Experiment Over, Monkey

I lasted twenty days on a “dating” app.

That wasn't because I found my person. It wasn't because I had one terrible experience that sent me running for the hills. Twenty days was enough time to realize that I had wandered into a culture I didn't understand. I went into it believing I was joining a community of people who wanted to meet other people. What I eventually realized was that I had shown up speaking a completely different language.

An old friend of mine has a phrase he uses whenever he's had enough of something. If he's been trying to fix a piece of equipment that refuses to cooperate, or he's spent an hour doing something that clearly isn't going to work, he'd throw up his hands and say, "Experiment over, monkey."

I've always loved that expression because it isn't angry. It's an acknowledgement that enough information has been gathered to reach a conclusion. I tried, observed and learned something. It was time to stop poking the thing with a stick and go home.

About halfway through my twenty days, that phrase started floating around in my head. By the end, it wasn't really about dating anymore. It had become an anthropological study of a culture I didn't understand. I wasn't trying to find a “boyfriend” . I was collecting observations, making mental notes and slowly realizing that I wasn't participating in the experiment. I was the monkey.

Let me be clear, this wasn't my first dating app. Like a lot of gay men, I'd downloaded them before, looked around for a few days or weeks, and deleted them. Sometimes I'd met interesting people. Most times I didn’t. This time was different. I wasn't killing time. I wasn't looking for validation. I'd decided it was time to make a genuine effort at dating again.

I wasn't looking for anything unreasonable. I'm fifty-three years old. I've had enough relationships to know that chemistry can't be forced, attraction isn't negotiable and rejection is just part of dating. Nobody owes me their interest, and I don't owe anyone mine. I wasn't expecting fireworks. I was hoping for curiosity

Curiosity was the one thing I couldn't find.

One of my favourite questions has always been, "Tell me something interesting about yourself." I ask it because I genuinely want to know the answer, but I'm also asking it because I'm hoping they'll ask me the same question. That's how I've always understood conversation. You ask about me, I ask about you, and somewhere in the middle we slowly discover whether we want to keep talking. Instead, what usually happened was that someone would answer my question and then wait for the next one, as though the responsibility for carrying the conversation was mine. Or they would just disappear into the mist.

After a while I started noticing all the things nobody seemed curious about. Nobody asked what I did for a living. Nobody asked why I'd moved to Nova Scotia after living in New York. Nobody asked why I build public art. Nobody asked what surviving two strokes changed about my life. Nobody asked why I eat pepperoncini with breakfast, which, if we're being honest, is probably a question worth asking. Nobody asked me anything except dick pics and nudes.

And for the record, I can recite the alphabet backwards.

Nobody asked about that either.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn't actually looking for someone who was interested in me. Interested is easy. Interested can mean you liked my photos, thought I was attractive or wondered whether we'd have sex. I was looking for someone who was curious about me, and curiosity is a completely different thing. It asks another question. It wonders what's behind the profile picture and assumes there might be an entire human being sitting on the other side of the conversation.

That distinction ended up explaining almost everything.

I've had the same sentence in my vocabulary for whenever I know someone and I aren't a good match. I simply say, "I don't think I'm the right guy for you." I've always thought it was a respectful way to end a conversation. I'm not criticizing them, and I'm certainly not trying to hurt them. I'm simply acknowledging that we're probably looking for different things.

One man answered that sentence with twenty-seven text messages.

At first, I felt guilty because I thought maybe I'd somehow been unclear. Then I became concerned because the messages just kept coming. Eventually I stopped reading them and started counting them instead. Somewhere around the middle of the exchange, I had the strange realization that I wasn't participating in a dating app anymore. I was conducting field research. By the time he'd sent his twenty-seventh message, I felt less like a potential suitor and more like I was Jane Goodall with an iPhone.

That wasn't even the strangest interaction. I woke up one morning to five unread messages from some anonymous man... Every one of them asked exactly the same question.

"Uncut?"

"Uncut?"

"Uncut?"

"Uncut?"

"UNCUT!!!???"

I remember laughing because the three exclamation marks suggested a level of urgency I hadn't fully appreciated. At no point did he ask my name, what I cared about or whether I was the sort of person who returned shopping carts.

I have been called a fraud because I wouldn't send naked photos. Another man accused me of gaslighting him because I wouldn't send a picture of my dick. Someone else called me an abuser despite the fact that we had never met, never spoken on the phone and never shared so much as a cup of coffee. One man simply told me to kill myself. I remember putting my phone down, making a coffee and thinking that the coffee was, by a considerable margin, the healthier relationship.

What fascinated me wasn't the insults. It was how quickly my ordinary boundaries had become interpreted as personal attacks. After a while, I found myself asking a question that I still don't have an answer to. Why were some of these men so angry that I didn't want to have sex with them? I'm not a movie star. I'm not the last gay man in Nova Scotia. I'm just an ordinary guy who politely said, "I don't think I'm the right guy for you." Somehow that was enough to make a few complete strangers genuinely furious.

Rejection is part of dating. I've been rejected plenty of times, and while it never feels great, I've never thought the other person owed me an explanation or an apology. Attraction isn't something you negotiate or force. Sometimes the answer is simply no. I couldn't understand why a polite “no” had become something that demanded punishment.

It also introduced me to a strange new vocabulary. Somewhere along the way, I think therapy language escaped the therapist's office and wandered onto dating apps. Saying “no” became gaslighting. Ending a conversation politely became emotional abuse. Declining to send a naked photo became evidence that I was dishonest. It was as though everyone had memorized the vocabulary without agreeing on what the words actually meant. The vocabulary wasn't really the point. What fascinated me was how quickly complete strangers became certain they knew my motives.

Then there was the anonymous account that messaged me and threatened me to stay away from some guy I'd dated briefly last year. We hadn't spoken in over a year. Dating him was one of the lowest points in my personal life. I hadn't made a good choice. At that time, I honestly believed he was the best I could do. My confidence and self-esteem had taken a real beating, so instead of simply dismissing the message, I found myself wondering what I'd done wrong. I remember staring at the screen wondering whether I'd somehow walked into somebody else's argument. It felt like community theatre where everyone else had been handed the script and I'd accidentally wandered onto the stage halfway through the second act. I didn't know who this person was, what they thought they knew or why they believed I required adult supervision.

I thought about replying, but I couldn't figure out what I would even say. There wasn't a misunderstanding to clear up because I had no idea what the misunderstanding was. Whoever was behind the account had already decided who I was, what I'd done and what my intentions were. My participation in the conversation seemed almost optional. I was summarily blocked from replying.

A few days later someone invited me to meet at an abandoned gas station in a parking lot off Exit 11 at ten o'clock at night. He presented this as though it were a perfectly ordinary suggestion. I read the message twice because I genuinely wondered whether I was missing something. Eventually I decided that I'd managed to reach the age of fifty-three without becoming the opening scene of a true crime documentary, and I wasn't especially interested in changing that record.

About halfway through this little experiment I stopped asking myself what was wrong with everyone else and started wondering whether I was the problem. I wondered if something was wrong with me. When enough conversations end the same way, it's hard not to look inward. It took me a while to realize I wasn't looking at the wrong people. I was looking for a different kind of interaction.

I've thought about that quite a bit, and I finally figured it out.

I introduce friction.

I thought the problem was simply geography. I live in rural Nova Scotia. Nobody accidentally ends up at my house. If you're coming to see me, you've made a decision. There are drives involved, schedules to compare and weather to consider. Then I realized geography was only the beginning.

I'm physically inaccessible, but I'm also virtually inaccessible. I don't hand out my phone number after three messages. I don't send nude photos to strangers. I don't invite people I barely know into my home. I barely invite my friends to my home. I usually want a voice call or a video call before I agree to meet because I'd rather hear someone laugh than look at six more pics. I've discovered that three days of texting can create a personality that disappears completely the moment someone answers the phone.

If I ask whether someone wants to talk and they're busy, I believe them. I'll ask another time. If they're busy again, I still believe them because life gets in the way. If the question disappears completely, I don't keep asking, I wont ask a third time. I thank them for the conversation and move on. That's never felt cruel to me. It's simply recognizing that people make time for the things that matter to them, and if I'm not one of those things, that's perfectly okay.

I also don't have sex on the first date. I want a coffee meeting first, conversation over before coffee or a beer and trust before I hand out my address. I don't think those are universal rules. I don't expect anyone else to adopt them. They're simply the boundaries that have made my own life quieter and happier.

In fact, on the twentieth and final day of “my experiment”, I'd arranged to meet someone for a coffee or a beer. Just a vibe check to see if we even enjoyed talking to each other. Before we set a time and place , I told him something I thought was perfectly reasonable. "Just so you know, I don't want to waste your time. I'm not going to be a guaranteed hookup."

He called me an asshole.

Then he blocked me.

That's when it finally clicked.

Almost everything I value introduces friction.

Friction slows things down. It creates enough space for a real human to appear before access is granted. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that I had built a life around intentional friction while participating in apps designed to remove every bit of it. The apps reward speed. I reward patience. The apps reward availability. I reward intention. The apps reward immediate access. I reward connection.

Looking back, maybe part of the problem was mine. Most of the apps aren’t really dating apps in the way I was imagining it. It's a bit like going to the hardware store looking for groceries. Sure, you might find a snack at the Home Depot checkout, but that's not really what the place was built for. But the phrase that finally came to me was "cultural mismatch."

I don't think the apps are broken or bad. I don't think I'm morally superior because I prefer to move more slowly. I think I walked into a culture that rewards efficiency while I’m carrying a suitcase full of patience. Those two things were never going to fit together comfortably.

The interesting part is that this stopped being a critical essay and was rewritten somewhere around the second week. The more I talked to straight female friends about what had happened, the more often I heard some version of, "Welcome to our world." I don't pretend to know what it's like to date as a woman because I don't. My experience is my experience. But if I found myself thinking about my personal safety after only twenty days, I came away with a renewed respect for the calculations many women make every single time they agree to meet a man, a stranger. Who knows where they're going? Who has their address? Will the person accept no? Can they leave safely? Those aren't romantic questions. They're survival questions.

Maybe that's what bothered me most. Somewhere along the way we seem to have confused access with intimacy. We know each other's measurements before we know each other's sense of humour. We know how far away someone lives before we know what they're passionate about. We know what someone wants to do in bed before we know whether they're kind.

I don't think that's a gay problem. I don't think it's a straight problem. I think it's what happens when that efficiency starts replacing discovery.

Maybe I'm simply getting old. Maybe I'm hopelessly out of step with modern dating. Both of those things are entirely possible. I still can't shake the feeling that curiosity is one of the most attractive qualities another person can possess, and if we've reached a point where asking a second question has become unusual or invasive, then we've probably lost something that was worth protecting.

I wrote a joke almost twenty five years ago that online dating is a lot like shopping at a thrift store. There's a lot of shit on the racks, some things are threadbare, some are well worn and some are just worn out. But every now and then there's a gem…

I’ll save the punchline.

As cynical as this essay might sound, I still believe in gems. I collect them.

In fact, while all of this was happening, something interesting happened. An old friend from my years in New York City reached out. There was no rush. No demands. No interrogation about body parts. He asked how I was doing. He wanted to know what I'd been up to. He asked if I'd be interested in talking on the phone. We had one conversation, then another, and eventually he asked if he could come to Nova Scotia for a visit.

Maybe that's the irony of this whole experiment. The one genuinely promising connection didn't come from endless swiping. It came from someone who was already curious before there was ever any expectation of access.

I don't know where it will go. Maybe nowhere. That's not really the point. The point is that good men absolutely exist. I met a few of them during those twenty days, and I suspect there are many more than my little experiment would suggest. I simply wasn't finding them in the way I was looking.

Twenty days was enough. I deleted the app, made myself coffee and went back to life in my quiet little lake house in rural Nova Scotia. I wasn't angry, heartbroken or even disappointed.

I'd gathered enough information.

Experiment over, monkey.