Date 29: The Girlfriend and the Happy ending

But…but…what about the text message to the Doctor explaining you were seeing someone?

Oh, alright, I suppose I should tell you what happened. In between Date 24 and Date 25, I got a message through OK Cupid.

 Now, this isn’t unusual – I haven’t actually closed my account on any of the sites I’ve joined, including ones I’ve never got dates through – I’m still holding out for a sexy baroness from nobility dating site Godmother.com or an amazing Indian wedding from arranged marriage site Shaadi.com.

However, this message, unlike lots of others I’ve received (I’ve got 16 sitting unread in my J-Date.com mailbox alone) piqued my interest.

It read:

“So – I have got worried that you might think I’m stalking you and so thought I should drop you a note reassuring you that I’m not.”

So, not a stalker. A good start.

“I appreciate the paradox in sending someone a message to confirm that I’m not harassing them but I was telling a friend about your blog (recommending if that gives me any credit). Once she’d stopped laughing we decided to see if we could find your dating profiles and it was much easier than we’d expected, given you’ve linked to the blog in them. Once we’d got that far it seemed rude not to read them... and then I realised I’d show up as having checked you out. A lot.

So I presented the conundrum of ‘contact or not contact’ to my office mate. Her response was “Well we haven’t got anything else weird to do today…”. Obviously not reporting me to the police would be appreciated – it would mess up my career quite a bit.

As an aside – by our ‘weird’ task of the day she is equating you with various things I have made her do recently - including going to a Nate Silver talk in a parliamentary committee room and learning ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ in Spanish. She was wrong. This is clearly weirder.”

By the time we actually got around to meeting, I’d done date 25 and date 26. To cut a long story short, we met up for drinks on the Southbank, which led to a.) me deciding she wasn’t a crazy stalker and b.) a lovely kiss in the sunshine. That led to trips to the Globe theatre, meals out, the cinema, picnics, her meeting my friends, me meeting her friends, us deciding we were a couple, and indeed, last week, her meeting my mum. Yes, it’s proper serious and everything.

We’ve been dating for almost three months - which may explain the slow rate of progress on the blog. I think by now, as Nik Vincent-Abnett hoped, I have taken the girl in question – the “winner” of the blog, if you like – on at least 28 Dates. Huzzah! A happy ending after all.

So, in conclusion, I met the woman I love through online dating. If you’re single, give it a try – it worked for me…

(Sort of...eventually.)

THE END (really this time)

1.) I reserve the right to do another post if there’s a book or a film or (whisper it) a wedding or anything of that sort.

This post originally appeared at the end of Date 28, but I've decided to separate it out.