A Real Story

I live in a town in Ohio where the gay bar closed in 2019 and never reopened, so my dating pool as a bisexual woman felt like it was three people deep. I’d tried the big apps and kept getting matched with guys who wanted a threesome fantasy or women who assumed I was ‘basically straight’ because I’d dated men before. I downloaded Taimi mostly because a coworker mentioned it had a real video feed thing, kind of like if TikTok and a dating app had a baby, and I figured worst case I’d waste twenty minutes scrolling.

What actually got me was the profile setup. It asked about my identity and pronouns in a way that didn’t feel like a form I was filling out for a stranger to judge. I wrote two lines about being bisexual and recently out of a long relationship with a man, expecting either silence or a lecture. Instead a woman named Reesa messaged first: ‘I dated a guy for six years before I figured my stuff out too, no judgment here, what’s your favorite bad reality show.’ We talked about Vanderpump Rules for forty-five minutes before either of us mentioned meeting up.

We met at a diner off Route 30, the kind with laminated menus and bottomless coffee, and she showed up fifteen minutes early because she said she gets nervous waiting in her car. I liked that she told me that instead of pretending she’d just walked in. Nine months later she still keeps a photo of that diner receipt in her wallet, which is either the most romantic or the most unsanitary thing I’ve ever heard, and I haven’t decided which.

I’m not going to pretend Taimi is packed with people in my zip code, because outside a city it can feel thin some weeks. But the difference for me wasn’t volume, it was that I stopped having to explain myself from scratch every single match.