A Real Story

I downloaded Grindr in March 2021 mostly out of boredom, the kind that comes from working from home and talking to no one but my cat for eleven hours a day. I set my profile up half-heartedly, tagged myself as ‘new to the area’ even though I’d lived in that Uptown building for two years, and started scrolling the grid like it was a slot machine. One profile kept catching my eye, a guy who just went by ‘C,’ shirtless gym photo, a joke bio about being allergic to small talk. The distance under his name said 0.3 miles. We messaged on and off for maybe a week, nothing filthy, mostly complaining about our landlords and trading playlist recommendations, and every time I refreshed the app the distance had shrunk. 0.2 miles. Then 900 feet. Then one Tuesday night it said 40 feet and I actually laughed out loud in my kitchen.

I half-joked that he was either stalking me or we lived in the same zip code, and he sent back a laughing emoji and said he was doing laundry. I went down to the basement laundry room fifteen minutes later under the flimsy excuse of needing quarters, and there he was, leaning against the dryer in sweatpants, phone in hand, looking as startled as I felt. We stood there for a solid ten seconds before either of us said anything, then he just said ‘C, unit 4B,’ like we were meeting at a networking event instead of over a shared washing machine.

We didn’t hook up that night, or even that week, which honestly surprised both of us given the app we’d met on. Instead we started doing the incredibly unsexy thing of borrowing each other’s Trader Joe’s ingredients and watching bad reality TV through the wall between our units with the volume up so we could both hear it. Eight months later he moved from 4B into my place, and we still joke that Grindr technically introduced us but the laundry room did the actual work.