I’m a 27-year-old gay man, and things are going well for me. I’m doing good in my career, and outside of work things are going well, too. The only problem is that I’m missing a guy to share my life with. I currently live in Salt Lake City, and dating as a gay man here is not awful but it’s definitely slim pickings. I’m thinking of moving to a bigger city to enhance my dating life. I feel that when it even comes to gay dating, the thing is a numbers game and the best thing you can do is to date in a city with lots of other gay men. Do you have any advice for me regarding dating as a gay man in his late twenties? Should I relocate to a city with lots of other gay men? Should I focus on meeting guys outside of the apps or stick with them?
Mulling Over Relocating My Overflowing Nuts
When it comes to dating, MORMON, move on both fronts — meaning, stay on the dating/hookup apps but you don’t be exclusive to them. Keep your photos up (and current) on Grindr, Tinder, Scruff, Recon, Feeld, etc., but get your ass out of the house. Going places and doing things ups your odds of running into a guy you might wanna fuck and/or date and/or marry. (I got an email today from a woman who swiped left on a guy on Tinder and later met that same guy at a party and now they’re married.)
As for whether you should move…
Bigger places are generally better for gays than smaller places. Gay men are a tiny percentage of the population, MORMON, and we need to achieve a certain critical mass to create and sustain a viable dating scene. So, a city can definitely be too small. But the Salt Lake City area has a population of 1.2 million people, which isn’t too shabby; it’s more than San Francisco proper (815,000), but smaller than the population of the San Francisco Bay Area (7,750,000). Would you have better luck in a bigger city? Maybe, maybe not. Gay men are slower to pair off, MORMON, but we’re likelier to remain paired off once we settle on and for someone. (Paired off, yes. Monogamous, no.) So, being 27 and single again and/or still is nothing to panic about. Check with your friends about whether you’re doing something wrong — on the interpersonal or personal hygiene fronts — and go ahead and move if you wanna get out of Utah. But wherever you go, MORMON, there you are. So, if it’s a “you” problem, changing locations won’t fix it.
And are you familiar with the “paradox of choice”? If someone goes to the grocery store to get mustard and there are only four options, they tend to leave with a jar of mustard. Send that same person to a store where there are four hundred different kinds of mustard and they’re going to leave without mustard. Swap in “West Hollywood” for “grocery store,” and “men who are your type” for “jars of mustard,” and you may find yourself so overwhelmed by your options in LA or NYC that you can’t bring yourself to pick a partner. (That said, I know lots of gay men in New York and West Hollywood who met their boyfriends and/or husbands in those big cities — so, having seemingly endless choices isn’t a problem for everyone.)
P.S. Everything isn’t perfect for the woman who married the guy she met at the party after swiping left on him on Tinder. No one writes to me about their perfect marriages.
P.P.S. Confidential to the woman who married the guy she met at the party after swiping left on him on Tinder: Your husband shouldn’t have lied about having lunch with his ex-wife — you’re right about that — but he’s highly likely to interpret your three-week-long freakout about him having lunch with his ex-wife as confirmation that he was right to lie about it. The quickest way to prove to him that he didn’t need to lie to you would treating the lunch he had with his ex-wife like the non-problem you insist it would’ve been if he’d told you about it in advance. (“You didn’t need to lie to me.” “I’m sorry; it won’t happen again.” “Apology accepted — now, take me somewhere nice to dinner.”)
P.P.P.S. This goes out to the man who married the woman he met at the party after she swiped left on him on Tinder: The quickest way to figure out whether your current wife is lying to you — lying about how having lunch with your ex-wife would’ve been okay if you’d told her about it in advance — would be to schedule another lunch with your ex-wife and tell your wife about it in advance. Good luck.
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