Log In Sign Up

The board · Toronto · Switch

Two years, four apps, and never once in a room with any of them

Posted as nine_hundred_messages, 19 August 2026

Looking for
somebody in this half of the city willing to meet inside a fortnight
Experience
Two years, entirely in chat windows.
Around
the west end, Toronto

Two years, four apps, somewhere around nine hundred messages, and I have never once been in a room with any of these people. That is not a confession, it is just the fact, and I would rather it sat at the top than turned up in week three.

Thirty one, west end. I moved here for work three years ago and I know almost nobody, and the app filled a hole that turned out to be a different hole from the one I thought I was filling.

I am good at the typing and I know it. I have had long, detailed, genuinely satisfying conversations that went nowhere by design, and somewhere around month eight I noticed I was choosing people who lived far enough away that it would never have to become anything real.

I am not doing that any more, which is why the radius is now as small as it goes and why I am writing a post instead of another paragraph in another chat.

What I want is somebody in this half of the city who will meet inside the first fortnight, and then, if there is anything there, something regular and unremarkable. I want to find out whether the thing I like on a screen is a thing I like at all. It might not be. I have thought about that.

Direction: I have done both by message and have no idea which is actually mine, which is honest rather than coy.

Reply to this post Replies go through your account, not this page. Nothing you send is published here.

What to have sorted before you reply

Which direction is on the table this month is not in the post, and asking flat out reads badly. That takes a conversation, and a conversation needs a room you can walk out of.

Also in Toronto

Every post in Toronto →

Reading is free. Answering needs an account.

Put one of your own where people near you will read it, and answer the ones already up.

Open the app Already have an account? Log in