'No Pic, No Chat' or 'No Distance, No Chat'?

I am sure you have seen numerous profiles on Grindr emblazoned with the motto ‘No Pic, No Chat’. And although it gets monotonous seeing it so often, you can understand why it is there. These guys are looking for sex in either a 'Right Now' or 'Friends with Benefits' form. They therefore don’t want to get chatting to guys who they don’t find sexy. Fair enough. It does look a little odd when these guys themselves either don’t have a profile pic, or are displaying a profile pic that tells you nothing about either their face or their body. But Grindr is full of oddities. And as they are effectively telling you ‘I’m demanding something off you that I am not prepared to reveal (initially) myself’, you may decide that they are not the type of guy you want to engage with.

I have never displayed ‘No Pic, No Chat’ on my profile. However recently, after getting several ‘Hi’ messages from good looking guys with no distance (or indeed profile text) showing, I have added ‘No Dist, No Chat’ to my profile text. It’s possible that these guys are either bots or scammers, and my text will be ignored. But I think I am going to leave it on my profile for now. Here’s why.

Grindr is a geosocial dating app so that gay guys can meet other gay guys. If this is purely for ‘Right Now’ then two pieces of information about a guy are essential. A picture, so you know if you find him sexually attractive. And a distance, so you know if meeting up is practical. If you are meeting up to investigate ‘Friends with Benefits’ potential then you also want to know something about his character and interests, to see if the two of you can be sociable together when not benefiting each other. But, regardless of whether you are looking for ‘Right Now’ or ‘Friends with Benefits’, distance away from each other is a vital piece of information to know about your potential partner.

There is one situation where a guy might have a legitimate reason for not showing his distance. If he is not out, if being outed could cause him significant upset, and if he lives in such a rural location that other users, seeing him to be x km away, could make a reasonable guess at his identity, then this is a valid reason for not displaying his distance. But the vast majority of guys fail to meet these three criteria. And if you yourself are using Grindr in a city, you can be confident that no guys in your cascade will meet this criteria. If a guy is showing 500m away, there are too many other males 500m away for you to pinpoint him. And if a guy is showing 3km away, there are too many possible locations 3km away for you to pinpoint him.

Therefore, assuming you are yourself on Grindr to meet other gay men face to face, when you peruse your Grindr cascade and you see a guy who is not displaying his distance away from you, heed this as a HUGE warning that he is not on Grindr to actually meet other guys in the flesh. Even though you might know he is x km away because the guys either side of him in the cascade are displaying their own distances, still keep in mind that his evasiveness about such a significant piece of information could mean that time spent conversing with him could easily be time wasted.
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I now have ‘No Dist, No Chat’ on my profile and a saved message of ‘Sorry mate, as stated on the profile, no distance no chat’ to fire off to guys who don’t heed the warning. Sure, I’m human – if he has great pecs I might overlook his transgression and get chatting with him! But it will be with the knowledge that our chat probably won’t lead to a meet.