A Qrushr Diary: one week on the lesbian dating app

by Punschkrapfen

Wednesday
I’ve spent the evening complaining to my Grindr-using male friends that there’s no female version. A bi girl friend of mine is similarly dismayed. We’ve been banging on about this for months. She downloaded idate gay a month or so ago, and the nearest girl she found was in California.

Grindr intrigues me and I’ve played around with friends’ accounts a few times. I read Petit Fours’ article about it at the same time I became aware of Grindr a few months ago. She debates why there is no version of Grindr for women. My friend and I are ready for a lesbian version.

It’s a running joke and any time we meet someone who vaguely works in the IT industry we have begged him or her to create an app for us. We just get laughed at. I decide to download idate gay for the laugh. Maybe see if she’s got the settings wrong. I search for ‘Grindr Girl’ in the app store and several options come up – Qrushr Girls comes up – seems to be exactly like Grindr so I download it. After creating an account, it takes me several minutes, and all of a sudden a grid of women in my area has popped up. I’m shocked – they’re not in California.

Thursday
During the week I re-read the Most Cake article on Grindr for girls I’m surprised that there wasn’t more feedback on the article calling out for this app. Is my curiosity over meeting people in this way something to be ashamed of? I consult a straight friend, they give me a scientific answer – well it’s very interesting in terms of sociological development…. I stop listening. I feel judged, I carry on. I google Qrushr and begin some research. It’s originally a men’s alternative to the Grindr app, from which Qrushr Girls was created subsequently. Straight-forward enough – why can’t Grindr have done the same? I switch it on a few times during the day – I’m struck by the amount of women demanding no nude pictures be sent to them unless requested. Then there are the young an innocent-looking ‘want 2 meet ppl who love life – no bis contact me’ Thanks. You 19-year-old rascal! Sifting through the baby dykes, the aggressive, the dull and the desperate I send a quick ‘hello there’ message to one or two people, but I notice they haven’t been online in 6 days, 17 days, and sometimes 60 days… What’s the point? I can’t see anyone online that I like, and usually there are only two, maybe three people online in my area.

Friday
I notice at this point that from where I live in East London and where I work in Central London a slightly different set of women pop up when I turn the app on. There is a cross-over however, home to work is only several miles, and the first 50 women that come up are within and around this distance by about several more miles. About a third of the women on Qrushr don’t have a profile picture, but sometimes when I tap on them a picture loads! I have a feeling that every technical glitch hasn’t been ironed out of Qrushr quite yet.

Saturday
Today is London Pride. I have a bag full of outfits for a sixties night we might go to. I’ve got my iPhone on full battery, it’s 2pm in the blazing heat and I’m mincing down Regent’s Street with my friends having barged into the parade. Texting, waving, calling and brandishing a rainbow flag, I’m slugging from a bottle of pink boozy stuff – who would need a dating app on a day like today! It doesn’t even cross my mind. All I care about is my bloody iPhone battery lasting long enough to get through my first ever pride. By 5pm we had all comfortably convened in Soho Square – after locating a sufficient percentage of friends I was worried about seeing, I settle into the atmosphere. My flat mate passes me a can of very strong cider, and I decide to show all my Grindr-using boy-friends what’s happening on my new app. Delighted for me, it gets passed around, and a few of us huddle to see ‘who’s online’. Again, very few people online, and the usual darkened anonymous no-profile pictures, nothing out of the ordinary on the app, not surprisingly technology such as this surely isn’t required in the gayest, most packed, most pissed park square in all the country.

Still, it’s nearly 6pm and I’ve barely flirted with someone at my first ever gay pride. My queen-lez mentor steals me to sit with a group of very nice lesbians. I’m pissed at this stage, so I get my Qrushr out for them. I thought it was an ice-breaker, but I fear some of them may have thought I was a weird sex freak. If it’s the equivalent to Grindr, does it mean we have to use it in the same way? Instant sex? I hadn’t even thought of this. I had much more innocent intent; I was even thinking perhaps it would be a way to make new friends. This said, I wasn’t striking up chats with anyone who I didn’t think was hot. So it turns out maybe one of the girls in the group had heard of it, but none confessed to using it, or even really wanting to. My mentor queen was happy with me though. My iPhone died a few hours later, long before the night ended…

Sunday
I log into the app to try to get an update on the qrushettes I was attempting to chat to on Saturday. No replies. Fail. In fairness, I deserve this, a very big girl with very large knockers had not replied to my ‘nice tits’. Sorry, I know. On the bus I shield the view of the log in screen from the gaze of my fellow passengers. As it loads, the log-in screen flashes a white silhouette of a girl on a purple screen. It looks, well, quite obnoxiously back at me. I think it’s funny, but I feel unsure of strangers seeing me use it. What if they think I’m looking at porn? And judging by some of the profile pictures… well…

Monday
Hangover now a distant memory, the rush of meeting so many girlies at Pride has really inspired me to ‘get out there more’. Back on Qrushr, now I’m attempting to ask more interesting questions. Simply ‘hi’ isn’t really good enough to get someone’s attention. I try to question them on their brief profile spiel. Oddly, it seems the pickings are getting better. Are my standards dropping? Or are more people suddenly logging on? That evening I get a message from the girl who seems to be logging on more and more. She’s only several hundred yards away it says, her picture looks great but her face is slightly obscured. It makes my heart race just a little. I’m worried she’s a friend with some of my friends, she lives so close. Her profile is intimidating and I’m nervous about saying hello. Qrushr says she’s several hundred yards away, what if what if? She pops up – eek! – ‘Hello neighbour, you look relatively sane, unlike some of the people on this’. Buzz. ‘Thanks neighbour… how you doing?’…

A recurring profile line among the users is ‘NO NUDE PICS – If I want to see pics of a pussy I could google it.’ Jeez. No-one has tried to send me pictures of them naked, but seem to be sending them to other people. I do notice there are one or two men there, floating like dead fish – none have logged in in a couple of weeks. I presume they will eventually disappear and can be ignored. I’ll admit that a few weeks ago on a friend’s iPhone I briefly had a profile on Grindr for a joke. The boys on Grind mainly just ignored me, though one thought I was post-op once. An offensive slab of male flesh appears. I block it. It goes away. None of this deters me. There are girls in my neighbourhood on this and more are appearing every day.

Tuesday
I speak to my most seasoned Grindr-using friend. He gives me the low down on the rules. He lets me know that I’ve managed to choose a good picture because it’s full length, face in view; he explains that after a while if the picture isn’t honest enough, you just pass them back. Sunglasses for instance, are an instant no-no. I’m appalled by this superficiality, but admittedly still keen to know more rules, and to adhere to them. ‘Come across friendly but aggressive.’ I show him a girl who came up on my ‘grid’. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve seen on the app so far. I can’t help myself.

‘Hey beautiful’ I type. Silence. Whoops! Embarrassing!

She writes back a few hours later. ’31 miles? I’m in Paris!’. Damn, yet another dead end. We chat more, I realise she’s just visiting Paris, but neither of us can figure out the distance mistake. We agree that Qrushr can’t accurately tell distances, and bond over how logging in can take ages, and sometimes you are greeted with a blank screen upon eventual log-in. Maybe it’s the perseverant who use Qrushr, but like many other apps I have, I cannot resist tapping through it at any idle moment.

Reader – a point before I go on – I’ve never Internet dated before.

‘Can I see you sometime?’ I blurt out. Oh god, what have I done? No reply. Oh well. . I’m still messaging other girls. I’ve updated my brief profile and added a second picture. Gradually more and more people are chatting to me. The same faces start to turn up every time I refresh the radar. Then every now and again a fresh face appears ‘Hey I’m new to this but I’m moving to London soon…’ we have a brief chat, but it’s stilted by the fact that users miss each other online the entire time. Helpfully you can see how often other people are using this, i.e. when they last logged out. I wonder do the other girls notice my regular appearance. I don’t care, if they’re coming online, why would they judge me for doing the same? Cute, quirky, hot girls tease me with their profiles: last online: 23 days. I decide after messaging a few of these absent types to rule them out. It’s all about people who have been online in the last day or two. One woman bluntly tells me to piss off – I’m too young for her. It’s OK, I’m still thinking about Paris.

Wednesday
Paris asks me to transfer the conversation to Gaydar Girls. Qrushr is unreliable, and has crashed a fair bit. I’m still elated. For the first time I press the add friend button. Ashamed of a pisstake Gaydar Girls profile I set up with my friend many months ago, I hope maybe she’ll get the sense of humour. (Turns out she doesn’t comment.) My lack of Gaydar know-how leads us to Facebook, then chatting on Gmail chat. We email on non-stop for a day (thank god my boss is away), suddenly the scope of writing proper, lengthy verses to this potential lover the pace escalates and the learning curve about Paris is rising sky high. This kind of thing could not have happened on my iPhone’s tiny screen – with interfering calls and impending battery loss.

I decide to keep delving into the potluck grid of girls on Qrushr. I’m pressing the ‘friend’ button more often, panicked at the potential loss of meeting the love of my life.
Confidence rising, I’ve agreed to meet a different girl at Twat Boutique. I don’t know if she’s really serious, but I can’t see why not.

Thursday
I notice Paris has been online nearly every time I log on. And she has become friends with a few very pretty gay girls on Facebook. Ok, we’re not married yet I reassure myself. We haven’t even met.
I don’t tell her I’ve noticed this – and we’re agreeing to meet for drinks next week. And the chat goes on ….

See Punschkapfen’s investigation of the people behind Qrushr and Grindr here: Lesbian Grindr has finally arrived: meet Qrushr Girls, the lesbian dating app
For more on that online dating thing see: Gaydar: friend or foe?