Can Grindr Make You More Lonely When Traveling?
I spent about two weeks in Playa del Carmen, Mexico in February, 2015, able to travel freely thanks to my recent entirely-remote job. I had rented an apartment there for a month with the option to continue if I liked it. I thought the daily Caribbean views and margaritas-at-noon vibe of a tropical tourist city would assure I liked it. Maybe I didn’t know anyone, but hey, I had Grindr; I was going to make vibrant new friends in no time.
Within two weeks I had met up with at least half a dozen men for drinks or sightseeing or dinner dates. A wealthy environmental scientist took me to a romantic dinner at a swanky beach restaurant where Mayan performers did fire tricks. I went to a club with a guy from Tijuana who didn’t speak much English but tolerated sweetly my halting Spanish. I laughed at the one sadly empty and hidden gay bar in town with a guy from London. A few I slept with, the guy from Tijuana I developed a deep crush on — only to find out years later through a random nostalgic Facebook stalk that he had died (didn’t see that coming, did you?). It was a busy couple of weeks, networking (ahem), sightseeing and working.
Sounds awfully adventurous in a way, doesn’t it? The only thing is, after two weeks I made a random queer friend on the beach and left with him to travel the islands around the Yucatan. Why? Because meeting one person after another in a town designed for drunken tourists assures you’ll have one nice day together and then they’re off back to Mexico City, or Tampa, or London. And you’re still friendless and opening the app again.
This was a particular situation, sure. If I’d had better Spanish, I could also have met people who lived in the town permanently. But it is one of the downsides to what should be a great tool for queer men— a location-based way to meet other queer travelers or locals and find community. When you’re on the move and hard to pin down (ahem), using an app that’s already given to one-off encounters, go-nowhere conversations and sudden ghosting becomes even more challenging.
It goes both ways. Sometimes locals don’t want to meet up with someone who they know will head off in a few days or weeks. Sometimes I didn’t see the point in it, especially since I know my track record for keeping in touch with people who I don’t see regularly. That German running enthusiast I met in Athens? The programmer from DC I met in Bali? Nice guys both — but after sightseeing with them once we are strangers again.
It also depended on where I was. In Portugal, even though I was there for a month, it felt very difficult to get a conversation going. I made one great friend there, but he was Brazilian and also complained about the Portuguese being distant. In Colombia, I couldn’t keep up with the amount of “holas” I would get in a day (my Spanish was fine for Grindr chats, thankfully). But getting guys to actually meet in Colombia was difficult. “Be my boyfriend” wasn’t an uncommon and off-putting request, but when followed by “let’s grab a drink” there was usually a sudden lack of response. In other places, people weren’t shy to ask you to meet right away.
I finally learned to ask myself what my expectations were with Grindr. Usually they were lofty: meeting fellow queer travelers who wanted to share the same travel itinerary and experience magical nights out and rollicking day tours together around Norway, or Ecuador, or Kuala Lumpur; finding local gays who could fold me into their social life during my stay in Prague; finding the man of my dreams who was Australian but also had a U.S. passport so we didn’t have to worry about visas when he moved back to Chicago with me. Of course these kinds of expectations are asking for disappointment.
So I learned to understand that my frustrations with Grindr were often my own. Because I did meet nice guys in places around the world to experience something local with. And if I didn’t keep up with the DC programmer, that’s on me. And hey, that dinner on the beach with the environmental scientist? You better believe I’ve put that in the Appreciation folder.
Grindr did what I’d hoped it could do, just not usually on the scale I daydreamed of. But, hey, that’s something you learn can happen in many parts of traveling. You can’t climb the pyramid at Chichen Itza and watch the sunset anymore, so you learn to appreciate the tower from the ground.
The app is what it is for queer men who want to find similar souls while traveling. Akin to a virtual hostel in a sense, encounters are a mixed bag and mostly fleeting. But if you keep your expectations in check, you can have some really nice experiences, maybe even make good friends. At the very least, help ease the occasional travel loneliness. It’s a pretty amazing tool when you think about it, even at this point in digital technology when we wonder if we’ve lost the ability to socialize without a data connection.
I find it a shame that this easy technology is kinda limited to queer men. Digital nomads and travelers of all sexualities and genders could also use a location-based digital way to find each other, to network, and to eat guinea pig while standing on the Equator together. To be fair, I did that with a boyfriend I had met back home in Chicago — through Grindr.
