"I Deleted Grindr For The Sixth Time. This Time I Did Something Different."

Michael, 37

As told to the Mingleo editors · June 2026

I've installed and deleted Grindr six times in three years. I know the exact number because I counted once, sitting on the edge of my bed at 10:42 on a Tuesday, having just closed it again without opening a single chat.

Here's what I want to be clear about: I wasn't lonely in the obvious way. I'd had brunch on Sunday. I have a group chat — three guys from my old job, two from college — and it's good. But it's closed. Nobody new has entered it in years. I had gay acquaintances at every party and not one person I'd actually call at 11pm.

And I'd had enough good sex to know that wasn't the thing I was missing. What I was missing was friends. Gay men I'd actually want to text on a Tuesday. The problem was that every tool I'd been handed for meeting other gay men was a hookup app or a bar, and neither of those has ever, once, produced a real friendship for me.

So I kept closing the app feeling like the problem was me. Four hundred matches, maybe one decent conversation. At some point you start doing the math and the math is humiliating.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to land on the obvious idea: it wasn't me. It was the format. The apps were built for something that isn't friendship. Expecting them to produce friends is like expecting a vending machine to cook you dinner.

I found Mingleo through an ad and — honestly — my first thought was that it looked like a scam. Half these things do. Pay to have dinner with strangers? But I read the reviews, saw it was a real outfit running real dinners, and the first month was cheap enough that the downside was basically zero. Nothing to lose for a month.

The thing that actually sold me was one line: no swiping, no profiles, no hookups. Just a small group of gay men, matched on a quiz, at a dinner. An evening where nobody's posting, ranking, or rating anyone. I didn't realise how badly I wanted that until I read it.

First dinner, five of us at a round table. All gay men, roughly my age, matched on the stuff that actually matters — not torsos, not stats. And the conversation just… went. The kind that lasts longer than four minutes. We were supposed to be done in ninety; we sat there for three hours.

Two of those guys are in my group chat now. The closed one. The one nobody new had entered in years.

I'm not anti-app about it — they're fine for what they're for. They were just never built to give me friends, and at some point I stopped pretending they were. If you're closing Grindr for the sixth time and feeling like the problem is you, it isn't. Pull up a chair instead. Worst case, you get one good dinner out of it.