My life on Grindr

Dear Latino Guy: Before you eagerly take a semi-naked selfie for Grinder...how about tidying up your hotel room? On Grindr , it's all about your photo. Your whole marketing effort needs to be squeezed into a few measly pixels, displayed on small screen devices in a grid. You need to sell yourself and you need to have a photo that says something about you. Or something about what you want. Your profile photo is not allowed to be nude, you have to be partially covered. Therefore, most of the profile photos tend to be rather dull. Selfies taken when on holiday, just out on the street, or in bed one night (with the covers on).   It is when you go into private chat with someone, things get a lot more interesting. In private chat, anything goes. I really mean anything. Anything . You are bombarded with close-ups of someone's ding-dong. Someone's rectal area. Or both, sometimes in t

The Hookup: I hook up for the first time Completely ordinary Friday night. Quite late. The TV is on, I have just loaded the dishwasher. Then suddenly, there it was. The distinct Grindr sound when you have received a new message. BiBoy19 says hi. Bit confused at first, I wonder what this guy wants. No interest from anyone so far, so why now? Well, he was interested. Very interested. And clearly horny. And when guys get horny, they look for sex in all places. And they want it now .  In fact, the now  is key to the whole app. Its genius is that it uses your GPS location to show you other users that are near you. The nearer, the better, apparently. This guy was very near. 20 minutes in a car. So far so good, I guess. His profile told me he was a bottom . Great, since I am a top . A top is the active one, a bottom is the passive one when having sex. At least we were compatible. Nothing worse than having two bottoms. We would just be sitting there looking at each other, neither want

A few weeks went by. It became clear things were really over. My husband had abandoned our marriage and our relationship, with no explanation whatsoever.  I was heartbroken. My husband would never come back. I had lost the love of my life. I had to try and figure out what was going on, though. I hired help. They found out he was likely living with his new partner (actually, his "daddy"). Shock horror.  Somehow, I had to pick up the pieces. I had to move on. My husband was no longer in my life. I came to the conclusion that we are only technically married still. There is no marriage any more. That means, I can see other people. My friends urged me to get back on that horse and see other people, to distract me.  How best to distract myself and see other guys? Well, I still had the Grindr profile. So I changed it. Put my real picture on there. My real age. Real everything. Tapped Save and hoped for the best.

No, really. That's how it started. I joined Grindr looking for my husband. You see, I married my husband last year. He was meant to come live with me. He never came, and completely shut me out. Telling my friends about this, they told me they had seen him on Grindr before. Not just recently, but even from before we were married. Now, Grindr is not just any innocent dating app. It's notorius for being the  app where gay men hook up for casual sex. That my husband had been on it for some time, was quite shocking.  In the end I heard nothing from my husband. No answers to my emails, calls, texts. He was in a different country as well. I wondered if he was still on Grindr and if so, maybe I could expose him on there. Even though he had not talked to me for a long time, and I suspected he had now moved in with his male "daddy" lover, we were still married. In fact, it's quite a combination: married, in a clandestine relationship with another man, and still looking