The worst part of every Tinder date I ever went on was the moment before the date actually started. I hated scanning bars, trying to identify a girl with whom I’d exchanged a few glib texts. What if I accidentally didn’t approach my date, but some different dykey girl in a backwards panel cap and short-sleeve button-down? If and when I did find the person I was actually supposed to be meeting, how were we expected to greet each other — hug? awkward wave? the classic, coolly nonchalant head bob that conveys “why yes, I am gay, and I acknowledge that you are too”?



The fleeting predate clumsiness, in the end, was always a small price to pay.

Online/app dating is allegedly destroying romance and turning us all into chiller-than-thou cyborgs, but as a lady who is into ladies, here’s my review: It fucking rules.

I’m on the femme-ish side of the presentation spectrum, where I tend to tragically blend in with the boring straight majority; in a pre-app dating world, the only surefire way I had of alerting someone to my gayness was recklessly flirting my way to a point of no return. I had to be sure I wasn’t misidentified as a friendly straight girl, who are notorious accidental flirters. No, I’m not brushing against your forearm and smiling a lot because I’m friendly, I have wanted to say too many times. It’s because I am a raging homosexual.

Eventually I learned to name-drop lesbianism in casual conversation so I’d avoid making a complete flirting fool of myself. But with dating apps — whether big players like Tinder or Hinge, or queer women-oriented minors like Her — there in front of you are all the female-identified people who are also looking for female-identified people, brought forth conveniently from the roar of the wild to the quiet simplicity of your screen. No furiously whisper-guessing about someone’s sexuality with your wing-women; no accidentally falling for not-even-questioning-a-little-bit straight girls, as were the hallmarks of our pre-digital youths. From the get-go of an app date, you know and she knows. A weight’s been lifted.

I discovered the potentials last spring, when I was living in Paris by myself. I knew no one. I didn’t speak French. But with the powers of Tinder and OkCupid, I found women to have adventures with. Some encounters turned into full-fledged flings; some, memorable friendships. Only a single outlier turned up a dud: French; a human resources major; hopelessly boring, but pleasant enough. The rest were worth it.

There was the soft-spoken grad student from New Zealand with whom I walked for hours through the Père Lachaise Cemetery, searching in vain for Jim Morrison’s grave while we compared the queer cultures of our respective countries. There was the American with a teeny-tiny septum ring and a head of wild curls, gleeful over any chance she got to escape the apartment full of French children where she was au pairing; we sat along the Seine, drinking red wine from the bottle, commiserating about femme invisibility and disagreeing about Wes Anderson (my take: overrated). There was the Moroccan onetime rugby player, who rolled me cigarette after cigarette on a poorly lit street corner as we talked tackles and heartache in the dark.

I wasn’t wary of going home with strangers the same way I might have been if I was meeting up with guys. (God bless you, lesbianism.) Women can be shitty dates, but they’re less likely to be creepy or violent ones.

And most of the time, there is just something magical about meeting other queer women.

We could have zero physical chemistry. We could read entirely different books, like entirely different movies, have entirely different dreams. Yet always, no matter what, we’ll have queerness in common. Maybe we won’t share anything beyond L Word references, or Kristen Stewart crushes, or a strong mutual dislike for the gaggle of straight bros making too much noise the next table over — chances are, on a first date, we’ll find something to hold onto. An app’s algorithms have alerted us to at least the base potential of compatibility; after that, rolling with it is up to us.