MR RIGHT VS MR RIGHT NOW
My name is Nicky. I recently turned 30 and am still single. So many of my straight friends at this age are married and have at least one child. But as a gay person, I think finding love is more difficult than winning the lottery.
I don’t want to make excuses, but I literally have no time for anything else in between work during the day and school at night. My life is simply work, assignments, homework and more work.
Time is passing and I am not getting any younger. To break the pattern, I decided to find a date for Valentine’s Day.
I am not a bar person and I don’t like being in the gay scene. Therefore, my choices seemed limited. But since I am part of Gen-Y, I thought I should make the best of the technology that is supposed to make life easier. I heard all of my gay friends are using the smartphone app Grindr, which detects users who are nearby.
I heard good and bad things about this app, but I figured it was like everyday life when you never know what kind of people you run into.
I am not the best looking man in the world, but I used my own picture with a little touch-up from a phone app. Still, I doubted anyone would come and say hi to me. I was quite nervous.
When my phone beeped I checked Grindr. I was surprised to see 28 notifications. This might be working. After all these years of hibernating, I might finally find my Valentine. I could hardly wait to read the messages.
“Are you top or bottom? Are you into high fun? Can you host?” I read through all the messages and felt so disappointed. All of them were invitations for sexual encounters, which was not what I was looking for. I browsed through all of them and found that 12 of the 15 messages I got were from Asian men, mostly Malaysian, mainland Chinese and some Thais.
After the first day of disappointment, I still had hope of finding that one person I am looking for. But all I got were sexual invitations, which I ignored. This went on for almost a week, and I started to feel hopeless.
Just when I thought about deleting my profile and the app, one message grabbed my attention. “I know it is not easy to find the potential Mr Right here, but don’t give up. Eventually something good will come,” a motivational message came from a faceless profile.
I checked him out and found that he was a 38-year-old GWM (gay white male) who is looking for friendship and a relationship. At least his first words to me were not sexual, so I started chatting to him. After a couple of days of decent conversation, we agreed to meet at CentralWorld for coffee.
It was about 4pm on a weekend and the mall was quite busy. I had no idea what he looked like since he never sent me a picture of his face. He said he will wait at the water fountain in front of the mall.
I walked around without a clue who my date was. When I took out my phone to send him a message, a voice came from behind me. “I am here.” I turned around slowly and there he was. A well-dressed, goodlooking white man. I was really nervous before, but then it felt like a lot of butterflies were spreading their wings in my stomach.
We spent most of the afternoon getting to know each other. It turns out that he is a very high-profile person who has just recently transferred to Thailand for work. We had a good, intelligent and meaningful conversation. I can’t believe that someone as decent as him could be found on an app otherwise filled with people looking for quick hook-ups.
Some said when it rains, it pours. From one decent man, I found more of them. I recently agreed to meet another, a Spanish man in his mid-forties. He is here for a short time with his medical crew for work.
He told me that he came out only a couple of years ago. For most of his life he tried to please his parents by marrying a woman and having children. Now that his parents have passed away, he gets to do what he always wanted to do: to live his life as a gay man.
For someone who always ended up in the corner of the room when going to a party, the application is not a bad choice. I guess the app is just like going to a nightclub or bar by yourself. You will never know who you will meet. You just have to put yourself out there and try your luck. As one of my dates said to me: “Don’t give up. Eventually something good will come.”