Grindr Survivr: How to Find Happiness in the Age of Hookup Apps

What would Grindr be like if it offered opportunities to actually connect with people rather than just react according to our base instincts? This book about Grindr aims to do just that. For far too long, gay men moan and complain about gay dating apps, and yet they feel powerless to do anything about it. Grindr and "app culture" have radically transformed how members of the gay community interact with each other, and while finding “dates” has become easier, it seems as if finding anything of substance has become near impossible. We're just surviving apps like Grindr, rather than using them to live fully in the moment. Well, it’s time to stop complaining and do something about it. Grindr Survivr is a book designed to give readers a guide on how to find happiness in the new age of dating apps. It gives readers a thorough understanding of how Grindr is changing the gay scene, and by extension, how such apps have changed each of us as individuals. Often, we aren’t even aware of how deeply we’ve been changed by these apps, but we can’t expect a different result until we look at ourselves, our behavior patterns and our community and resolve to transform all of them. Grindr Survivr is divided into three parts. The first part discusses exactly why and how Grindr has changed the gay community, and how such apps make us both super picky and very cynical. The second part, which is probably the most important, discusses the “Gay Commandments” that every gay man should live by if Grindr users want to find relationships of substance (or even merely stop suffering and worrying about what happens online). The Gay Commandments aren’t preachy at all, but rather they are a call to interject a moral baseline into online behavior – but all the while the book gives honest and humorous anecdotes from his own personal dating experience. The author's not afraid to reveal his own failings in order to help readers learn from his mistakes. The Gay Commandments also include numerous “action points” that are that are designed to give readers new insights and new results (rather than just stating an overwhelming problem and not giving you anything to do about it). Readers will laugh and see themselves in the author’s unique and wry perspectives on gay dating. The final part of the book contains basic tips, guidelines and recommendations for online behavior and first dates. It contains help in spotting fake profiles and contains a veritable list of do’s and don’t’s for early dating. It’s what you might expect in a regular dating book, but in Grindr Survivr, it’s merely the third part of three. Whether people want to admit it or not, dating apps are here to stay. They are changing everyone who uses them, so it’s time for a group of committed individuals band together and decide to push for new conversations and ways of behaving that will dramatically alter how the gay men interact with each other. There aren’t enough thought leaders out there pushing to transform how people treat each other on apps, and so this book is designed to help users start a dialog to change this, while empowering them to take new actions that make them more content and satisfied with their online dating experiences. They can stop surviving apps and start using them to thrive.