We become body parts, framed, screened — a Damien Hirst minus the formaldehyde. We are torso, or face, or bicep, or bottom. Choose me, order me, I can be at yours in seconds. Only 20 metres away! Can you feel the liberation yet? I sense only the banal assimilation of individuals into types: Sexual racism rules, of course.
Guys with disabilities unsure which fetish they fit. We lose at love, too. Apps enable our checklists like nothing before. Search by height, age, area, ethnicity, fetish, body type, body hair — all within a mile radius. We forget how stupid our criteria are. Apps are a lifeline for those in the closet, say some.
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But how much longer does this lifeline keep them there and choke them? The gay scene suffers, too. Bars have closed. Many have waned as the frisson of potential encounters collapses under the promise of an app shag on the way home. We used to speak first. In the silence, fear grows.
Want to finally quit hookup apps? Here's how to get out of the validation vortex
Are we good enough? Do our penises look long enough? Is the lighting on this selfie capturing pectoral definition? In the silence, emptiness echoes, too: We think we are hunters, but all are hunted, pursued by the tech that knows us too well. And so, no gay man will be put off using apps after this aggravated burglary, because fear is not important here. Loneliness is. But how, exactly, do the apps make it so easy for us to get hooked in the first place?
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And what can we do to quit? Earlier this month, Rich Juzwiak at Gawker dove into the reasons why gay men in particular can become dependent on hook-up apps. He suggested that there's a correlation between feeling innately undesirable — something gay men are prone to do, often as a result of growing up in predominantly heteronormative environments — and developing a nagging adult need to constantly gather evidence to the contrary.
This idea gets to the heart of what was going on with me during my peak usage.
Every expression of interest from a new guy served as a quick shot of validation for the insecure year-old in me who used to work out to Richard Simmons VHS tapes and steal diet pills from Wal-Mart. Nancy Jo Sales, author of American Girls: This pattern explains why I compulsively checked my apps throughout the day, even when I knew it wasn't really the right time or place. Let me just check when he was last online. So let's say you're one of those people who is addicted to a hookup app.
You recognize the addiction and you want to quit. How the hell do you go from being one of those perpetual " deleting soon " people to being the rare success story who actually breaks the cycle for good?
Given that I was using the apps as a stand-in for the relationship that I ultimately wanted, this easily explains how I managed to quit. Once I developed a connection with someone offline, shallow greetings from online strangers suddenly seemed so unfulfilling by comparison. But of course you don't have to magically meet the love of your life overnight to begin the recovery process.
Alter offered a number of small steps you can take in the short-term to develop a healthier relationship to your dating apps. If the answer is yes, you're far more likely to develop a smartphone-related addiction, whether to an app like Grindr, to checking your email, or to playing a smartphone game.
The trick is to 'lose' your phone for certain hours of the day. Anyone familiar with the concept of a digital detox might recognize some of Alter's suggestions for doing so: Make it hard to find. This is what he calls "behavioral architecture," which works by "reducing the sting of addiction by redesigning your life so that addictive triggers occupy progressively smaller parts of your mental and physical space.
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On the first day, you might leave your phone in a drawer for an hour; by the end of the week, for three hours; and by the end of two weeks for several hours at a time. The suggestion to start out by simply locking your phone in a drawer might sound a little too obvious or even trite to take seriously.
But what's the alternative?
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Perhaps putting my damn phone in a drawer for a few hours a day, however painful at first, could have helped me to clear my mind enough to realize this fact on my own.