work on. My inspiration has always been Virginia Woolf because although she didn’t have Tinder, it seems that she still managed a healthy and consistent amount of Sapphic game within her context. This is the kind of humble success I can only hope to replicate over the course of a lifetime. I’m not sure whether other English students share this same preoccupation with respect to their secondary reading.

"There is a sense that they are just one in a conveyor belt of shit dates, and a worry that the other person might still be on these apps undermines any chance of a relationship"

In the short term, it can feel dangerous having a device in your pocket that you can pick up whenever you’re feeling anxious about yourself or your relationship status. It can also generate a weird complacency where you stop even trying to meet people in your day-to-day life, unprepared to put in the groundwork of finding out whether they are a) queer b) single and c) ready to mingle. Meeting people can be achieved in a five minute library break, circumventing any need for a nerve-wracking outing.

But dating apps can also offer an exciting adventure, where you get to meet people you might never have met otherwise, and have a spontaneous passing-through-London date (I’m sure I’m not the only one), a low-key thing, or even a relationship. If you’re me it might even be where some of your fan mail comes through about your queer column – thank you readers! Yet, it’s hard to escape from worrying that the fact you’ve never crossed paths in the real world is a sign of your incompatibility, especially in somewhere as small as Cambridge. Moreover, should queer apps really be replacing real-world queer spaces?

I think part of the complication with apps is that all these different users, with their very different relationships to these apps and expectations from it, are all in the same pot at once. There are some people who check the apps rarely and use them for a bit of fun, and others who look at them more regularly and genuinely want to meet someone – I’m sure I’ve been both of these people at different stages. It can be hard to recognise these differences in approach, meaning a lot of time is spent second guessing what the other person may or may not be looking for.

I just want to dance, CUSU LGBT+

In the long term, there are strange implications for having met someone on one of these apps. Some of my friends have found this, especially when trying to navigate a relationship with someone met on one of the more obvious queer hook-up apps like Grindr. There is a sense that they are just one in a conveyor belt of shit dates, and a worry that the other person might still be on these apps undermines any chance of a relationship. As someone who is a bit frightened by apps like Scissr and is perpetually single I’m not in an amazing position to comment, so I might sit this round out.

I suppose it comes down to the recognition that there is an element of unpredictability about using these apps. Her was created with the intention of introducing users to “a lesbian that hasn’t slept with any of your friends”, an exciting prospect, and yet you really cannot account for anything else about this lesbian. It took me a while to move towards the assessment that actually I can make some perfectly bad decisions both with and without the help of these apps, and I believe that we all have this capability.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with dipping into the mystery box occasionally, but you don’t want to spend your life in it. At the end of the day, the most important match is the one that we make with ourselves; if you can’t swipe right for yourself, how the hell are you going to swipe right for somebody else?