Page 47 of A Solid Guide to Surviving a Situationship

Half-thoughts. No names. No context. No effort.

Just intent.

I let out a small breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.

Grindr, I thought. Never change.

Still, I replied to a few, just enough to participate and to feel like I was part of something, even if I knew exactly what that something was.

For a moment, it worked.

The replies came quickly.

Later that day, my phone buzzed again… and again… and again. I didn’t even have to open the app to know what they were.

“Got place?”

“G?”

“Pic?”

“Up for threesome?”

I stared at my screen longer this time, because there it was—the part I couldn’t pretend about.

They were clear about what they wanted. And it wasn’t wrong. That was the whole point of the app. But the more I read through the messages, the more something in me resisted.

Because I wasn’t like that.

Not totally.

It wasn’t that I needed romance, or that I was looking for something deep or life-changing.

I just wanted… I guess… something more human.

Like a conversation that didn’t feel like a transaction. Or a moment that didn’t feel replaceable. Or a person I could actually be comfortable with before the sex part happened.

Maybe that was both the best and worst thing about me.

But then all of a sudden, the twenty messages didn’t feel validating anymore.

They felt empty.

I stared at my screen for a few more seconds before exhaling quietly.

Then I held down the app and the icons started to shake. Then I hit delete. Confirm.

And just like that, Grindr was no more.

I set my phone down on the table, but the silence that followed felt heavier than before.

Because I now knew. It wasn’t that I didn’t have options, it was that none of them felt right. And somehow, that made everything worse.

I leaned back against the chair, staring at the empty restaurant, letting the quiet settle in.

That was when my mind did what it always did when I became idle.

It went back to him.