Friday 16 November 2012

The End of Modern Dating


I have deleted my online dating profile. That noise you just heard, like a chorus of deflating airbeds, was the collective sigh of relief from thousands of single women across the city.

I’m in two minds about this decision. It’s a relief to be free of the posturing, the calculating, the humiliation of online dating. Yet I’m also aware that it made my life more interesting, and that now this blog will be comprised only of uninspired masturbation jokes and all the other unremarkable travails of my existence. If you want to stop reading from now on, I commend your sagacity.

To mark the end of the Modern Dating saga (a saga about as dramatic and meaningful as the Twilight movies), I feel it deserves some kind of summative conclusion. More importantly, I deserve one last opportunity to moan about it. Here’s a round-up of my experiences.

This is how excited people are about my stories

-       The first girl I went out with after a week or so of talking online offered me MDMA while we queued outside a busy bar. When I refused, she simply shrugged and took my dose on top of her own.

-       One date ended early after I accidentally took her to a gay night and she later caught me hugging a pair of friendly lesbians, which, I believe, is something of a faux pas on a first date. You can read about it here.

-       I discovered that it’s fairly standard on a free dating site for women to receive unsolicited pictures of penis’ and for men, at least in my own case, to receive unsolicited pictures of penis’. The only difference is that mine came from cross-dressers.

-       I went out on several dates with the last girl I met on the site. In fact, I rather liked her. Until a small misunderstanding led to her accusing me of faking mental illness to avoid seeing her. Such an accusation was reason enough to avoid seeing her.


I could go on like this for a long time (and I have, in earlier blog entries which I will shamelessly link to at the bottom of this post). The thing is, I have a tendency to play the victim, which isn’t fair to the majority of the people I met. Most of them were perfectly lovely, I was simply not up to scratch when it came to dating them. And, indeed, not up to scratch for dating at all.

Nor do I mean to denigrate the use of dating sites. Since deleting my profile I’ve spoken to three separate people who have found a relationship through online dating. All of them had very positive experiences, and I’m very happy for them. What their success makes quite clear to me is that I’m simply not cut out for dating. I don’t have the confidence, the ease of manner, the ability to develop chemistry. What I have is a taciturn manner, over-active self-awareness, and an unrivalled ability to sit in a darkened room and consume biscuits. These qualities are more likely to result in your corpse being removed by crane via the window than they are in marriage.

We all need something to aspire to

I don’t mean for this post to come across as defeatist or lugubrious. Rather it’s a declaration of pragmatism. And I have been assured from all corners that romance happens when you least expect it. If that is so, it hardly matters just how little I believe that this is true.