Helloooo… is anybody there?
Photo via Oprah Daily.
I’m beginning to think that falling in love with your best friend is truly the only way to get into a relationship as a lesbian.
Everyone wants to talk about how organized lesbians are. Like: “Oooh, ‘L’ is the first letter of the LGBTQ+ acronym because the sapphics supplied healthcare during the AIDS crisis.” Well, then why can’t we organize ourselves to do the one thing we’re supposed to be best at — loving women? Queer dating apps nowadays, especially for lesbians and sapphics, are somehow worse than their heterosexual counterparts… which is saying a lot.
On Tinder, which is arguably the most popular app for straight dating, there are many dangers to encounter, even if you set your preferences to “women only.” Grooming, catfishing, ghosting, blocking, and men accidentally setting their profile as female are all common risks as a sapphic on the app.
If you can dodge these issues and find a woman interested in other women, she usually already has a boyfriend. Let that sink in. She’s already dating a sweaty, skinny, straight man, and he’s in every single one of her photos with her. If I swipe right, am I signing off on him, too? I don’t want him! I can see in his beady, horny little eyes that he wants me, but most lesbians aren’t interested in being a third… especially to a random dude.
Baby gays will often have a revelation after their first dismal Tinder experience: there are other dating apps out there. The mere idea of a whole new pool of people, a new impression, and a potential lover somewhere out there is enough to get us back on the app store.
Have you ever heard of “Hornet,” “Gaydar,” or “LESARION?” How about “Grindr” or “Bindr?” Could “Meet Kinksters” be the one? All of these are real queer dating apps, and they’re all barren wastelands, too.
The amount of unskippable ads I’ve had to watch trying to convince me that “Fluid — Dating Without Labels” is going to be the next big, cool, LGBTQ+ hotspot is going to force me to convert to aromanticism.
The one factor these hundreds of apps always forget about is gay panic. In my experience, it’s a true stereotype that sapphics see beautiful women, freeze up like a deer in the headlights, and subsequently don’t reach out. It’s very, very sad. There’s nothing worse than staring at each of Kynn’s piercings poking through their curls in their profile photo for weeks on end after matching, wondering if they thought you were scarily beautiful, or just not their type.
It’s also embarrassingly routine to match with the same queers over and over again on different apps. At some points it feels like you’ve probably seen people’s entire camera rolls through their photo profiles. You get to know some people really well without meeting them when you read countless question prompts about their inner lives. Sometimes you might even get to hear snippets of their voices on apps like Hinge, so it almost feels like you’re FaceTiming from different countries (even though you probably live a block away).
Eventually I swipe one way or another enough times, and I never see Kynn’s cuffed jeans again. Ultimately, I like to assume that these people have just given up on the apps, too. I’ve seen all of the same options as them, and I know that we can both do better.
My theory is that if we combined every single one of these queer dating systems into one gigantic “Gay App,” the world would be a much better place. Everyone should just get along with each other. If we can’t share a dating app, how are we going to share a community space, or an acronym, for LGBTQIA’s sake?
This is, more than anything, a call-to-action for all queers on dating apps: Take the leap — keep reaching out!
