tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37543590483217635092024-03-26T02:25:19.712-07:0028 Dates LaterA survivor's chronicle of the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is online dating. Updated until I've done 28 online dates, find true love, or get myself killed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-5540604623490988602013-11-28T05:47:00.003-08:002013-11-28T10:40:02.523-08:00Quite literally 28 Dates Later - The end of the blog<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">In case you hadn't realised, this blog is finished (awwww). For six months, January - June 2013, I went on 28 Dates from 28 different dating sites, after my first online date ended with an infected human bite wound.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">500,000 unique readers will be aware of how it all turns out - </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">of the three options at the top, I thought the most likely end was "get myself killed" at times -</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"> but just in case you've just stumbled upon it, here's links to each every post, in chronological order:</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">1: The Biter</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...my first online date, <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/date-one-love-bites.html">in which I meet a girl who almost bit my finger off</a> - from OKCupid.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">2: The Girl with the Knives</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which I recount my previous worst ever date, <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/date-zero-worst-date-ever.html">which involved a wall of sharp knives.</a></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">3: The Adulteress</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which I <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/date-2-married-woman.html">consider having an affair</a> - from Ashley Madison.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">4: The Lizard Loving Nerd</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which I <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/date-3-nerd-her-iguana.html">encounter a fiscally prudent herpetologist</a> - from Geek2Geek</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">5: The Republican Warrior Princess</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/date-4-conservative-warrior-princess.html">I take romantic inspiration from Ayn Rand</a>, and meet a "gun loving, god fearing Republican" - from The Atlas Sphere</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">6: The #Twittercrush Part one & Part two</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/date-five-twittercrush.html">I meet up with someone I had a crush on through twitter</a>, and <a href="http://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_1100477024"></span>make her charity cupcakes<span id="goog_1100477025"></span></a>. - From Twitter/52 First Dates</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">7: The Farmer</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which I meet a <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/date-6-farmgirl.html">soft-fruit farmer and get my first proper kiss</a> of the project - from Muddy Matches.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">8: The Fan of the Blog</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which I <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/date-7-fan.html">meet a fan of the blog and on this occasion</a>, I *am* the bad date.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">9: The Naval Officer</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which I am<a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/date-8-officer-gentlewoman.html"> "sexted" by an officer and a gentlewoman</a> and we discuss our favourite admiral. From Uniform Dating.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">10: Three Jewish ladies</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/date-9-3-jewish-ladies.html">I discover I am a hot piece of beef</a> on J-Date.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">11: The Cougar</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/date-10-cougar.html">I date an older woman</a>. From Cougar Dating.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">12: The Guardian-reading Tory</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/date-eleven-worlds-only-other-guardian.html">I meet the only other socially liberal but economically conservative person</a> known to man - from Guardian Soulmates.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">13: The Blandest Date</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/date-12-crazy-bland-date.html">I meet a woman I have nothing in common with</a> - from OKC Crazy Blind Date.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">14: The Sleazy Hookup</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/date-13-sleazy-hookup.html">I hookup with a friend</a> - from Bang with Friends</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">The half-time show: <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/14-dates-in-why-am-i-still-single.html">A midway through maudlin reflection on why I was single after 14 Dates.</a></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">15: The Tabloid Date Blogger</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/date-14-other-date-blogger.html">I meet another Date Blogger and get reviewed</a> - from Single, bored and Geeky about films.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">16: The Psychic</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/date-15-psychic.html">I date a woman with psychic powers</a>. Or so she claimed! - from Beyond Psychic dating</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">17: Two Fakers & a Cambridge Undergraduate</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-devout-christian-sex-devils.html">I don't date either a Czech pornstar or a High-flying lawyer, and end up taking out a Cambridge undergrad instead</a>. - from Plenty of Fish</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">18: The Fundamentalist Christian & the Sex Devils</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/the-devout-christian-sex-devils.html">I date a Christian, who put the "Mental" into "Fundamentalist"</a> - from Missionary Dating</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">19: The London Cosplay Otaku</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/date-18-london-otaku.html">I date a lovely lady who was into dressing up</a>. - from Lovestruck</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">20: The New York Millionaire</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/date-19-new-york-millionaire.html">which I am a gold-digger</a>. from MillionaireDating</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">21: The Second Injury</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/date-20-redacted-and-second-painful.html">I can't tell you much about the date apart from the fact I received an agonising sex injury on it</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">22: The Hometown show</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which<a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/date-21-home-town-show.html"> I try online dating in my small seaside hometown - from Match.com</a></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">23: Pet Dating with my Hedgehog</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/date-22-dating-with-your-hedgehog.html">I take my pet Hedgehog on a date with me</a> - from Pet Dating</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">24: The Data-Driven Dater</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/date-23-data-driven-dater.html">I try to date arithmetically, and meet a woman who dates by Spreadsheet</a> - from E-harmony</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">25: Speed Dating with the Pickup Artist</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/date-23-mix-tape-scientist.html">I go to a Scientific speed dating event and am lectured by a strange pickup artist</a> - from Dating Science London</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">26: My Single Friend and the Finnish Superwoman</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/date-25-my-friends-sold-me-to-finnish.html">my friend Janine tries to pair me off with a Finnish lady-adonis</a> - from MySingleFriend</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">27: The Video Gamer and the Zombies</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/date-26-video-gamer-and-zombies.html">I fall off a barn and my date steals my sniper rifle from my cooling corpse</a> - from LFGDating</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">28: The Doctor and the Cliffhanger</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which<a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/date-27-doctor-garden-and-cliffhanger.html"> I meet a lovely doctor in Chelsea Physic garden, and reject her by Text message!</a> - from Doing Something</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">29: The Blind Date </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which<a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013_08_01_archive.html"> I go dating in a National Newspaper column</a> - from Guardian Blind Date</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">30: The Happy ending and the Girlfriend</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">...in which <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/date-29-girlfriend-and-happy-ending.html">you discover who I ended up in Love with</a> (we're still together after six months, so it all seems to be working out). </span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-54156187679204458502013-11-28T05:17:00.001-08:002013-11-28T05:49:49.037-08:00Date 29: The Girlfriend and the Happy ending<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But…but…what about the <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/date-27-doctor-garden-and-cliffhanger.html">text message to the Doctor</a> explaining you were seeing someone?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oh, alright, I suppose I should tell you what happened. In between Date 24 and Date 25, I got a message through OK Cupid.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> 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 <a href="http://www.godmother.co.uk/welcome.php" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">nobility dating site Godmother.com</a> or an amazing Indian wedding from arranged marriage site <a href="http://www.shaadi.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Shaadi.com</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“<i>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.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, not a stalker. A good start.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></i><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“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.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></i><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></i><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.”</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We’ve been dating for almost three months - which may explain the slow rate of progress on the blog. I think by now, as <a href="http://www.nicolavincent-abnett.com/2013/07/the-dating-game.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Nik Vincent-Abnett hoped</a>, 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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, in conclusion, I met the woman I <span class="il" style="background-color: #ffffcc;">love</span> through online dating. If you’re single, give it a try – it worked for me…</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Sort of...eventually.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">THE END (really this time)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This post originally appeared at the end of Date 28, but I've decided to separate it out.</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-49510299664404670652013-08-15T09:12:00.000-07:002013-11-28T05:52:21.805-08:00Date 28: The Guardian, the Finale & the Girlfriend<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, at long last, it's the end of the blog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've learned a great deal since I first set foot in the dating wasteland - for example, to stop girls *before* they <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/date-one-love-bites.html">bite your finger</a> and exactly <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/date-20-redacted-and-second-painful.html">what the tensile strength of the human cock</a> is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For my last ever online date, and my last ever (1) post on this blog, I decided to do one of the dating experiences I've read about loads, and always wanted to do - <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/blind-date" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Guardian Blind Date</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For those of you who aren't familiar with how it works, four years ago, the Guardian started sending people on dates. Now, every week, one couple a week share their Blind Date story for the delectation of the Guardian’s readership every Saturday. At least two of their daters have got married:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's fun, vicariously reading what other people think of each other. The dates don't always go well. Some people obviously have a dreadful time – this one where he starts by complaining she was <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jun/15/blind-date-edward-ellie" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="">"25 minutes late and didn't apologise"</a> and ends with <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jun/15/blind-date-edward-ellie" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="">"I'd run out of things to say, so we walked to the tube in silence"</a> sounds grim.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As ever with online dating, some people are just pricks – check out Mister "I was hoping for Anne Hathaway, and she’s<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/nov/09/blind-date-maddy-barney" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title=""> not Anne Hathaway"</a>. I think the oddest one I’ve ever read is <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/11/blind-date-emily-luke" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" title="">"I got trapped in a courtyard, then he asked if I owned a corset and then I didn't know what to say when he suggested we 'call a spade a spade and leave it at tonight'."</a> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The way you get to go on it is you send an email to <a href="mailto:blind.date@guardian.co.uk" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">blind.date@guardian.co.uk</a>, telling them a little bit about yourself. I’d always thought about going for it, but I suspected they’d have trouble finding a date for a Tory who writes for the Telegraph. Occasionally, being a right winger is useful – for example, if you turn up for jury service in a tweed jacket, with a copy of the Spectator under your arm, no defence barrister in their right mind will select you. On the other hand, it’s not ideal when trying to get picked for a thing in Britain’s best known left-leaning paper. I told them I was a TV producer who wrote a dating blog, and hoped they wouldn’t delve too deep.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The (slight) subterfuge worked, and the Guardian’s in-house cupid got back to me quickly, and started setting up a date for me. Apparently, the reason I went forward so quickly is that the ratio of men to women applying is about 20 women for every man. So get writing, chaps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once you’ve had a response, you wait, and then once they’ve picked a person they think you're suited to, they set up the restaurant, and then a photoshoot in the Guardian’s office in King’s Place. I was nervous – I felt sort of like Frodo sneaking into Mordor in the Lord of the Rings. To blend in, I wore sandals, and had some Quinoa in my bag. I figured if anyone stopped and ask me I could bluff a few lines like “Ooh, that David Cameron” etc etc.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I just hoped I wouldn’t get caught out by a Great Escape “Güt Luck” style question and end accidentally blurting out something that marked me as the enemy. I probably should have worried more about the photograph. I’m one of those people who always looks hideous in pictures, no matter what I do. I used to say I’m not photogenic, but a cruel photographer friend once said to me, “Actually, being photogenic or not is a reflection of whether you actually look in real life as you do in your pictures – and I’m afraid you really do look like that when I point a camera at you”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As it was, I rocked up, appeared in the pictures and managed to get out in one piece. The day of the date rolled around, and wearily, I got on the tube and went to meet the lady in question. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/22/blind-date-hazel-willard">You can read about how the date went here.</a> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, *I* actually quite liked her, and believed she was 25 when I met her, but it seems my friends ummm…felt differently.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I still stand by telling the “Spiderman jizzed on me on a nightbus” story, btw. It made sense in context, honestly! </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For the record, the date was perfectly pleasant and she actually looks far better in real life. It's just a bad photo. But, alas, I fear she was as Zathras from Babylon 5 would say, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4j4Cj8Mip0" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">“Not the one”.</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, there you, 28 dates from 28 different dating sites and still single. I’ve learned a huge amount while writing this blog; I’ve made mistakes but had a great time. In doing it I’ve become a fervent advocate for online dating and met at least a dozen women I know I’ll be friends with for years, had some great experiences – and the not-so great experiences make for good stories, at least.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">THE END...or is it...?<br /><br />If you want to know what happened next, jump to <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/date-29-girlfriend-and-happy-ending.html">The Happy Ending</a> here.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-25098929032052896722013-07-26T00:53:00.000-07:002013-07-26T03:42:09.355-07:00Date 27: The Doctor, the Garden and the Cliffhanger<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">So, Date 27 - The Penultimate date. </span><br />
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Obviously, by this point, while I was hoping it would end up as the ultimate date, I wasn't holding out too much hope - it really is a barren wasteland. I was starting to worry that my Telegraph colleague Tim Stanley might be right, that there might be no woman in the world willing to <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100227407/if-david-cameron-must-ban-anything-let-it-be-warhammer-fantasy-games/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">date a man who still likes model soldiers in his thirties</a>. I mean, it's not like I'm addicted to them. I just like them, ok? They're not a problem. I could give them up any time. I just don't want to.</div>
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Ahem, trips to group therapy aside, I felt I wanted to maximise my chances, and this was my last shot at a mainstream dating website. I pored over lots of the remaining big sites, thinking to myself, "where am I going to find Ms. Right?" I was getting increasingly disenchanted with the whole process of online dating - as much as I like talking about how great I am, writing essays about how great I am more than twenty times was starting to get to me.</div>
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That said, one of the dating sites I've been looking forward to trying is called "Doing Something" - and while pretty mainstream, it's also fairly odd. It's sort of like Chat Roulette, but for dating. All you do is upload a picture of yourself, and a one line perfect first date. That's it. No essays, no pointless questionnaires, no existential crises while you try to figure out if a person who says they like both "staying in" and "going out" is just saying they enjoy "being alive"; usually those people love both "the city" and "the countryside", or as I like to think of it "most terrain". </div>
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That sort of contradictory profile is incredibly common - occasionally they hit brilliant heights of self-delusion - on Guardian Soulmates, I saw a woman who maintained she wanted a man who would judge her for what was inside, not her looks - as long as he was at least 6'2", because "I like to wear heels, and hate midgets". I'll be honest, I did judge her on the content of her character.</div>
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As opposed to other sites, Doing Something is refreshingly stripped down and free of pretence or artifice. I think it just acknowledges the fact most people don't look much beyond that all important profile picture, and a huge amount of what people write in dating profiles is self-important guff or lies designed to make you sound much better than you really are. </div>
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You spin through a bunch of dating ideas, and that (plus a picture) is all you get to judge them on. Of course, wri<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">ting a short description of what you think would be an ideal date is actually quite hard. While my experience thus far suggested "Couple of drinks in a pub, while we try to work out whether the other one is boring?", I sat and pondered a lovely summer evening date for quite a while. This was a harder challenge than it might at first seem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Two close friends of mine - who are now in one of those lovely (vomit-inducing) relationships everyone is jealous of, met through the site. To quote the lady of the pair, <i>"<span style="line-height: 17px;">Steve had seen that I had looked at his profile so sent me an invitation to spin the wheel of date. I accepted, in spite of his hideous profile picture and the result was: eat breast milk ice cream."</span> </i> I wasn't quite exciting enough to go and drink human milk for the first time in 32 years, but I thought I could come up with something that was better than what 50% of people write, which is "Wine on the Southbank".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">While I rather like wine, and I'm quite a big fan of the Southbank, I thought I could come up with something more original to stand out. You don't want to sound too weird (Breastmilk?!) but equally, saying "I want to go to a pub" makes you sound like a frighteningly prosaic alcoholic if that's *all* they know about you. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Lots of people suggest the cinema or theatre for a first date - I think because they think it makes them seem cultured. I'm not sure that's a good idea, as the whole point is to get to know someone; I'm not sure how much you learn by sitting quietly next to someone, other than whether they understand social norms relating to silence.</span></div>
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I'd like to say I instantly came up with something brilliant, but as Mark Twain said, sometimes a good off-the-cuff remark takes weeks to think of. After a couple of hours of pondering, I hit on the idea of going for a walk around <a href="http://chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk/">Chelsea Physic Garden</a>, a sort of hidden botanical garden down by the river, that not many people know about. I found out about it from a Tim Powers book about time travel, apothecaries and wizards on stilts. </div>
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The real garden has a distinct lack of stilt-magi, but it is beautiful, especially on a pleasant summer's evening. It also has the advantage of being near loads of lovely West London pubs - so if things went well, we could repair to one of those for booze and more chat. After a week or so of trying, I managed to arrange a date with a lovely psychiatrist. Now, I'm sure some of you are saying "Thank god, he's finally getting help", but this was an attempt at a romantic meeting, rather than a therapeutic one.</div>
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We met, wandered, and chatted. She told me what she could about her practice, within the bounds of confidentiality; asked me about what possessed me to write a dating blog. We swiftly left the plants and ended up at a pub.</div>
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As ever on an online date, the topic of odd online dates came up. It was fascinating to hear a psychiatrist's perception of the world of online dating. She said she'd been on probably as many unfulfilling dates as I had; especially, she'd found Guardian Soulmates an enervating experience.</div>
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It seems, from the female side of the site, there's an army of wistful, chin stroking men who long for the relationship they had when they were 19 - they're looking for a "<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/06/i-was-manic-pixie-dream-girl-now-i%E2%80%99m-busy-casting-spells-myself">manic pixie dream girl</a>" who they can educate about what's cool in music, books and films.</div>
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Of course, this being the Guardian, that means being lectured about late 90s indie bands, "graphic novels" where Superheroes go through a bruising divorce, and Belgian art-house films only being shown in one dingy cinema in Crouch End. It's almost enough to make you choke on your organic Quinoa.</div>
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She said "It is something of a shock, as a highly-educated 30 something, to find yourself recast as captive student against someone who knows significantly less about the topic than you do. I happen to possess an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of crap indie bands myself. Being female though, I don't like to brag."</div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">For the record, she was definitely better on 90s bands than I was, despite my own tragic past as an Indie shoegazer. I used to go to gigs in purple velvet trousers and acid yellow DM boots. Yeah, I was 19 once too. Fortunately for the psychiatrist, I've spent the last 14 years trying to grow up. Well, apart from the whole "toy soldiers" thing. </span></div>
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Following on from the Manic pixie chat ("What really interests me though is the word 'manic'. It's used (as far as I can tell) to denote a preference for some form of mental instability. What on earth is that about??"), I asked if she'd ever been on dates where she thought the other person had needed professional help. She gave me an answer that made me worry a little (and not for the first time) about the sort of people who are drawn to online dating.</div>
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Still, lack of lecturing aside, we had managed to amuse each other, and we both seemed pretty normal. We kept talking, covering all sorts of odd topics - we actually got into a quite heated argument about the rights and wrongs of prostitution and drug abuse. It was lovely - a great date, all told, a genuinely interesting intellectual conversation, and we had lots in common. I'd say she was my intellectual equal, but she was clearly a damn sight smarter than I was.</div>
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However, after the date, I sent the following text:</div>
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That wasn't an excuse (although I'm told it's often used) - the psychiatrist was genuinely lovely, and I do wonder what would have happened if I'd met her earlier.</div>
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So, there you go... there's a lady in my life now. I have indeed, won at internet dating. Tune in next week for the last tale from the wasteland... the tale of how I finally escaped!</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-58268215171263797872013-07-05T06:46:00.000-07:002013-07-05T06:46:11.682-07:00Date 26: The Video Gamer and the Zombies<div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, after 25 Dates, I was starting to get exhausted. That's part of why the blog has been moving forward with all the alacrity you'd normally expect from a Mississippi sheriff's department investigating the murder of a young black man. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other reason was that the end was looming, and I was still single. While at this point I'd met at least two women I'd thought about ending the blog for, it hadn't panned out. I was starting to dread writing some kind of nonsense about "every woman being date number 28" or something equally trite to round this damn thing off happily. No, the "every woman is Date number 28" thing would never work. I mean some of you are married or lesbians or part of the whole <a href="http://bishuk.com/aboutyou/">QUILTBAG</a> or whatever.</span><div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, feeling exhausted and burned out by the relentless grind of the dating (well over 50 dates at this point) and the blog, I decided to take a bit of a break, take stock and indulge in some of my hobbies - you know, the ones that don't involve receiving sex injuries while searching for Ms. Right. I luxuriated in a couple of weekends without dates, where I could just slob around in my dressing gown, playing computer games, watching box-sets of TV I've missed, and at no point having to make small talk while drinking an overpriced gin and tonic. No, I was at home, so I could make myself a <i>cheap</i> gin and tonic, while kicking myself about forgetting to buy ice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I always feel a bit guilty about drinking at home alone, and I especially feel guilty about playing co-operative computer games drunk. I've written before about how playing <a href="http://thetoysoldiersneverletmedown.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/life-after-warcraft.html" target="_blank">particular games is a bit like being in a bad relationship</a>, and we all know how fast that can go downhill when you add booze. In between playing games, I was still logging on to dating sites, trying to find a particular kind of lady.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was determined to get at least one date off of a site that catered to people who like playing computer games. It's always been a bit of a dream of mine to date a woman who I can play games with. I've got a couple of friends who met and married through playing World of Warcraft together (you know who you are, Alice and Phil). Once you've been to a wedding in Stormwind Cathedral, I suppose it leaves a mark. <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stormwind Cathedral. Nice venue, but the catering charges are <i>extortionate.</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They have a lovely daughter called Caelia now, and I suspect if she ever has to ask her parents how they met, "raiding the Troll city of Zul Gurub to slay the Snake headed blood god Hakkar" is a pretty amusing, if non-standard answer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I've got closer to the end of the blog, I've realised that I may never get a date off sites I'd quite like to do, like arranged marriage website <a href="http://shaadi.com/" target="_blank">Shaadi.com</a> (although a successful date on that could complicate the blog as I've already done Ashley Madison), circus performer and clown dating site, <a href="http://www.boohiccup.com/clown_dating.html" target="_blank">Boo Hiccup</a> (no sexy trapeze artist for Willard, it seems) or that one where your <a href="https://www.thejmom.com/" target="_blank">Jewish mum creates your dating profile and talks to other Jewish mums</a> about how great you are. I'd even suborned a New York Jewish comedian friend to pose as my mother, but alas, no takers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You'd think finding a gamer girl would be easy, given that something like <a href="http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2012.pdf" target="_blank">48% of the gaming market is ladies</a> these days, but actually, not that easy at all. I suspect it's because while tons of women play and enjoy games, very few self-identify as the kind of person who wants to go on a gaming dating site. I suspect it's because most people imagine a gaming dating site will be not unlike this Tim and Eric bit:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ahem. I could probably find a lovely woman who could tell a Space Marine from a Colonial Marine on something like Ok Cupid or My Single Friend, but the point was to get 28 dates from 28 dating sites, so I persevered.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's quite a variety of gaming dating sites out there, and in my brief dating hiatus, I've tried most of them. It's not the most promising of fields. In digging around, I managed to find, <a href="http://www.dateagamer.co.uk/" target="_blank">Date A Gamer</a> - a website which prompted Harry Langston of Vice to say of it "<span style="line-height: 19px;"><i style="color: #42423b;">Gamers – no matter how integrated into mainstream culture gaming is becoming – are still thought of as lonely, weird, socially awkward individuals who struggle with the opposite sex. Not all gamers fit within those stereotypes, just like not all footballers are racists who sleep with their teammates' wives, but, as with that particular example, there are always some who snuggle up comfortably within the cliche." </i><span style="color: #42423b;">Date a Gamer seemed dead, at least in London;</span><i><span style="color: #42423b;"> </span> </i>the adult hookup version, </span><a href="http://shagagamer.com/" target="_blank">ShagAGamer.com</a> seemed to have quite a lot of escorts, not a lot of real women looking for dates. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another, <a href="http://www.gamerdater.com/" target="_blank">GamerDater</a>, had one of the ugliest websites I've ever seen, and I struggled to find a date from it, or even get a response to a message. I choose to believe that's because it's a mostly console dating site, and I'm much more of a PC gamer. Ahem. Yep, that's the story I'm sticking to. Quite a few others - including Warcraft specific site World of Datecraft, and bizarre "pay girls to play games with you" site <a href="http://gamecrush.com/">Gamecrush</a> seem to have gone bankrupt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The best one I found was <a href="https://www.lfgdating.com/gamer-dating-blog/finally-an-authentic-real-wow-dating-site" target="_blank">LFG dating</a> - LFG being gaming slang for "Looking for Group". It's a small American site, but at least it seems to have real people on it. It's pretty basic, although slightly tweaked for a gaming audiences. For example, amongst your preferences for going out, there are boxes to check for "LAN parties" (where a bunch of people get together in a house and link their PCs together, a very 1990s phenomenon) and "LARPing it" (dressing up like a goblin and being hit with big rubber swords).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Having found a site that was at least alive, I commenced looking for my gaming lady. There was one problem - LFG doesn't have many Brits. Still, think back to the story of Phil and Alice, when they "met", he was in Aberdeen, and she was in Southampton. For this date, maybe it didn't matter where the lady was, at least in the first instance. Also, I'm a sucker for an American accent. So, a bit more looking, and I eventually struck up a conversation with a lovely Yankee lady.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I explained the whole blog thing, she was charmed, and thought it sounded like fun to go on a literally online date, where we'd play a game together, chat online, and see where that took us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For the date, she decided the most fun would be for us to spend an evening being chased around Chernarus, a zombie filled Eastern European shithole, the setting of rather <a href="http://www.dayzmod.com/">good indie computer game Day Z</a>. Or, as she'd have it, Day-Zee. The basic concept of this game is you rock up in a zombie filled wasteland with nothing but the shirt on your back and a gun that's so worthless it might as well be a kazoo, and then just do whatever you want, until you get eaten by Zombies or murdered by another player who wants to steal your boots. It's terribly, terribly realistic - you can freeze to death if you don't find a coat, break your bones, all that sort of thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or "whatever we wanted" would be to go on a date as survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse. Romantic, eh? So, we logged on at 8pm one Saturday evening, and started chatting while we tried to navigate our way to each other. I'll be totally honest, while I'd played DayZ before, she was much better than I was. By the time I actually got to the Orthodox Church we'd picked as a meeting point, I'd almost died about three times. I felt this was the online gaming date equivalent of turning up late with a huge egg stain on your tie. Still, we'd been chatting the whole time, and getting to know one another.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She was a single mum in Chicago, running a little cafe she'd bought with the cash she'd saved up in the military. We talked about a bunch of current affairs stuff - she was fascinated to meet a real-live journalist (Well, "meet", anyway). We talked about the USA, the Middle East, geopolitics and so on. She proclaimed it to be "pretty refreshing" to find someone she could talk to about politics without getting them getting bored.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We decided to push out into the world, try to find some decent guns and canned food. One of the nice things about DayZed (definitely, definitely Zed) is it's very persistent, so we knew we could log in at the same time and play together again. It *was* great fun, walking around an abandoned town at night, scavenging for firearms, trying to avoid zombies, all while getting to know one another. it did feel vaguely like we were the protagonists of a zombie movie - exactly the kind of fun fantasy experience gaming is meant to deliver.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We talked about her military career, her ex-husband, what it's like to be a woman in a male dominated environment. She told me a few chilling stories of the kind of sexist abuse she gets as a female gamer - the kind of thing you can find here at <a href="http://fatuglyorslutty.com/">Fat, Ugly or Slutty</a>, a website that exposes the sort of everyday abuse women get for beating people in computer games. Maybe it's not so surprising that the "date a gamer" websites are so dead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Indeed, as we started to investigate an abandoned farm, we came across one of the internet's archetypal douchebags, the thirteen year old boy in a high place with a sniper rifle. Fortunately, he was a bloody terrible shot, but the problem with the loud noises of a rifle is it brought an army of zombies down on us. Taking shelter in a barn, we realised if we went out outside, sooner or later he'd get us. Equally, if we stayed on the ground, we'd get eaten. She was a much better shot than I was - so, proper gent that I am, I gave her the last of our bullets for our Lee-Enfield rifle, and decided that I'd run out across the open ground, luring all the zombies over to our teenage tormentor. Hopefully, he'd see me coming, pop his head out, and she could waste him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"She said "Ok, decent plan, how will you deal with all the zombies then?" I said, "Well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it". I knew I was going to die. She knew I was going to die. But we did it anyway. I ran out, and against my own expectations, managed to get into the building with the sniper - while still pursued by a flesh eating moshpit. I dashed up the stairs, and had the satisfaction of surprising our sniper chum by getting behind him with a double-barrelled farmer's shotgun. I, of course, missed completely, despite being at point blank range and he chased me up on to the roof, where my date wasted him with a single shot to the head. It was a genuinely brilliant moment - we hooted and whooped and laughed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I picked up his massive tricked out sniper rifle from his cooling corpse, which turned out to have precisely zero bullets in it - which sort of explained why he hadn't killed me. Shit. This left me trapped in a building full of zombies, with no way out. Except jumping off the roof. Pumped up with thinking I was an action hero, I did exactly that, and broke both my legs. By this point, we were both crying with laughter at my spectacular ineptitude. She came over to me, and got the sniper rifle from me as I bled out, so at least I didn't die for nothing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was a great date - probably one of the best I've done, if I'm honest. The lady confirmed if it had been a real date, "I'd have kissed you at the end of the evening for sure. Even if you can't shoot for shit".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, only two left to do! Hoping to get the penultimate piece and the last ever date up next week...</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-59672021084187401522013-05-30T00:55:00.001-07:002013-05-30T00:56:43.094-07:00Date 25: My friends sold me to a Finnish Superwoman<div style="font-family: arial;">
<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So, I'm getting close to the end of the adventure, and starting to confront the very real possibility that I'll be single at the end of it, barring some sort of incredibly convenient narrative twist (but more on that later). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm also deep into making a quite difficult documentary film, and working on a number of big investigations and articles for newspapers, so my dating (and writing!) time is limited, despite the end being in sight. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">That said, when you start to get comments on your serious, proper articles like "</span><i style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I don't think it's too much to ask that you spend more time going on and writing about amusing dates and less time investigating large-scale wastage of public money. Priorities, man" ... </i><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">you know you have to get back in the game.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So, like anyone flailing around in this sort of situation, I turned to my friends for help. Fortunately, there's a website set up for just that situation - <a href="http://www.mysinglefriend.com/" target="_blank">My Single Friend</a> (MSF).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The idea is, "we" (we all being all the smug married happy people in the world) all have that one friend who is single and you can't understand why. Or, more likely, you totally understand why this hapless goon is single, but are willing to lie to a stranger in order to make up the numbers at your exquisite dinner parties. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The gimmick, and the difference between it and other sites is you don't write your profile, your mates do. This avoids the crushing humiliation of actually writing yet another dating profile, plus makes online dating less of a solitary activity, and more of a fun thing you do with friends.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I'd heard only good things about the site, so I was looking forward to trying it. It's popular among ladies - partly because it's a good way of bonding with and actually helping a single depressed mate over a bottle of Lambrini, but also partly because it's quite hard to get someone to fill out the profile unless you really are friends with them. Getting even a good friend to actually follow through on writing it is quite hard - it's surprisingly difficult to convince someone to write a 400 word essay about why you're great, no matter how many times you've held their hair back while they are sick by a Bristol Kebab van. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The reason that makes it popular is the requirement to actually have some friends (and the fact it's a paid site) acts as a good sieve through which the neanderthal misogynist element that hangs around the periphery of most dating sites is filtered out. In case you're late to the blog, here's a <a href="http://i.imgur.com/JfNI0ii.png" target="_blank">good recent example of that sort of thing</a>, via the excellent Ms. Holly Brockwell. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Mind you, that might not always work. I think my favourite MSF anecdote came from a friend in telly, who found herself very drawn to a man on the site, after he was written up beautifully by a lovely female friend of his called Zelda. After about 5 dates, the friend asked the man, who she had by then fallen for quite heavily, "when am I going to meet Zelda?" The bloke rather shamefacedly admitted she'd already met Zelda - because he'd made Zelda up. However, the friend forgave him, and reader, she married him. Maybe I should just cut out the middle man and have "Zelda" write my profile too.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">"She" could mention how I'm just like Ernest Hemingway, except with the body of a bronzed greek god. Or, you know, maybe be a little more honest. However, I (perhaps foolishly, as things turned out) decided not to cheat. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, I have a wide group of friends who have been following the blog since the beginning, all of whom have been clamoring to help out. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">The question was to whom should I entrust the responsibility? This was, after all, the dating equivalent of giving away one of that pair of keys you use to fire nuclear weapons at Russia. As an aside, I've always imagined the British versions of those keys would be a bit shit - that the person handing them over would say "Oh, you have to wiggle them a bit to make them work. There's a knack to it. Try some Vaseline."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I sat down and tried to figure out who should I anoint as my herald. A male friend? A female friend? A gay friend or a straight friend? Someone I knew from work? From University? From School? An arch-leftie? A Swivel-eyed Tory? </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">A relative?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">No, scratch that. It should never be a relative. Firstly, if I wanted to go down that route there's <a href="https://www.thejmom.com/">The J-Mom.com </a>(where your Jewish mother writes your profile), and secondly, I'd spoken to one friend who told me her sister had written her a profile saying "Well, she likes tupperware". Hardly enticing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">A single person might know the dating scene better, but a happily married person might be better at actually knowing what people who settle down are looking for. Decisions, decisions. Egalitarian that I am, I let anyone who wanted to write me a profile do one. This is how I, (Sigh), ended up with 5 profiles on My Single Friend.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: arial;">
<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">One thing I realised fairly early on was that some of your friends should definitely not be writing your profile, even if they aren't related to you. The key sign will be, that person is a dick. There was one profile, written by the male model chum <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/date-eleven-worlds-only-other-guardian.html" target="_blank">I've mentioned before</a>, which led with <b>"Do you love to laugh? And fuck? Then Willard is the man for you!"</b> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I mean, yes, I was looking for a woman who enjoyed both laughter and sexual congress - that is to say, "a female human" - but I could see that this wasn't a profile that was going to work. Or was it? He's much more successful with women than I am. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Once, a few years back, we were standing in a nightclub toilet, when in walks an attractive lady. He says "You realise this is the gent's toilet, right?" She replies "Yeah, I know". He says "So what are you doing in here then?" She says "Looking for a man like you". He smiles, gestures at a toilet cubicle. She smiles. They then depart into it to get naked. I was pretty astounded at the time; indeed, years later I'm still astounded. Then again, I think there's a reason he pulls in Nightclub toilets and I don't. I have different charms, lets say. Ones less obviously displayed in a muscle vest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">I suppose that's the nature of online dating in a way. It's best for people like me who are a good at being charming in print. A well-written dating profile is the closest I'm going to get to a push-up bra for a good sense of humour, or a tight pair of jeans for being well read and interesting. Handing over the rights to show that off to someone else felt odd, especially if they seemed to be screwing it up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">You are also relying on your friends to not say something unflattering about you. And lets face it, they know you well enough to know <u>all</u> the unflattering things about you. Some of them are honest enough to say those things, the damn fools. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Another of my profiles, written by a smug married couple, included the line "He's lovely, brilliantly chaotic, always dropping everything to rush off on some sort of adventure...that means he's not the most reliable of people. He missed our wedding!" Thanks guys. Way to make me sound like a good bet. You might as well have written "AVOID AT ALL COSTS - DEADBEAT DAD IN THE MAKING". </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">They did at least have a big section on what a good cook I am, so at least the kids will get well fed on the one weekend in four that I see them. Of course, I probably would have had to sell their beds to pay the rent that week or something. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, you're not completely at the mercy of your friends. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">You get a right to reply at the bottom of the friend's profile - where I could point out I'm not some sort of cataclysmically unreliable chancer (anymore). My excuse was pretty much that there was a different Willard, an evil Willard, but I killed him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">What you basically need is someone who knows what a single woman on a dating site is looking for. And someone who likes you enough they are willing to </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">l̶i̶e̶</span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"> gloss over your flaws.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Perhaps unsurprisingly, that came from a single female friend - in this case my long suffering chum Janine. Yes, the lass I was<a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/date-one-love-bites.html" target="_blank"> talking to on facebook chat at the start of this blog</a>. Janine wrote a profile that was appealing enough I wrote my right to reply saying "<span style="font-style: italic;">Well, I pretty much agree with Janine, to be honest." </span></span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Janine, by the way, is very much one of those people I haven't got the slightest idea why she's single. Well, to be fair, she *does* love country and western music. But, if you can see past that flaw, (or, god forbid, share it) and if you're an exceedingly handsome, charming man, preferably Irish, who is reading this, and fancies a date with her, drop me a line via the blog, and I'll see what I can do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So, all of the profiles were running, and I sat back and waited. They all generated interest. The male model's profile did, to be fair, attract quite a few women with a serious amount of cleavage, very few of whom could spell. Janine's was by far the best. Within a week of turning it on, I'd spent the money to get a full account, and arranged a date with a stunning Scandinavian lady. Well, I *think* Finland counts as Scandinavia, anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">She - slightly bizarrely - invited me as her date to a dinner her company was holding on HMS Belfast, which is an old battleship (well, heavy cruiser) moored near Tower Bridge. Now, normally, I think dinner first dates are a bad idea, as it's much harder to escape quickly if things go wrong. However, she seemed nice enough, so I thought what the hell. When was I next going to get the chance to meet a beautiful woman on a battleship? It's not often you get to go on a date where the venue is festooned with 6" guns. I was a little worried this might have ended up another one of those super weird dates - battleship, foreigner, work do all rang alarm bells, but it was fine in the end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">It was quite fun - we ended up arriving early, sharing sparkling wine, and spent most of the evening chatting happily, with only occasional smalltalk with other guests about other things. We chatted about Finland - I surprised her by knowing quite a bit about the Finnish concept of Sisu, which is a basically untranslatable nordic concept, all about being tough and stoic while terrible things happen. I didn't know that it could come in good and bad varieties, and that a cowardly person could be described as having "Bad Sisu", which had a Finnish word which I can't recall and even if I could probably couldn't find all the accents required to type it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Inevitably, the nature of My Single Friend means you end up talking about the person who recommended you. She'd been recommended by her smug married sister - but of course the conversation turned to why if Janine thought I was so great, isn't she dating me? Well, sometimes you can like a person, without there being any spark of romance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Which sadly was also true of this date. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">She was very sporty - into snowboarding, hang-gliding, running marathons and rock climbing. It's fair to say, I'm not really into any of those things, as I'm not James Bond. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">She lamented the shortage of well-read, successful, interesting men who love all those things, and I sympathised, all though I suspect to be good at all of those things you'd need to not sleep very much, or possess a great deal of Sisu. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">She was certainly all of the above, so presumably there's some eugenically perfect chap (currently, no doubt climbing a mountain while reading Camus' L'Etrangere) out there for her. </span><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">However, it certainly isn't me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">So back to the wasteland, and once more on my own...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Next week, Willard tries Warcraft dating through <a href="https://www.lfgdating.com/" target="_blank">LFGDating</a> and Chat-roulette style random dating from <a href="https://www.doingsomething.co.uk/start/?utm_expid=41820584-5&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.doingsomething.co.uk%2Fstart%2F" target="_blank">Doing Something</a>... and then the week after, the big finale!</i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-74098736228591888242013-05-15T17:15:00.001-07:002013-05-16T06:11:49.967-07:00Date 24: The Mix Tape Scientist<br />
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I've done some strange dates in my time. However, without doubt,
this was the strangest evening thus far.<o:p></o:p><br />
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It all started quite promisingly. My friend Martin, who
writes about science and things for the Guardian, invited me to this scientist
dating thing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The idea was it was a speed dating event, for scientists. As
well as the dating, there were a series of quite fun sounding experiments in
human relationships. You were going along to simultaneously meet people
interested in science and do science at the same time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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So, for example, once they'd done all of the speed dating
blindfolded so things were completely based on your conversation; another time
they'd done a thing with motion capture suits and body language. It sounded
like a fun, interesting night out, and maybe a good way to meet the kind of
intimidatingly intelligent lady I'm attracted to. Ideally a doctor - I mean,
what better way to make my Jewish mum proud?</div>
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It was being held in a Trade Union Working Men's hall in
deepest darkest east London. I probably should have looked at the phrase
"Trade Union Working Men's Hall" and realised this probably wasn't
the event for me. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I got off the tube and started to wend my way through the
narrow streets. The bustling markets gave way to deserted streets, which gave
way to row after row of boarded up terraced houses. The neighborhood was like a
demilitarised zone.Eventually, after about 15 minutes walk, I got to the
working mens club. It was like a bunker - huge oak doors reinforced with steel,
steel bars over all the windows. Inside it was a glum place, all peeling paint,
tattered home-made flyers for discos in 2010 and fused sets of fairylights. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Downstairs, in the basement "Ballroom", there were
a set of plastic chairs, a bar where a burly barmaid with a beehive was serving
beer, and a gigantic heart, crudely fashioned out of tinsel. Not the most
promising venue. It had the air of a Butlins holiday camp in a fallout shelter.
And not a ritzy fallout shelter either.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Two cheery, exceptionally enthusiastic women greeted me,
checked my ticket, and gave me a massive sticker with my name on it. Because
nothing says cool like name labels! A few minutes of chatting to them revealed
to me this wasn't just going to be fun, it was going to be SCHEDULED FUN! You
can't have fun without a timetable, right? It was about this point that Martin,
demonstrating the renowned reliability of Guardian journalists, texted me to
cancel. I was on my own. Fucking lefty bastards.<o:p></o:p></div>
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People started drifting in. There were a bunch of pretty
attractive women, and a bunch of male scientists. I'm not saying they lived up
to a particular stereotype, but there was only one other bloke who looked like
he, rather than his mum, bought his clothes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anyway, looking at the schedule, we had a half-hour lecture
on the psychology of dating from an expert, then an experiment invoving looking
at objects we'd brought with us that summed up our personality, then the speed
dating. We took our seats and our man with the PhD got started into his
lecture. Not only did he habitually clear his throat to such an extent I thought he might be trying to pronounce words in one of those Eastern European languages that Stalin banned, the material he delivered was a straight lift from the pages of the Game. </div>
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It went a bit like this:<o:p></o:p></div>
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"<b>Hruumphh. Ummmm</b> Hi. I, ummm, I'm like, writing my PhD on
the secrets of <b>Ahhruumphhh....ruurummppph</b><b>hharrhhhmmmmppph</b> a group of
fascinating geniuses. Men who describe themselves as Ahhrrruumpppphhhh pickup
artists." </div>
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<Pause, flip through dense Powerpoint slides, pause to
visibly rub himself, continue></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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His PhD was in looking at the bible of the
Rape Jedi and seeing if it was true. He described women like fish
in a Jack Cousteau movie - strange, mysterious, unknowable creatures of the
deep - and I could tell there hadn't been a lot of field research on his part.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It was so strange, for the first five minutes I thought it
might be character comedy or performance art. There was no analysis of whether
all the tricks to attract women were true or not, just verbatim repetition of
the Rules of the Game, accompanied by a Powerpoint covered in spangles and
glitter. The Powerpoint was incredible - the sort of thing an eleven year old
girl might design after an afternoon of watching My Little Pony while overdosing on Skittles.<o:p></o:p></div>
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After that five minutes, it dawned on me that he was TOTALLY
SERIOUS. He wasn't pretending to be a weird academic
studying a self-help book as though it was Marx - he was the real deal. There
was no diversion into what might work for women on men, despite the 50/50 male female ratio. Just half hour an
hour of how to manipulate and deceive the ladies, delivered by a man who had
"I want a Fritzl dungeon" written all over him. I was seriously
worried that at any moment he might flip to a slide of the glittery suits he'd
made from his victim's skins or something.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Despite the horrified looks from the organisers and most of
the audience, he ignored signals to stop, and just plowed on with the full
lecture. At the end, he got to the end of his presentation, and asked
"<b>Ahhrhahhhump</b>...Any questions?"<o:p></o:p></div>
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There was a moment of silence, and I put up my hand. He
pointed to me, and I asked "Isn't this - and the whole pickup artist scene
- all just weird misogynist bullshit?" He didn't really get a chance to
answer as there was a spontaneous round of applause from the ladies. We then
broke for drinks, where everyone expressed shock and dismay at the guest
speaker's performance, then we all launched into looking at the objects we'd
all brought with us. The men looked at the women's objects, and vice versa. I'd brought my BBC issue flak jacket, which was misidentified loudly by someone as a "fishing vest". Wrong kind of rugged manly appeal.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This might have been interesting, but mid-way through this,
a group of rowdy seventy year old working men insisted on pushing into the
venue, and sat in the corner in a group, drinking bitter and heckling the
nerds. One had his wife with him, who sat at separate table, playing patience.
Maybe married life isn't all it's cracked up to be.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The one object that really caught my eye was an old school
mix-tape. I hadn’t actually seen a cassette tape in ages; and for people of a
certain age, mixtapes are the sweetest gift. I picked it up, and was pleased to
see that the person who had brought it had superb taste in late 90’s Britpop. The game was afoot.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, the speed dating kicked off, and we started to
rotate around the tables. The women were all interesting, but seriously
underwhelmed by the quality of the men. “It's like dating the characters, rather
than the cast, of the Big bang theory”, said one woman. <o:p></o:p></div>
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After a bit of hunting, I found the mixtape lady. We sat
down, got to chatting. She was impressed I'd guessed hers was the mixtape, and she'd pegged the flak jacket was mine right away. She was a teacher – observant, pretty, interesting, great taste in
music, but regretting coming to the scientist dating thing immensely. I asked
her why and she replied “The last bloke was picking his nose and his bum at the
same time as he walked over.”</div>
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That’s not a bad epitaph to the night as a whole. As soon as
the speed dating was over, everyone rushed for the door, despite the fact that
a really good comedy duo, <a href="http://www.robinandpartridge.com/index.htm">Robin
and Partridge</a> were booked to play. I think everyone was desperate to avoid
being stranded in the mutant haunted wastes of East London before the last tube
left. I stayed and watched the desultory spectacle of two great comedians
performing to an audience of grumpy drunk heckling old men before I left.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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As I sat slightly shellshocked on the train home, I totted
it up. I’d gone to a science experiment in a bunker, where the MC was a misogynist
obsessed with glitter, which had been gate crashed by rowdy pensioners. Still,
I lived in hope that the mixtape lady would email me and we could go on a date
for more than four minutes. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Sadly, she didn’t get in touch – but these days, I'm pretty relaxed about not being everyone's cup of tea. For all the
strangeness, it wasn't a bad ego boost – I realised that compared to some men
out there, I’m quite the catch…<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-70373563551752957122013-05-10T10:00:00.000-07:002013-05-10T10:00:19.106-07:00Date 23: The Data-driven Dater<span style="color: #222222; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, I've left some of the bigger dating sites, the ones advertised on the telly, to near the end. I actually quite like E-Harmony's TV ad (I'm quite a fan of quirky brunettes in floral dresses), and it had a reputation for being the one people use when they were in the market to settle down. Seeing as that's what I'm after, it should have seemed like a logical choice for near the start, right?</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">Well, confession time, I actually thought I'd have girlfriend by now - and E-Harmony had never really appealed to me, quirky brunettes or no. It seemed like the most mechanical version of online dating. People told me the profile took forever to complete - one of my mates described it as <a href="http://boredalonegeeky.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/imperfect-harmony.html" target="_blank">"E-Self-Harmony"</a>. It's all based on one of these bizarre pseudoscientific personality tests - you know, the kind of thing your school made you do when you were thirteen, to tell you what career you were suited to. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The ones that never told you you'd be a "motorcycle daredevil" like you hoped, but instead gave you something you definitely didn't want to do, like "Mainline railway station bootblack", "Piscine Agronomist" or "Council environmental waste management officer". I've always wondered if there are some people who come out of those tests with results like "Crimelord" or "Feckless Layabout" or "Tragic Date Blogger".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I say, I'd heard the stories of how bad the profile was to fill out, but nothing had quite prepared me for the full horror of it. It's charmless and takes ages. No word of a lie, there must be over 300,000 questions to answer. Well, really about 300, but it feels ENDLESS. Each page of 20-30 questions ticks the profile completion up about 2% at a time. It took me about an hour of box checking to get about half-way through, I foolishly went and made a coffee, only to return to my computer and find the whole thing had crashed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's akin to applying for a job at a major corporation, or being asked about your personality and dating desires by a particularly rude and brusque Dalek. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFOdBEjIll2_qqxgisZ89yIM-9QgkL9YAr3hmztU7Nx-JzSk1_b2ecQJBQUrezI96oTTA55zKzp4rL4eJg314v42CGM7YW3Od3sEE3v2CaIFVjmQVpX4BWe-ypXSU4JXLSe5FXsltFoiv1/s1600/You+must+respond.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFOdBEjIll2_qqxgisZ89yIM-9QgkL9YAr3hmztU7Nx-JzSk1_b2ecQJBQUrezI96oTTA55zKzp4rL4eJg314v42CGM7YW3Od3sEE3v2CaIFVjmQVpX4BWe-ypXSU4JXLSe5FXsltFoiv1/s320/You+must+respond.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I could help but read these warnings in my best HAL 5000 voice</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also, some of the questions are very odd. For example, at one point, I was asked to rate my rationality on a scale of 1-7, from "not rational at all" to "I am very rational'. Another asks you to rate "how often you suspect you are being plotted against" from "always" to "never".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I mean, who ticks one out of seven for both of those? Presumably, if you're sitting there with borderline personality disorder, hallucinating unicorns that are scheming against you, online dating is probably not your bag.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I returned to the computer, and started again. Every now and again, it will flash up little messages, encouraging you to keep going. </span></span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">"This process may seem long, but I believe it will be so worthwhile for you--just as it has been for so many others before". Yeah, right.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">By now, it was not unlike those grueling interrogations you see in films. You know the ones, where the Gestapo have tied the hero to a chair, are shining a bright light in his eyes and demanding to know where the resistance are hiding. Of course, the Gestapo aren't asking you to rate where the resistance are on a bloody scale of 1-7 from "almost never in caves" to "In the caves right now!".</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Finally, I got to the end of the questionnaire, but before I could rise from my knees and call out "</span></span><a href="http://there.are.four.lights/" style="color: #222222; line-height: 24px;">THERE.ARE.FOUR.LIGHTS</a><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">!", I realised that I </span></span><i style="color: #222222; line-height: 24px;">still</i><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"> had to go through all the normal rigmarole of uploading pictures and being charming and so on. And then they presented me with the bill for being interrogated and my jaw dropped.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E-Harmony is <i>by far</i> the most expensive dating site I have used. It's a quite astonishing £34.95 for a month. You can make it cheaper per month by forking over more cash - you can pay £75 for three months, £90 for six months, or £120 for a year. Of course, yes you are getting it cheaper by buying in bulk, but you are also effectively betting on yourself to fail. It's only good value to take out a year's membership if you think you're too much of a loser to find love in six months.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, looking at my own success, or lack thereof, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea. Equally part of the appeal of the site is that it's for people who are really serious about dating. No-one is spending hours doing a psychological profile and then spending £35 a month if all they want is casual sex, when OK Cupid will give them that for free, and even classier places like Guardian Soulmates and My Single Friend will do it to a classier audience for £10 a month. No, if you go on E-Harmony, you are seven out of seven SERIOUSLY WORRIED ABOUT DYING ALONE.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Possibly somewhat cockily, I signed up for a month's membership, assuming I could find at least one person in my first month of trying. Of course, once again, E-harmony attempted to thwart me. As opposed to other sites, where you can browse the entire membership, E-harm only shows you your matches, and shows you them on a slow drip feed, maybe one or two a day. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">My first couple of weeks, I wasn't attracted to anyone. I started to wonder if maybe I should have shelled out more money on a longer subscription or maybe I had been overly liberal on clicking on boxes like "I don't care about the looks of my partner", which made me feel less like a Nazi while going through the interrogation, but presented me with a cavalcade of warty trouts to date.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I mean, we all sort of wish it wasn't true that we judge attractiveness at least partially on looks, but I was depressingly finding it to be quite true of myself. I mean, I'm not that picky, and I'm no oil painting myself, but Christ, some of these women all but had a calliope organ playing in the background while tophatted Victorian punters rolled up to leer at them. Even when you are offered a match who isn't some kind of ghastly curiosity, there's no way of telling if they're still on the site.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Finally, three weeks in, I got a date. Phew. We arranged to meet in a <a href="http://www.brewdog.com/bars/camden" target="_blank">trendy bar in Camden</a>; a place I rather like that does excellent craft beer (including the strongest beer in the world, which is <a href="http://www.asylum.com/2010/07/22/its-the-worlds-strongest-most-expensive-beer-inside-a-squi/" target="_blank">served inside a taxidermied squirrel</a>) and wonderful cheeseboards. The girl I was meeting worked locally, and she worked in "data analysis". We'd chatted a few times on the phone before I met her, which struck me as slightly odd.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">She turned up, and was brilliantly geeky. Glasses, curly brown hair. A genuine quirky brunette, so it seems I can abandon that ASA complaint. She was really, really wonderfully quirky - it was like being on a date with a female <a href="http://www.channel4.com/news/nate-silver-uk-voters-too-sensible-for-ukip" target="_blank">Nate Silver</a>. We chatted science, and numbers, and graphs. She explained the difference between an infographic and a diagram. Normally, none of these topics are particularly exciting, but her obvious enthusiasm for the subject carried the conversation through.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Anyway, about twenty minutes into the date, she asks me about the blog, then asks me about my "system". I reply "I don't really have one, I just date people who seem cool". She looked at me like I'd said "I eat the hearts of my foes, to gain their delicious courage."</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">"YOU DON'T HAVE A SYSTEM?!" she replied, and bam, out comes her Macbook. She boots up a spreadsheet, and highlights my name on it. I realise I am looking at my entry in someone else's <i>dating spreadsheet</i>. There are multiple colours, multiple tabs. The data lass explains that she lists everyone who she has contacted; everyone who has contacted her; the progress of every conversation.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">She responds to messages she likes, Googles you to find out what you do and if that accords with the profile you've written ("Photo analysis for height is quite hard; but doable"). Then, she calls a couple of times, to "have a real conversation, make sure you aren't weird". Then once you've been messaged, googled and called, she arranges a date with you. Apparently, she'd broken one of her rules by meeting me somewhere new, but "you seemed charming enough I felt you probably had good taste".</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Only about one man in ten makes it through the "system" to get a date; oh, and of course, there's a tab for the men she's dating. Now, I suspect there are two camps on this sort of thing - the sort of person who says "OF COURSE YOU HAVE A SPREADSHEET FOR DATING! By Crom, you'll be telling me you don't itemise your receipts, next!".</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">And then there are people like me, who find the whole mechanisation of the process faintly terrifying. While I enjoyed my data-driven date - which included glasses of the world's second strongest beer, "Sink the Bismark" (which sadly isn't served out of a model Nazi Battleship), and a long discussion about the worst genre of music known to man (I hadn't even heard of Viking metal before - apparently it's "the worst of hero metal, black metal and folk metal combined") - I was pretty glad to escape back into the pre-industrial world of Artisanal Organic dating.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Or, at least as artisanal and homemade as online dating can ever be...</span></span></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-76896660440553001512013-05-01T17:44:00.000-07:002013-05-02T01:03:09.730-07:00Date 22: Dating with your HedgehogA close friend of mine (<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/28-dates-later/2013/04/28-dates-later-willard-foxton-part-twelve-crazy-bland-date" target="_blank">she of kinky sex boots fame</a>)
recently asked an interesting philosophical question: “Do you think if you’d
gone on 21 totally normal dates, and not written the blog, you’d still be
single now?” It’s an interesting question, but I suppose I’m a bit too far down
the rabbit hole now to go back.<br />
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Indeed, it’s just starting to sink in that any date I go on
in the future will probably find out about the blog, will probably read it.
Hopefully they’ll like it. Maybe I should spend more time talking about how I
have the sort of incredible sculpted body normally only observed on ancient Greek
statuary, with perfect buns of pure Athenian marble. Of course, that would be, as we say in journalism, “a lie”. Maybe I
should mention my incredibly cute pet?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Dm3iaTv_-ppgbOi00kJIZfSo-rfLMfa5MOWLr4n3gnkpifiZFjKvicMa81hFSg0N4x22edFAQ6FuVOSpN6mGVdxE4-2CH3pWUoCCSA59dn7l2FoEqb35-kTsxzPH2r1DFT_dki-BNMxE/s1600/hog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Dm3iaTv_-ppgbOi00kJIZfSo-rfLMfa5MOWLr4n3gnkpifiZFjKvicMa81hFSg0N4x22edFAQ6FuVOSpN6mGVdxE4-2CH3pWUoCCSA59dn7l2FoEqb35-kTsxzPH2r1DFT_dki-BNMxE/s320/hog.jpg" width="304" /></a></div>
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Yes, I keep a pet hedgehog, and she is lovely. Most people’s
attitude to the little beast are pretty much summed up by this exchange:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtclX8ysJ0kShTHaY3kxS7C87Qlh2KPOU0lZ-ONDqtQHNONXLkOvOuGx2gZE_TpRCNGJvxwrZRnm_88dpNfAmzBUASmKJpKs51L2n1kr7PyaFFntclLmP_gI5icWzTrnkClHGFIV0rbMDA/s1600/Sazza.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtclX8ysJ0kShTHaY3kxS7C87Qlh2KPOU0lZ-ONDqtQHNONXLkOvOuGx2gZE_TpRCNGJvxwrZRnm_88dpNfAmzBUASmKJpKs51L2n1kr7PyaFFntclLmP_gI5icWzTrnkClHGFIV0rbMDA/s400/Sazza.jpg" width="382" /></a></div>
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How, indeed, am I still single?<o:p></o:p></div>
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It often comes up on dates. The hedgehog, not the
singleness. I mean, being single is normally the default for dating, right?
Most people are, it must be said, charmed by the hedgehog. People are often
surprised you can keep them as pets. They’re not spiky unless they get upset.
On top, it’s not much different to touching a hairbrush, but they have lovely
fluffy bellies that they enjoy having stroked. They say pets are like their
owners, so draw your own conclusions about that, I suppose.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So, anyway, I recently went on a date with a very attractive
lady. I was a little unsure of exactly how attractive she was, as she had one
of those classic online profile pictures where a key part of her was obscured -
the lower part of her face, by a wine glass, in this case. I’ve learned to
become a little wary of obscured picture like this, but what the hell, I
thought.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We were due to meet at a lovely middle-eastern place for
breakfast. I was about half-way there when she texted me to say “<i>I realise this is very weird, but I've woken
up with a lost voice. So weird. Tea hasn't made any difference. I feel 100%
well so if you're chatty I can come and listen and smile?”</i> It was weird,
but I, loving the sound of my own voice, thought, “Why not?”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So, we met up, and she was not only just as attractive as
the picture hinted, but also, fortunately, she was able to speak, albeit in a
husky tone. We chatted over coffee and shakshuka (it’s a lovely North African
breakfast of eggs, peppers and onions) and got along brilliantly. She was smart,
beautiful and fascinating, super-successful, all the things I want in a woman.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I was really excited, all ready to ask for a second date,
and then she asked me what I was doing for the rest of the Saturday. I answered
honestly that my only plan was going to try to teach my hedgehog some tricks - nothing
exciting, no blazing hoops to jump through, just how to run on a big wheel.<o:p></o:p></div>
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She gave me a look as though I’d said I was going to go home
and tend to my shrine made entirely of human skulls. “You keep a hedgehog?! Why
on EARTH would you want to do that? Why would you want to keep a nocturnal
burrowing vicious little spiky monster like that?” I tried to explain that hedgehogs
are lovely really, but she was having none of it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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She HATED animals. Hated them with an almost unbridled
passion. Couldn’t understand why anyone would want a pet. She said that animals
were only for eating; and then provided me with a recipe for cooking and eating
my lovely little pet alive. It involved rolling the hog in clay, then baking
it. Apparently, when you shatter the clay with a hammer, the spines come out
and you can devour the juicy hedgehog meat inside. She’d got the recipe from
gypsies, apparently.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s fair to say after that after “I hate your pet so much I’d
kill it in a cruel way and the eat it in front of you”, a second date wasn’t on
the cards. She hated animals, I love them. Irreconcilable. I guess it made me
realise that I’d find it really hard to live with someone who didn’t like
animals, which I’d never really realised about myself before.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Was I really enough of an animal lover to go on <a href="http://www.petloverdating.co.uk/singles.php?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=pets_and_animals&utm_term=pet%20dating&gclid=COCt4c379bYCFZLKtAoduwYAKg">Pet
Lover dating</a>? While I like animals, I didn’t feel I could date the sort of
person that would, for example, buy their <a href="http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2013/programme/event/super-dogs">dog
a super-hero costume</a> or <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/babymantis/30-lucrative-occupations-for-hedgehogs-1opu">humiliate
their hedgehog on buzzfeed</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Within a week of dating the animal-loather, I got the
opportunity to find out how a date with an animal lover would go. I went on a
date with a woman who loved her Dachshund so much we’d have to go to a dog friendly
pub, as the dog apparently couldn’t bear being left alone. We met in the pub,
and in she came with her absolutely beautiful little Dachshund puppy, who was
incredibly, incredibly cute.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The girl in question was incredibly glam and perfectly
turned out, with incredible Hollywood award show hair. She worked in publicity,
and fortunately, in the part of incredibly high end entertainment publicity
where taking your dog with you everywhere was seen as a positive advantage. We got talking about work, the media, and of course, our pets, and dating them.<br />
<br />
She too had encountered a date where she accidentally unmasked an animal-loather, and here's the really weird part: that bloke had offered her a recipe for cooking and eating her dachshund. It seems to be the go-to move for anyone who discovers their date has a pet they aren't keen on. It must be said, there is an acceptable middle ground of "I just don't like pets", before you break out the<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/8818975/Hugh-Fearnley-Whittingstall-eating-puppy-meat-is-no-worse-than-pork.html" target="_blank"> Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall recipes</a>.<br />
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Anyway, the fabulous dog owner and I got on very well, and crucially, the dog liked me enough that he kept trying to shag my arm all through the date, which was a new experience.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So, there you go. Another date, another unfulfilling sexual adventure…:)</div>
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<i>No blog is complete
without at least one post apologising for the lateness of a post. In this case, there’s
been lots of news this week, and I’m also writing a really difficult piece for
the <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/04/introducing-mental-health-week" target="_blank">New Statesman’s mental health week</a>. It’s hard to do “searing honesty about mental
illness” and “quirky dating humour" in the same week. Hopefully I'll get to E-Harmony early next week.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-30853580638587426532013-04-25T23:37:00.002-07:002013-04-26T02:00:08.377-07:00Date 21: The Home-town show<br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">After my last date, I decided to take it easy for a bit, and take my foot off the dating blog gas. I've resisted using the phrase "retreating to lick my wounds", as it would be all too distressingly graphic, but, in essence, that was what I was going to do.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Now 75% of the way through my Internet dating adventure, I'd learned a great deal about exactly how the process works, in a major city, at least. London is a hive of dating activity, catering to every possible need, taste or desire. As tempting as things like heavyweight <a href="http://www.boxitbootcamp.com/boxdate.php" target="_blank">Date Boxing</a> sounded, my own desire to remain uninjured suggested that what I needed was a change of pace.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">As a veteran of London dating, I was starting to wonder what online dating is like outside of the capital. Anecdotally, lots of my friends who live in assorted small towns had told me it wasn't much good; a friend who'd tried it in the fishing village I come from said, in his inimitably earthy style, "it's only bifters or bitter single mums on the web. I date in bigger, cooler places, like Ashford or Maidstone."</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Astute observers of British geography may note that ugly Kentish commuter towns like Ashford and Maidstone are neither "big", nor "cool". My own home town is a tiny, quaint village called Hythe. Our main exports are fish, seaside tat, and happy memories of 99 Flake ice cream by the beach.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">There's one nice-ish restaurant, one nice coffee shop, a 1000 year old church, a 3ft deep canal that was expected to stop both Napoleon and Hitler, as well as eight dingy, interchangeable pubs. Once, we had a female Dolphin in the bay, that our clueless local paper named Dave, on the basis that all Dolphins are boys. It's not exactly a happening place.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">It was famously described as the fourth worst place to live in England in the book "Crap towns", whose authors said of it, "It's the sort of town where Ian Duncan-Smith is regarded as rather too liberal. The sort of town where incest rules to such an extent that men give themselves Father’s Day cards. Perhaps the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in Kent, Hythe is the place that makes nearby Folkestone look like Las Vegas." As a native, I can't say any of that is terribly unfair. Anywhere that makes a dump like Folkestone seem like an exciting metropolis has to be dreadful, right?</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It's quite picturesque & quaint though. Which is a polite way of agreeing with the above.</td></tr>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Friends who had tried online dating there told me that even when you logged on to the biggest dating sites you would personally know at least half the matches you were offered. Stories of the intense awkwardness of stumbling across work colleagues or friends with exaggerated or strange profiles proliferated. In one particularly hilarious example of the form, a chap falling foul of a world where you're identified by a user name like "HunkySuperBottom105", and pictured only as an oiled, muscular torso, ended up going on a date with his own brother by accident.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">However, seeing as pretty much everyone I know in my home town is happily married, and I'm 99% sure none of my sisters are on Grindr, it was probably pretty safe. Also, dating a local girl would make my mum very, very happy. It's always been her dream that I'll meet a "nice, little girl", move to Hythe, get a secure job with a good pension, and have babies. I have thus far failed on every count.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I decided to use Match.com for my hometown date. It's a pretty big site; one of the biggest. It's TV advertised, so I felt I had the best chance of meeting someone back home from it. I felt a little guilty using a free pass I blagged off a tube advert (at <a href="http://match.com/tube">match.com/tube</a>) to go on a date outside of London, but obviously not *that* guilty. The first thing I noticed was that out in the provinces, the average age of an online dater is considerably older than in London.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I'd set it to find women aged 25 to 40, and the vast bulk of the women were in the 36-40 range. There were a surprising amount of them, though, so it wasn't the barren wasteland I'd imagined. Fortunately - or unfortunately, as you might see it - my narrowing of my search radius to within ten miles of my home town provided only one lady living in Hythe.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I sent her a message and luckily, she replied, and was free the weekend I was down visiting the family. It's the best hit rate I've ever had on a site, but to be fair, in this particular incidence I was literally the last man on earth, so I probably shouldn't pat myself on the back too much.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">One slight complication was that when I suggested the one nice restaurant in town for our date, she pointed out she'd rather not go there, as it was where she worked. I offered to drive us to a nice gastro pub in the countryside, and she accepted. It was on.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">When I told my mum I was going on a date in Hythe, it was like I was listening to a greatest hits of Willard's mum's dating advice compilation. She started with the classic "You haven't told her you're a journalist, have you? Women want a man with a proper job," followed it with an extended B-side cut of"Why don't you settle down? You are thirty-three you know," and rounded off with a rare acoustic version of the feelgood classic "I'm getting older, I want to have more grandchildren, get a move on."</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I also didn't tell my mum where I was going on the date. This is because she is world-class embarrassing, and probably would have thought nothing of just turning up. Once, on meeting a girlfriend, my mother sized her up, looked the poor girl in the eye, and said in a thick Scottish burr, "Oh, you've got fine child-bearing hips!". Which is EXACTLY what every girl wants to hear.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">So, on the night of the date, I drove my car to the girl's house, knocked on the door at the appointed time, and her dad came to the door. It was almost exactly like being 17 again. She appeared quickly, and with a very forceful " BYE DAD", we were off. The 15 minute car journey with a complete stranger was a bit weird, especially once we started going down country lanes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">A low point on any date is when the other person turns to you and says, only half-joking, "You're not going to murder me, are you?" Fortunately, my window into what being a serial killer must be like was brief, as within seconds of her asking, the pub was in view.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">We parked the car, walked inside, had a lovely evening. She'd gone to the local girls grammar, then University, picked up a boyfriend, a house and a job up North, but all of those had gone sour at the same time. She'd run out of money before finding a new job or a new flat, so she'd returned home. That had been a year before, and after what sounded like a soul-destroying couple of months on the dole, she'd taken a job as a waitress.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">She was applying for other jobs, trying to, as she put it, "sort her life out". She asked me about how to get into the BBC and we had a brief careers chat. We had a shared passion for writing fiction, so weirdly ended up having a pretty academic chat about story structure.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">What became fairly apparent early on, was we didn't really have a passion for each other. It wasn't in any way unpleasant, just by the time we were getting her third wine and my third coke (driving, see) we'd pretty much established that we weren't romantically interested in each other. It's a relief when that feeling's mutual and everyone is grown up about it. Indeed, by the end of the evening, we were thinking of friends we could set each other up with.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I dropped her back at her house, drove back to mums, and parked the car. I quietly opened the door, and there was mum, waiting up for me. Seeing me home, alone, before midnight, she gave me an acid look, and exclaimed "Och, you blew it, didn't you?"</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Hmm, yeah mum, I guess I did.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><i>Normal service resumed next week with <a href="http://www.petloverdating.co.uk/singles.php?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=pets_and_animals&utm_term=pet%20dating&gclid=CI-Miu_b57YCFXMctAodCgUAog" target="_blank">Pet Lover dating</a> on Monday, and then a data-driven date from E-Harmony on Friday.</i></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-69944921693609477102013-04-16T18:00:00.001-07:002013-04-17T10:21:11.972-07:00Date 20: The [REDACTED] and the second painful injury<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I suppose at this point it's worth warning you that this blog post is the one that contains the most adult content thus far - if you're easily offended by amusing sleazy sex stories, please don't read beyond this point. Just watch this <a href="http://www.funnycatsite.com/videos/kitten_hates_electric_toothbrush.htm" target="_blank">video of a kitten fighting an electric toothbrush</a> and go about your business. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you're still here, best get yourself a cup of tea.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back? Good. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, anyway, where were we? Date 20? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It seemed inevitable that sooner or later, I was going to end up doing some sort of dating site that was centred around some sort of crazed fetish. I mean, you kept sending me links to things like <a href="https://fetlife.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Fetlife</a> ("For kinksters, by kinksters"), <a href="http://www.sploshdating.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Splosh dating</a> (for people who like pouring ooze on each other) or <a href="http://furrymate.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Furrymate</a> (for people who are turned on by anthropomorphic animals). On one hand, it did seem they might provide excellent blog material; on the other hand, I was never going to be able to have a lasting relationship with someone who wanted me to pour buckets of chocolate sauce on them while dressed as a leopard.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, despite my decision not to go on those sites, it seems, if Willard will not go to the perverts, the perverts will come to Willard. On regular dating sites, I get sent some mind meltingly strange requests and emails. One woman on OKCupid, who was married, sent me an email with a 5 point list of things she wanted to do me; normally, at this point I'd gloss over exactly what was on her depravity shopping list, but... (<a href="http://www.funnycatsite.com/videos/kitten_hates_electric_toothbrush.htm" target="_blank">LAST CHANCE TO ESCAPE TO KITTEN VIDEO</a> BEFORE SLEAZE AND HORROR) ...since I've given you enough chances to look away, it can basically be added up to her husband pissing on me while she choked me, while I was locked in a cage in their sex dungeon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That message ended in the most English way imaginable - the last line was "Do let me know if that sounds like your cup of tea", as though she'd just offered me church raffle tickets or something. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I politely declined, as, well, frankly, urine soaked homoerotic strangulation is not something I'm really down with, no matter how charming and bijou a cage I'm offered. I mean, I'm sorry, I find degradation a bit, well, <i>degrading</i>. The strangest bit of that whole business was after I politely declined her offer, she added me on Linkedin. The "How do you know Ms.X?" box firmly in the "other" category, there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, at least that lady was open and upfront about her particular kinks, which is a much better way to be. I'd much rather that came up in the initial email than it suddenly being sprung on you mid-way through any sort of physical act of love. Which, just for the record, secret kinksters, is not cool. Probably worth at least discussing it first. That said, there just seems to be a certain open minded type of online dater who just assumes their date will be cool with anything.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A female friend recently told me about a chap she met online, who she really liked, who on the third date she invited back to her place. They get inside, start having a bit of a pash, and before they've even taken their clothes off entirely, the man produces a huge strap-on cock from his smart leather satchel, and asks our dumbfounded girl to fuck him with it. Yes, he'd brought it with him, "just in case" - obviously a boy scout. Be prepared and all that. Needless to say, our heroine called a halt to proceedings, and bundled him out the door, woggle and all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, before I cut to the chase, and tell you nothing about Date 20, it's important to step back a few years, to provide a bit of context. About eight years ago, as a young, budding freelance journalist, I had one of my first ever assignments - interviewing a slightly shady property developer. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The editor of the god-awful magazine I was writing for - one of those glossies that gets pushed through your door with two fawning profiles, a recipe for treacle tarts and two hundred adverts for 6 bedroom mansions - mentioned that this developer, as well as carrying a prominent aristocratic title (always a bad sign) was widely rumoured to have murdered his wife by pushing her out of a helicopter into the sea.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not that anyone could prove anything, but there was a helicopter flight and a remarkably convenient spousal disappearance. So, I was sent to interview this bloke, and the editor mentioned that under no circumstances should I mention the rumours that he was a murderer. Just ask about the new houses, and the miraculous recovery from his 1980s "drug hell". But mostly about the houses. And accept chopper joyrides only at my own risk. 45 minutes tops, then out. Easy. If only I had listened.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, understandably nervous, I drove to this chap's country pile, and while there, interviewed the developer/murderer, avoided being murdered, and struck up a conversation with his remarkably attractive niece, who was visiting her uncle for the weekend. She and I got to chatting, then went to lunch. Lunch turned into drinks, drinks turned into dinner, dinner ended up as sex in her murderous uncle's house.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, this girl - a very proper, prim english girl, well brought up and so on - was quite into horse riding. On this occasion, she was on top, and she was riding me remarkably vigorously, giving me a fair idea of what winning the Grand National must be like, if you're a horse. At this point, it may be worth asking you if you know what a frenulum is? No? Also known as a banjo string? No? Well, suffice to say, it's the bit of skin that holds the skin around a man's penis to the rest of the penis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Suffice to say, it's not a thing you want to rip or tear. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Incidentally, I can almost literally feel the sympathetic pain of every man wincing as he's reading this. Bet you fuckers wish you'd watched that kitten video now, eh? Well, anyway, the pain you're imagining - it was at least that bad, if not worse. I immediately screamed for the girl to "Get off, Get Off! GET OFFF!!" and plunged my hands down to free my bleeding member. She, unaware of what had happened, looked terrified and said "what's wrong? What's wrong?!" before she caught sight of the gushing fountain of blood and immediately passed out into a dead faint.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, she's unconscious, I'm bleeding everywhere. Everywhere. Agonised, I crawled up the bed, and looked for something to staunch the flow of blood; the only thing to hand was a box of tissues on the bedside table. Of course, being quite a prim and proper household, it was one of those prim boxes of tissues where you can only pull one dainty tissue out at a time. So, instead of being able to instantly create a makeshift bandage from a wodge of kleenex mansize, it was more of a matter of pull, pull, pull,pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull - bandage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By this point, she was coming to, and she covered her eyes, not looking at me..."Oh god, what happened, I can't stand the sight of blood, sorry, I just passed right out, sorry sorry sorry Sorry!" I just begged her call an ambulance, as I literally thought I was dying. She grabbed a dressing gown, got up, and opened the door to go downstairs to use the phone, turned back round to say something (probably "Will you be ok?" or "Sorry!"), and caught sight of the blood leeching through the makeshift tissue bandage. I maintain, if they'd had proper tissues in that house, it never would have happened.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She instantly felt woozy again, started to collapse, and, gentleman that I am, I ran to catch her, dropping the bandage as I went. At the point I caught her, her murderous uncle came to the door to investigate the commotion, only to find me naked, covered in blood, holding his semi naked niece. His eyes met mine, and I blurted out "I can explain EVERYTHING."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He actually reacted better than I expected - in that he didn't instantly bundle me into his helicopter to commit another rotary-winged slaying. That's mostly because she came to, explained, we got an ambulance. Needless to say, we didn't have much of a relationship after that, and ever since, my penis, while now healed, has always been quite, well, fragile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So that's the context of Date 20. I have a fragile penis. There are ladies with unusual tastes in the world. Now, sooner or later I knew I was going to go on a date where something interesting happened, but the lady in question didn't give me permission to write it up in full. So I figure it's probably ok to tell you, dear reader, what happened, without going into any specifics of who the person was, what site she was from, or anything that could possibly link her to this blog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Suffice to say, after a very pleasant evening, we adjourned to my house. Without warning, this girl liked her foreplay very, very rough indeed, which I not at all comfortable with in the first place, even without factoring in my ahem, Achilles heel, if you'll forgive the term. After having to say, "No, sorry, I don't want to do that" a few times, she started giving me a handjob with the sort of gusto normally reserved for a Ukranian farmhand changing gears on the ancient soviet tractor on his collective farm. A request to be more gentle produced the sort of action normally required to change the gears in an elderly Citroen 2CV while driving it up a Provencal hill.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Needless to say, under this treatment, I'm sorry to say my penis broke. Not in the kind of disastrous fountain of blood of 8 years ago, not in some kind of nightmarish ice-lolly-snapped in the packet scenario, just a lot of pain, a little bit of blood, a bit of spooning and saying it was ok, "My penis is very fragile, it's not your fault", a discussion about how we probably weren't suited anyway, and then a doctor's visit for me in the morning. Followed by quite a few emails to get this compromise so I can share what happened with you lovely people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, so there you go. There was a 20th date, and I ended up getting injured, again. Ouch. It's tough, this dating lark. Now, I'm not sure whether to look on this as "my average is one injury worthy of showing off to the doctor every ten dates", or "I can usually go around eighteen dates between agonising injuries", but with only eight dates left to go, let's hope it's the latter,eh?</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-14031630576161747382013-04-12T02:22:00.001-07:002013-04-12T02:26:49.606-07:00Date 19: The New York Millionaire<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Now that I'm 2/3rds of the way through this experiment, I've realised something strange has happened to me. Whereas three months ago I was a complete online dating virgin, after 19 dates on 19 dating sites, I'm now regarded as something of a dating expert. I frequently get requests from friends to review their profiles, help them write messages and so on. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Leaving aside the ludicrousness of this as a proposition - I mean, if I was an expert at dating surely I'd have a girlfriend by now - it means I do have to sometimes give brutal advice. This has included having to type the phrases "I think women are scared off by the fact you dress like a Miami pimp" and "I'm afraid I think your messages display the sort of charm you'd expect from a Nazi propagandist". </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That said, I have also seen some people with messages, pictures and profiles which seem perfectly attractive to me, where the person in question doesn't seem to be having much luck. One of these people - a very successful lady in New York - rather depressingly told me "My girlfriends looking at my profile think I come across as too strong and too smart." Too strong and too smart? Neither of those seem like negatives to me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Indeed, my ideal woman would be strong and smart. My sort of idealised life in my mid forties would include me at home, writing brilliantly incisive columns in the morning, then cooking something from Observer Food Monthly in the afternoon for when the kids get home from school, before my high powered, strong smart wife gets home from her incredibly responsible, well paid job. Then, of course, we'd have a row about why I hadn't done the hoovering or something, but hopefully my excuse of "But I had to tell the nation how bad the Labour party are!" would placate her. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a writer who's a good cook, I've sort of unconsciously been building myself towards being the ideal stay at home dad for some time. The problem is finding the sort of woman who's in the market for a creative househusband. And that's where <a href="http://millionairematch.com/" style="color: #1155cc;">millionairematch.com</a> comes in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'd always assumed that millionaire dating sites were either places for sexually inadequate JP Morgan Partners to meet gold-digging bimbos (step forward <a href="http://sugardaddie.com/sd2a.php?gclid=CMqwtbXpv7YCFU7MtAoda0QArw" style="color: #1155cc;">Sugar Daddy dating</a>, <a href="http://www.misstravel.com/" style="color: #1155cc;">Miss Travel</a> and <a href="http://www.wealthymen.com/" style="color: #1155cc;">Meet Wealthy Men</a>) or are transparent fakes, trying to leech bank details out of wealthy men in the guise of a "wealth verification process". All of these sites encourage UGLY RICH MEN to register to find BEAUTIFUL POOR WOMEN. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaFBaHHXdM4JUy2jicpAPToEU_HN5hm5aNGHtHhZXyLAHaUTeuh_jq4x7QTOQWQrDc4H-Mic9YqnnqlHOoYd3jo4hPHbD6JulVHRf1ihK46GxAx9-IulklnJlK2eNNSJyuURh9YnN7N9mM/s1600/sugarddaddie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaFBaHHXdM4JUy2jicpAPToEU_HN5hm5aNGHtHhZXyLAHaUTeuh_jq4x7QTOQWQrDc4H-Mic9YqnnqlHOoYd3jo4hPHbD6JulVHRf1ihK46GxAx9-IulklnJlK2eNNSJyuURh9YnN7N9mM/s320/sugarddaddie.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's got a pretty seedy feel to it; especially Miss Travel feels like a site where you swap sex for airline tickets. The site specifically bans escorts - because swapping money for sex is sordid, but selling your body for a flight to New York is A-Ok. Unfortunately, being neither a rich man, nor a beautiful woman (not, lets face it, a beautiful man) I don't think any of these sites were for me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That said, I had been intrigued by millionairematch - mostly because a friend, a barrister, had met her fiance on it. In her words, she was "sick of being taken out in Birmingham, and fancied being taken out in Barbados". She'd heard it was a good place for successful women to meet successful men, had registered on the site, and within a year was engaged to a lovely, handsome vice-president at a private bank. So, armed with the knowledge that it was real, I registered on the site & got to work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the strangest things about this website is that the rich person has to verify their income, and you pick your income from a drop-down menu, before it gets verified. There's a screenshot of the menu below - my favourite option being the "Yes, I am the heir to a large fortune". </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSCGkBT3ID7wKXIAtAsk35dQM10HckSwhhI1oFc5inbGQXzvhSGt2EVfdjmvl684nMjINWjYlhuNGIvYot8tA0kJPe8LxMdwjkzwkJ2fUd_rlIeELsn8MaV2TpilDeUY2I_Y4lXodbuYG-/s1600/Millionaire+date+value.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSCGkBT3ID7wKXIAtAsk35dQM10HckSwhhI1oFc5inbGQXzvhSGt2EVfdjmvl684nMjINWjYlhuNGIvYot8tA0kJPe8LxMdwjkzwkJ2fUd_rlIeELsn8MaV2TpilDeUY2I_Y4lXodbuYG-/s400/Millionaire+date+value.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I imagine the verification process for that involves sending in pictures of your skin tight chinos and telling the site the name of your polo pony.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you get verified as rich, you get a diamond next to your name, and you are allowed to upload pictures of your fabulous wealth. This is the most horribly gauche end of the site, with people uploading huge amounts of pictures of their shiny trucks, massive yachts big villas, and t̶i̶n̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶c̶k̶s̶ mountains of shoes. It's not a website I'd recommend to anyone who is easily outraged by a copy of FT How to Spend It or an issue of Tatler. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's surprising how readily women on there respond to messages; although I do think I stood out by not being posed on the roof of my truck, pouring Cristal on myself. Indeed, my biggest problem was less finding a date, and more finding a date in London whose diary matched up with mine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eventually, after around a month of messaging one lady, she told me she was going to be transiting through Heathrow, and we arranged to meet for dinner in the Gordon Ramsay restaurant in Terminal 5. That's past security, so I bought myself a £10 one way ticket to Frankfurt so I could get into the restaurant. Sad long experience of missing flights for work (and occasionally pounding on the pressure door of aircraft, begging the crews to let me in) told me that missing the plane, even after missing the last call, wouldn't cause a security crisis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, anyway, I sat down on the ugly leather chairs, and waited for my date. I was proper excited - she was very charming by message, and, I'm not going to lie, I was excited by how minted she was. She arrived, bang on time, and was stunning. She was beautifully turned out, despite a full day at work, and was wearing an assortment of tasteful - yet doubtless incredibly valuable - jewellery. I suppose I wouldn't have sat trying to guess the value of my date's clothes had it not been a date off millionairematch, but there you go. I am, a shameless <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vwNcNOTVzY" target="_blank">gold-digger</a>.<br /><br />We got to talking, and she had a wonderfully blunt way of talking. It's not uncommon in people who work in the fund industry, but it was still hilarious to hear that manner of speaking transposed into dating chat. For example, she explained the failure of her first marriage by nodding gently, fixing me with a steely blue gaze and saying "Vegas Hooker orgy", with no further explanation. We had a few acquaintances in New York (take your pick, it's a small world, finance, or it's a small world, Jews), got to talking about work stuff relatively quickly. We talked a lot about business and politics; unusually for someone in finance, she was a Democrat, and so being left-wing in the US made her politically about the same as me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We talked about the states, she told me about some terrible dates in New York ("He took me to his parents on the second date. He hadn't told them I wasn't orthodox. Cue lecture.") I told her a few hair-raising tales of travelling around the deep south, which she found hilarious. Before the date had really started, her flight was called, and it was over. She insisted on picking up the cheque (*smile* "I'm the millionaire, remember?"), and has since invited me to a dinner party in New York. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, I'm paying my own way...</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-39932969549026868782013-04-05T00:20:00.000-07:002013-04-05T00:32:00.338-07:00Date 18: The London Cosplay Otaku<br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">So, for Date 18, I was back in the realm of normal dating sites, and for this one, I decided to use <a href="http://lovestruck.com/">Lovestruck.com</a>. It's a trendy , hip, young dating site for beautiful, stylish urban professionals, or so the adverts on the tube seem to suggest. And no-one would lie in an advert on the tube, right?</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">The site is unashamedly London-centric, and a huge part of its appeal comes from the raft of events they organise. Lovestruck is very much the whole package dating business, rather than just a website. It's very slick Groupon-meets-dating type affair, and as much as the faux-cheery post-modern copywriting occasionally rubbed me up the wrong way, I was pretty impressed with the breadth of activities on offer.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">They offered dating comedy nights, dating quiz nights, dating museum visits, a dating film festival, even a dating holiday to somewhere near the North Pole to watch the Northern Lights, if you thought dropping a grand on the world's coldest speed dating night, risking being devoured by Polar bears, was a good idea. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Maybe that would be good if you had a thing for being cuddled by men in bobble hats & wooly jumpers, or were unaccountably aroused by women wrapped up in scarves. That said, giving the seemingly endless winter we're currently having, the knitwear fetishist is probably well served enough in London already.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">So, yes, not just lots of people, but also lots to do. I don't know how good a dating site it would be in say, Hull, but for a Londoner, it's excellent. And let's face it, if you live in Hull, you probably don't want to date someone else in Hull anyway. That's how catastrophes like raising a family in Hull happen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Anyway, so after a bit of tooling around on the site, before I could book a ticket to the North Pole, or indeed even send a message of my own, a lovely lady from West London got in touch. She described herself as a "bit of a nerd", liked my profile, and wondered if I fancied going for a drink. As a bloke, I must say, I do find being asked out very flattering indeed, so I said yes, and pottered along to a mutually convenient bar for a drink.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">So, we walked in, got talking, and I soon realised I was out of my nerd-depth. Yes, despite the late night screenings of Robot Jox, despite the legion of model soldiers, despite the Warcraft account, despite the general love of sci-fi & fantasy. Normally, in the "date between two London stylish urban professionals" context, I'm comfortably the nerdier one of the two of us. Not today.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">There's a wonderful bit in Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch - a novel all about loving someone despite their all-consuming obsession - where the main character explains how people justify their lives revolving around football. The man who goes to every game at the pub knows a guy who goes to every game at the ground; that guy knows a guy who goes to every away game; the guy who goes to every away game knows a guy who goes to every youth team gain, and so on. You know people deeper down the rabbit hole than yourself, so you reassure yourself you must be the normal one.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">It's fair to say this lady was deeper down than I was. There's a Japanese word - Otaku - which describes someone who is devoted to a particular interest. Now, I like science fiction & fantasy; she had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the entire genre, especially in terms of anime. I'd been to comic conventions; she regularly cosplayed at them. I like J-pop & K-pop, had seen wacky bands shouting Korean lyrics & throwing bananas into the crowd at Glasto way before Gangnam style was a thing, but she'd been to Japan to see her favourite band. She'd actually met the band's mum, at one point. I think describing me as a mere nerd, and her as Otaku is fair.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px; text-align: center;">Oh, by the way, Cosplay is sort of like competitive fancy dress, often with an anime theme, where you dress as your favourite science fiction, fantasy or anime character. It's big in Japan, and occasionally when Westerners do it, it's incredibly embarrassing.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I filmed a pilot for a doc on it once, which memorably led to a moment in an edit suite where a highly respected TV Exec stared closely at the rushes and said "Is that...is that...some kind of paedophile Catwoman?!"</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">However, it's incredibly impressive at its best, and she was clearly very gifted at it. There were pictures of her in costume, on her phone, which were firmly in the category of "my goodness that's amazing" rather than "my goodness that's embarrassing". </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">That skill I suspect partly stemmed from her interesting day job, which partly involved far east related academia; she spoke what sounded like impressive Japanese, and told me the difference between katakana and hiragana; and partly involved adapting racing swimsuits for paralympians.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">So yeah, she was more nerdy than me; or maybe just nerdy in different ways to me; or maybe she was just bold enough to wear her fandom on her sleeve and not care what society thought. She wasn't in any way terrifying, or odd as a date - there was no devil-possession, no biting, no obsession with Lizards. She was very easy to talk to, and we did share plenty of interests, even if I was to all intents and purposes worse at doing them than she was. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">As well as covering vital topics like favourite Dr.Who episodes (her: Stuff with creaky sets from the 1970s, me: the more modern David Tennant/Matt Smith era), and our favourite Manga (hers something she pronounced exquisitely in Japanese, mine a Giant Robot Film Noir called Big O), we chatted about growing up with unusual hobbies. For me, doing nerdy things had always been a social thing - it was a way to get people together & talk, to bring socially awkward friends out of their shells. For her, it had been more like a solitary refuge, growing up in a small rural town with a devoutly religious family. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I suppose it gave me a window into the world of what it's like for a perfectly normal girl going on a date with me; meeting someone who is fun, charming, but a bit on the edges of your experience. It's a little nerve wracking, but fascinating - exploring, pushing your limits, finding out what you can or can't tolerate. Or, at least, what the other person can say without you laughing at them and saying "Yes, but you're an adult now, surely". All in all, it was a fun evening. We went our separate ways, and I was looking forward to seeing her again, but a couple of days after our date, I got the following email:</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;"><i>I have to let you know that I have since met up again with the other Lovestrucker that I told you about and we've had a Serious Talk, the upshot of which is that we are now properly dating. So unfortunately I'm off the market for now. That said, I really did have a lovely time with you and I'd love to stay in contact as friends - I swear there was so much more stuff we could and should have chatted about if only time hadn't run away with us. Best of luck with the rest of your dating adventures - I hope you do find someone amazing, you're a great guy and you deserve someone equally great! I look forward to reading about it all :)</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Curses. Just as I was about to tighten my grip, she'd slipped through my fingers. If only I'd been a few days earlier. Still, we're meeting up as friends, and she has a wonderful handle on where to find Japanese food and rare manga comics, so it's not all bad.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Thus, a friend gained, a lesson learned, and back to the wasteland...</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-78768942038358187952013-04-02T06:19:00.000-07:002013-04-02T06:23:00.548-07:00Date 17: The Devout Christian & the Sex-Devils<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Now, back when I was starting the blog, I was sent a huge amount of very strange dating sites by friends. Some of the most alarming ones came from from devoutly religious chums. They all thought it would be hilarious to hear an atheist's reaction to things </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;">like this -</span><br />
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...and came with stories about how their crazy cousin Edward had found his wife through them, and now the happy couple lived in a cult compound in the mountains of Nigeria. So, obviously, this was a rich mine of strangeness, and could prove hilarious to my readers, but I had kind of resolved not to do a religious one.</div>
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Why? Well, apart from the fact I can't really afford a plane ticket to Abujah, I'm an atheist, and in my opinion, the sort of person who was using a site like <a href="http://www.muslimandsingle.com/" style="color: #1155cc;">muslim&single</a> (Tagline: "Find Allah's match for you") or <a href="http://www.christianmingle.com/" style="color: #1155cc;">christianmingle</a> (tagline: "Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart. - Psalms 37:4") was probably on there specifically because they wanted to avoid dating someone like me.</div>
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Then again, at the same time, that sort of Thirty Years War attitude of "You are of one belief, I am of another, therefore we must be separate" (and fight with pikestaffs) never really sat right with me. Could I date with a religious person? My track record seemed to indicate "probably".</div>
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The last two serious relationships I had were with devout catholics; I had become quite adept at finding a nice coffee shop near the churches of their choice, and sitting reading a book while they made their observance. There are a lot of things that religious people like - things like tradition, the Chronicles of Narnia and close harmony singing - that I'm also a big fan of.</div>
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I was mulling it over, when a Christian friend recommended a "really good" christian singles speed dating night. On a boat. What can I say, I'm a sucker for hanging around on boats, so, I went along. I realise this wasn't online dating in the classic sense, but hey, it's quite modern, and I had to send some emails to get the tickets and things, SO IT TOTALLY COUNTS.</div>
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So, anyway, speed dating. For those of you who aren't familiar with the process, you sit and chat with a person for three minutes, then a bell rings, and you rotate around the room. At the end of the evening, you mark people you'd like to see again, and the organisers pass out the emails/phone numbers of people who both said they were up for meeting again.</div>
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That's the normal chain of events. This one however, started with a sermon from a Minister from "Kingdom of God International", which seemed to have more than a touch of the televangelist about it. The man had that sort of silver helmet of hair normally found only on Republican senators in the USA, and the sermon was very, ummm, enthusiastic. It was odd hearing a sermon like this delivered in a broad cockney accent. There was also a Powerpoint about "Dating for Jesus".</div>
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I felt I was not only going to be saved, but that I might get be offered a teasmaid at a bargain price, too. At the end of the pitch, they handed out a flyer for his next dating event. It all seems pretty normal, until you get down to point five.</div>
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Yup, had I been "visited in the night by sex devils?!" The answer, of course, was not nearly enough.</div>
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Anyway, the speed dating proceeded relatively normally, and most of the ladies I met seemed lovely. There was no demonic attack, that I could see. At the end of the evening, I walked away with a couple of phone numbers, and later arranged to meet the girl I liked the most for a couple of drinks. We met at a pub near her work. She's an accountant for a very big firm, seemed perfectly normal - smart, funny, interesting.</div>
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So, anyway, we go to a bar near her work in Farringdon, and sit there in modern, urban London. After about five minutes, I broached the sex demons point, hoping she would say "Yeah, that IS odd! Crazy Yanks, eh?" and we'd carry on chatting about 21st century stuff.</div>
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Oh no. She went on to tell me about how she had personally witnessed a child she was babysitting be possessed by the Devil himself while she was a teenager. I asked her how she could be sure it was actually the Prince of Lies himself, rather than some minor cacodemon, and she replied "If you had heard the sounds he made, you would know".</div>
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It was so bizarre, I asked her if it was an elaborate joke. But no, deadly serious. By the third drink, she was telling me about how 9/11 was an inside job and about her recent suicide attempt. She was very keen on "Missionary dating" - converting a non-believer to date, which was part of the reason she was dating me. There had, to be fair, been a slide about it in the Cockney preacher's Powerpoint.</div>
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Needless to say, I walked away a little shell shocked. I mean, I'd known she was religious, but I'd thought she was more "Fun" than "Fundamentalist". Indeed, she was, it must be said, quite heavy on the "mentalist". It wasn't the date I'd been expecting, and I think most of my religious friends would have been as incredulous as I was. I made a call to my Christian friend, explaining that what he'd delivered me to. He responded that he'd had no idea about the sex-devils thing, and he'd been recommended the speed dating event by several people. </div>
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I assume there were plenty of less, errm, "devout" folk at the event, and I know she's not representative of religious people in general - she's much more representative of my own supernatural ability to be put in a room with any number of women, and unerringly home in on the strangest one. Sometimes that's a blessing, sometimes it's a curse.<br />
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I still think I could date a religious person; just probably not someone so fundamentalist. So, anyway, needless to say, still a cold and blameless bed. Here's hoping for a visitation by the sex devils soon:)</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-27668621009132794152013-03-29T01:45:00.001-07:002013-03-29T01:59:18.314-07:00Date 16: The Czech Pornstar, The High-Flying Lawyer & the Undergraduate<br />
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So, for Date 16, I'm back on normal websites. Or should I say "normal" websites.</div>
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For this one, I was using a website called "Plenty of Fish" (or POF, as it's known in the trade). It's one of the bigger, and more popular dating sites; it was certainly one of the first. However, unlike say, Guardian Soulmates & My Single Friend, I didn't know anyone who'd used it successfully. A few people I know from online dating had described it to me in very negative terms - "Plenty of Freaks, more like", was one veteran's take on the site.</div>
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Indeed, I must say this accorded with my own experience. While there seemed to be a huge amount of profiles on the site, very few of them seemed active. Whether this was because they were profiles people had made and then forgotten about (presumably because they'd found "the one") , or whether they were fake profiles, I wasn't sure. However, once I started being messaged by a woman who bore a startling resemblance to a famous porn star, I started to get suspicious.</div>
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Obviously it wasn't the porn actress. It was either a.) someone real foolishly using a salacious fake photo or b.) an out and out scammer. I decided to play along for a couple of days, and yes, surprise surprise, she was based in Prague at the moment, and if I could just wire her the money for an expensive plane ticket, she'd pop over and go on a "sex-date" with me. </div>
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Yeah, of course she would. Now, of course, it's possible I have turned down a sex-date with a hot slutty Czech babe, but it occurs to me that if a person wants to go out with you, they probably don't ask for the fat cheque (Czech?) first. Or if they do, it's not really "dating", is it?</div>
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After a few weeks on Plenty of Fish, I started habitually google image searching any picture of a woman I was attracted to; and sure enough, many of them came from things like magazine shoots and so on. It seems like the absolute mecca of fake internet dating profiles. Why? Well, it's absolutely free, and the profiles are very low effort to create. It's just box-checking, and then uploading a picture, so minimum scammer effort. Simultaneously, it's pretty huge, so there must be a decent supply of marks you can con out of plane tickets and cash.</div>
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After a little while, I managed to get a date off the site. She was a lawyer, at a big firm, seemed nice on the internet. We arranged to meet in a lovely cafe in Holborn, at lunchtime. I arrived five minutes early, as is my habit, and sat down. I didn't order anything, because on these dates, it's always better to wait for the other person to arrive before ordering. </div>
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So, I sat at the table, with a copy of "Business in Great Waters" by John Terraine in my hand, and sat reading about U-boats, waiting for my date to arrive. 10 minutes passed, still no sign. I was now in the weirdo position - I was giving every woman who walked in a quick look up and down, thinking "Is this her?", and smiling at them, like a loon. Ten minutes later, with her being twenty minutes late, I began to tweet friends about how late she was, asking if they thought she was late or was standing me up. </div>
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After about 40 minutes, I gave it up for lost, ordered a massive home-made organic scone, and carried on a twitter conversation over lunch with a comedian who knew a surprising amount about U-Boats & a lovely lady novelist, so it wasn't a total loss. Indeed, between the two of them they were a pretty great date...</div>
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I messaged her again, asking what happened, and she gave me an excuse that sounded deeply unconvincing. Over the next week, I asked her a few questions about what she did, where she worked, googled her, made a few calls, and surprise surprise, the person who had been messaging me didn't match up to her work profile picture - and when I dropped an email to the solicitor at Linklaters she claimed to be, that lady had never used online dating - mostly because she was married.</div>
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I have to say, after this experience, I was pretty much done with Plenty of Fish. The site was clearly full of fake profiles, and scammers. It's also badly laid out and full of bad copy like asking you to "sum up your personality in one word' and then offering you 'Hopeless Romantic', 'Starving Artist' and 'Music Snob' as ahem, "one-word" suggestions.</div>
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Then, out of the blue, I got a message from a very pleasant sounding lady. She was another Guardian reading Tory (there's three of us, it seems) and get this - also Jewish. She was an undergraduate at Cambridge, who had worked for a big campaigning charity that I wholeheartedly approved of before leaving to go back & do the university thing. If I'm honest, it all seemed a bit too good to be true. Nervous, I arranged for us to meet at a pub in Chiswick, near where I work.</div>
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Struggling blinking into the light out of an edit suite, I arrived about 15 minutes early, and sat reading my book (The Military Experience in the Age of Reason, by Christoper Duffy, in case you're interested). 25 minutes passed, and I was looking at my watch and thinking, "Bloody hell, not again". 5 more minutes ticked by, and I started writing an angry "Why do you think my time is worth so little?" email.</div>
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5 more minutes, and I literally packed my books into my bag, and was getting up to leave, when in walked the lady, looking flustered and apologising profusely for being late. She was, I'm glad to say, exactly as advertised - entertaining, mildly right wing & Jewish enough to be killed by the Nazis, but not Jewish enough to say no to bacon sandwiches. It was, to all intents and purposes, like dating a fascinating, younger, female version of myself.</div>
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We sat down, and starting ordering drinks. She confessed fairly early on that the reason she had come on the date was because her brother, who is a fan of the blog, had begged her to track me down & date me "because he is desperate to have you as a brother-in-law". So, no pressure then...</div>
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We got talking, and had a great chat about favourite novels, writing fiction in general, the way your own experience shapes your writing. I'm firmly of the opinion that if Tolkein said "it's just a book about goblins", then yeah, it's just a book about goblins, but she argued back that everything is in the eye of the reader, really, and I'm almost sure's the first person to convince me there's some merit in the argument. It was one of the best conversations I've had on a date - certainly the most intellectually stimulating.</div>
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Of course, being an Oxbridge undergrad, she got around to asking me the inevitable "You *seem* clever - why didn't you go to Oxbridge?" question. So I told her the story. It's a good one - there's a Nazi war criminal called Baron von Mullenheim in it - but I don't really have space to tell it here. The lady in question was entertained. Maybe if you go on a date with me, you can hear it too:)</div>
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She admitted she'd never been on a "date" before; she saw dating as something pretty antiquated, like steamboats, top hats or jousting. She was, she said, much more the sort of copping off with someone in a club type. Of course, that's the nub of the whole issue. </div>
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Once you're at the age where you realise it's ok to admit you think nightclubs are shit, once going home at ten PM to watch Game of Thrones DVDs under a duvet sounds better than staying out until dawn talking to a Scandinavian blonde who's fallen down a K-hole, then you have to find other ways to meet people. </div>
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Hence, online dating.</div>
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Anyhow, after a fun evening, and a great deal of gin, we parted company. Just goes to show, there are great people on online dating sites, even on POF (Plenty of Fakers), and that as ever in the online dating world, persistence pays off. She's a lady I'd love to see again; I'm sure I'd have seen her since if she didn't live among the dreaming spires, and wasn't in the middle of exams. I may live to make her brother a happy man yet.<br />
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<i>Next week, as it's Easter, I try Fundamentalist Christian dating, through Missionary Dating (tagline: Flirt to convert), and meet a Cosplay fan through Lovestruck.com.</i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-20106111340768534612013-03-26T09:33:00.000-07:002013-03-26T11:07:10.950-07:00Date 15: The Psychic<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Back when I started the date blog, I signed up to a huge number of very odd dating sites, in the vague hope that someone from one of these sites would contact me and arrange a date. I was quite excited by the idea of dating a </span><a href="http://www.boohiccup.com/clown_dating.html" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Circus performer,</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> a </span><a href="http://www.gothicmatch.com/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Goth</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">, a </span><a href="http://www.datealittle.com/Default.aspx" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Dwarf</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">, a </span><a href="http://www.naturistpassion.com/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Naturist</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> or a </span><a href="http://www.bikerkiss.com/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Biker</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">. Although, of course, that could all be the same person.</span><br />
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I must say, I've largely been disappointed, and as yet, no tiny naked trapeze artist has roared into my life on a Harley-Davidson, to take me off to a Sisters of Mercy gig. I think it's for two reasons - one online dating is to a large part about effort. You get out what you put in. If you sit back passively and wait for someone to come to you, you are likely to be disappointed, especially if you're on a site where your gender is in the minority. </div>
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Equally, as I discovered from a comment on the blog (yes, a GOOD comment - as a Telegraph journalist these feel as rare as hen's teeth), if you go on a random site, you may infact just be signing up to a giant white label dating database, that filters you by niche. The comment reads: </div>
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<i>"<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I recently had an interesting conversation with a web developer who runs dating sites, and he explained to me that many sites actually run off the same back end database (for example <a href="http://www.whitelabeldating.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">www.whitelabeldating.com</a>), and developers simply pay for access to the database and build their own front end, filtering the results according to whatever niche they are catering for. So you can end up exchanging messages with someone who actually signed up to a completely different site. For example if you happen to have red hair your profile could end up on here (<a href="http://www.dateginger.co.uk/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">www.dateginger.co.uk/</a>). I always wondered how there was enough demand to keep so many highly niche sites in business, and this goes some way towards explaining it. Whitelabeldating appears to be pretty respectable, but I'm sure there are sleazier "white label" databases out there."</span></i></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A bit of digging finds that, for example, this <a href="http://frenchfriendfinder.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">dating site for people looking for French</a> partners shares a database with sadomasochism dating site <a href="http://bdsm.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">BDSM.com</a>. I mean, I assume if you draw a Venn diagram between "French" and "Bondage", there will be a reasonable crossover, but not *that* much. Some French people don't like bondage. I assume. Ahem.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I must admit, I was pretty sure that the bulk of these sites were therefore unlikely to deliver the, for example, psychic of my dreams. I mean, I'd made a profile on a <a href="http://wld.beyondpsychicdating.co.uk/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">psychic dating site</a>, but it seemed to be just one of these white-labelled front ends. The site was relatively amusing - for example, it allows you to look for people aged up to 120 years old; I assume in case you're looking for a Macbeth-esque wise woman, or a Biomancer who had successfully delayed their aging by the use of their chi, or whatever. But yeah, never thought a real live psi would want to meet me, a humble mundane.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thus, I was pretty damn surprised by the message that appeared one day, titled "Star of a Strange Dream":</span></div>
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<i>Dear Willard,<br />I am an expat, so my life in London is dotted of strange things, strange people, strange feelings.<br />But last night I had a remarkable over-strange dream, in which we were dating each other. We were in an old fashioned yellow motel, eating pancakes. Everything in the room was slightly dusty but we didn't care.<br />Then I woke up thinking "I have to write this guy" and I sent you an email. We met in a totally different place, a dark bridge, and I recall observing that you weren't so short after all.<br />Then I woke up again.<br /><br />"I have to write this guy."</i></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's one of the more charming, and more strange messages I had ever received. It did but me in a bit of a quandary. I mean, on one hand, the lady in question was able to write lovely and charming messages. On the other hand, she did think she had dreams where she saw the future. It could have been bad: I mean, I'd seen the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY-03vYYAjA" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">1980s classic movie Scanners</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Still, I figured worst case scenario, at least my head being telekinetically shattered would be quick & painless, and best case scenario, she could tell me next week's winning euromillions draw numbers, and started looking for a nice place to go for a date. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My housemates were very sceptical, and if I'm honest, so was I. That said</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, Divination is the best psychic power chart in Warhammer 40,000, so how bad could it be? I'd never date a pyrokine, on that basis...</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, I decided I'd find a hotel with yellow walls, where they served lovely pancakes, and decided to do that rare thing, a breakfast date. The weather on the morning was absolutely dreadul; freezing with driving rain. Both myself and the charming psychic just happened to rush through the doors of the place at exactly the same time. Fate, obviously (or was it?). Anyway, after five minutes of drying off and shivering, we sat down for and ordered lovely pancakes, with spiced apple & raisin compote, and honey mascarpone. It was, I must say, one of the best breakfasts I've had in years.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The psychic was lovely - extremely smart, well educated, and very attractive. She worked in science, which made her prophetic dream an interesting quirk. We talked about her home country, which she'd left because of the amount of corruption there got her down, and she felt women weren't taken seriously there. We discussed how dreadful politics was in her country - frankly, for all of my occasional bitching, we can't really compete with our southern european neighbours. She had an exotic accent, and the typical quirk of people who are brilliant at language of insisting that her English wasn't that good when in fact, it was better than mine.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />So, smart, beautiful, different, politically active - and all from someone I had been leery of dating in the first instance. I walked her to the tube in the rain, gave her a kiss on each cheek, and we've since arranged to see each other again. I guess one of the most interesting things I'm learning from the experiment with online dating is that my prejudices are just that - prejudiced. Maybe I should be more open minded in the future?</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-12439242483589287452013-03-21T05:29:00.000-07:002013-03-21T05:29:13.684-07:0014 Dates in, why am I still single?<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I haven't found Ms.Right yet, but equally, <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/date-one-love-bites.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">I haven't yet had another bite wound</a> (although I have had a second injury, but more about that in a later post). For those of you have wondered why I haven't settled down with one of the lovely ladies I've met, well, a good first date, doesn't automatically lead to a good second date. I think the best story I've ever read about a precipitous drop between the expectations you create on a superb first date that are then shattered by a tragic and terrible second date is this one, <a href="http://jezebel.com/5978702/the-dangers-of-getting-too-excited-after-the-first-date?tag=dating" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">by Ali Waller, writing in Jezebel</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It certainly rang true for me, especially the bit where <i>"a</i><span style="line-height: 22px;"><i>fter the delightful first date, I decided this would be the perfect situation: we'd date casually but exclusively, I'd stay focused on my career, and we'd meet up on weekends for movies, dinners and make-outs. In this (totally made-up) scenario, he was unscathed from his divorce and I was miraculously able to sleep with him without getting attached or distracted. Also, our sex was flawless. This was exactly how it would play out."</i> Seriously, it's great - <a href="http://jezebel.com/5978702/the-dangers-of-getting-too-excited-after-the-first-date?tag=dating" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">read it</a> - there's a link and everything.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Did you read it? Really? Good. The truth is there have been several second dates, third dates (and even one lady who I considered dropping the blog for) - but it hasn't worked out. </span><span style="line-height: 22px;">I suppose wha</span><span style="line-height: 22px;">t it encapsulates is not only is online dating a long process, but it's</span><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><i style="line-height: 22px;">hard</i><span style="line-height: 22px;">. You not only need to find people you like, you need them to like you back and want the same things, and it all needs to work physically, you need to be sexually compatible and be at the same stage of your life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">My three part criteria for what I want a woman - that she needs to be funny, sane and "not evil", are also surprisingly hard to fulfill. Why do I have those criteria?<br /><br />Well, thereby hangs a tale.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">It's a long story.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">No, seriously. This is a proper Willard story. The sort that requires a cup of tea and a comfy chair. The sort that's kind of entertaining, but also hair-curlingly horrendous at the same time. Lots of my stories are like this if you think about it. Usually, any time a story starts with "Well, this one time in Israel/North Korea/GW Bristol..."</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">So get a cup of the heated beverage of your choice, and then carry on reading.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">It was 2002. Combat trousers were an "in" look, The White Stripes were an underground buzz act that only cool people liked, invading places seemed to be working, and despite that, no-one thought Dubya would get a second term. I was reading for a Masters in International Criminal Justice; some of the people reading this blog were still in school.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Right, all of this aside, I was going out with this girl I met on the debating circuit.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">She was pretty, and very, very clever. But, she was also mad and a little bit evil. And I know what you girls are thinking, it's not me saying "She was crazy; occasionally she expected me to call her!". She was crazy in an authentic, take off her facemask to reveal a writhing mass of tentacles, Cthulu cultist, end of the world by the power of the Dark Star-gods way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Just so to establish her mentalist credentials, here are some examples.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">She was concerned that I might not be faithful to her,so she got one of her friends to come on to me. Of course, I was a bit shocked, and rejected the friend, explaining I was a bit shocked, as she knew I was seeing her friend. However, I was still the bad guy, as when I rejected the friend, the girlfriend was angry with me because I didn't tell her the friend had cracked on to me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Also, she used to do things like keep spreadsheets of MY finances (oh, and hers of course), so when I bought us a valentines holiday in Paris, she refused to go because I couldn't afford it and would be better saving the money. For the record, I took the money and spent it on a giant model tank.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Oh, and this is just the highlights. There were all kinds of crazy mindgames, tearful fits because I beat her on tabs at debating, etc etc She once threatened to dump me by Point of Information in the semi-final of a debating competition at the Inner Temple. Everyone in the audience laughed, assuming it was a joke; I didn't. She never joked.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">So, I've established her nutter credentials, right? </span></span><span style="color: #222222; line-height: 22px;">Ok, the other important other thing about her was she had a life plan. Her whole life was planned out to the age of sixty.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">It was on a wall calendar, in her room. I didn't even know you could get ones that go 45 years ahead. In case you thought I was joking about the Cthulhu cultist thing, this one really was waiting for the Stars To Be Right.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">(I realise, by now, you are probably wondering why I went out with her; the answer is, I don't really know:)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Anyway, on the calendar, she was allowed to have 8 boyfriends before she got married. Why? you ask. That's such an arbitrary number. Well, otherwise, she wouldn't be young enough to be well established as a barrister before she took a career break to have her first child. It was eight boyfriends of six months each. Six months to prove your worth.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Anyway, I got to the six month window. She walked me to a little church in her village, and told me that as a little girl, she had always dreamed of getting married in that very church. And then she turned to me, and asked me, "Where would you like to get married, Willard?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">What I didn't realise at the time was that there was a wrong answer to that question.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Unfortunately for her, my response was "Well, I'd always rather fancied getting married under the big top of the Moscow state circus, by the Arch-Mandrite of the Russian Orthodox Church".</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">This was my jokey way of saying, "Lets not talk about this; we're 22".</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Not the right answer. She ran away crying, which was a bit of a shock; I remember thinking, "that Orthodox joke was pretty good...wasn't it?". I didn't run after her; in her eyes, this was death death Death. I had failed the final test; oh, yeah, this was the last in a series of tests including the faithfulness one; another included forcing me to ostracise a close friend.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">So, she'd decided that I was not "the one", but, this put her in a dilemma. It was my finals; she was obsessed with success and exams. She couldn't imagine dumping me during my finals,but, the calendar's merciless ticktock was still going on in the background, and she had to move the relentless grind of boyfriends on.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Her solution was to start fucking one of my friends behind my back. The reasoning was she could dump me after my finals, no damage to my exam chances, and satisfying her need to keep within the strict timetable.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Sadly, there was a problem with this other wise brilliant plan.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">The problem was, well, I went to my doctor with a small problem; now, bear in mind my doctor is a sweet old man with a bow tie, who I've known all my life, who used to give me lollipops when I was five, to imagine the awkwardness of this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">My doctor looks at my problem, and says "Have you been sleeping with Nigerian prostitutes?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">I looked shocked.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">"Of course not!" I replied.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">He looks at me, very embarrassed, awkward, very English, wearing his cheery bow-tie and says, "Come on Willard, it's important to your treatment you are honest with me..." And I reply I'm in a committed relationship, totally monogamous, etc etc.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">To which he replies, "Well, she obviously isn't as committed as you are".</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">So, yeah, he, through her, had infected me with a rare and potentially hideous disfiguring African genital parasite. They managed to kill the damn thing by freezing it off with Liquid nitrogen; that's the stuff they use to kill the T-1000 in terminator 2. Some people say they have scars from their relationships; I have frostbite scars on my genitals from that one.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">So, I was disgusted, appalled, horrified, betrayed. So, I call her, we row, and I break it off.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Now, at the time, we were the fucking golden couple of university debating. So us splitting up was massive, massive gossip and next week, at an Inter Varsity Debate, someone says "I hear you and X broke up; I can't believe it; is it true?"and I say,</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">"Yeah it's true." And they ask what happened.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">And I tell them. In excruciating, hideous, African parasite detail.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">And then, she goes totally berserk. I'm the bad guy. How DARE I tell everyone the private business of our relationship. To which I reply, how dare you have unprotected sex with one of my sluttiest friends?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">So, is that the worst breakup story you've ever heard? I don't think it's a coincidence that in the aftermath, I grew an American Civil War beard, an afro that was cool on Black men in 1974 and stopped studying Law to become a music journalist.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Anyway, after that relationship, I developed a criteria for what I want in a woman. She has to be the diametric opposite of that girlfirend; that is to say, she has to be:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">That's it. Y</span></span><span style="color: #222222; line-height: 22px;">ou'd think it'd be easy to find:)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Sadly, that woman has proved elusive. The trouble is, most women who actually want to date me are 2/3 at best. It's not an iron-hard criteria. It's just as soon as a woman starts playing mind games, or I realise she has no sense of humor, she becomes terribly unattractive.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Women who do, of course, meet all three criteria, are hard to find. And when I do come across them, they almost never want to date me, for some ludicrous reason, like they don't find me attractive, or I embody all they despise in society.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">I'm not sure if blogging it makes it harder or easier. </span><span style="line-height: 22px;">On one hand, I get licence to vent at you, dear reader, and tell everyone about the dates I go on, be they good or bad. On the other hand, I have to go on a lot of dates, and while individual nights are fun, looking at your diary and realising, yes, you are going out on a date every night this week, is grinding and tiring in of itself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unlike most people who are doing online dating, I have to come and write notes, which I then have to type up later and then make witty and amusing. Yes, it may come as a shock, but often my first drafts are quite dull and sound like I'm feeling sorry for myself. Sort of like this whole post, really.</span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-6672183161503768062013-03-19T17:05:00.001-07:002013-03-19T19:22:00.156-07:00Date 14: The Other Date Blogger<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, 14 Dates in. Halfway through the marathon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">My smug married friends often wonder out loud at me how I put up with it - along with pondering what's so wrong with me to still be single at 33, of course. My sister phoned me up the other day to tell me my problem. The real problem, she suspected, was that as well as being a journalist being off-putting, all the girls I date sound</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">too thin</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 22px;">, and my sister thought I should date more fat girls. "You're fat. Only a fat girl will want to go on more than one date with you," she said, only sort-of joking. The evil body fascist that she is.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">It's actually an article of faith in my family that people below a size 14 are basically not to be trusted. Once, after I was hospitalised with bad lungs, my mother took a then-girlfriend out to dinner, to say thankyou for being generally brilliant about the whole situation. As soon as my mother picked me up from hospital, I could tell the (thin) girlfriend had made some dreadful faux-pas. I finally got it out of mum. "I took her to the nicest </span><span style="line-height: 21.99652862548828px;">restaurant in town, told her to order whatever she liked. And do you know what she ordered? A SALAD. It was like she was calling me fat to my face."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 21.99652862548828px;">Body shape aside, I must say having gone on 13 dates and not yet found "the one", I was starting to look at myself in the mirror and think "What is wrong with me?" Most of my friends who have really good experiences with online dating tell me things like "Oooh, I went on 8 or 9 dates with freakish monsters or nice but boring folk but then date 10 was my beloved wife/husband". </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 21.99652862548828px;">I was coming close to the point where I was beginning to wonder if I *was* the boring weirdo freak in other people's stories. It would be a wonderfully Lovecraftian twist ending to the blog, if nothing else. </span><span style="line-height: 19px;">You already know the drill: mind-melting shock, a sudden congealing of all the apparent facts into a terrible revelation, and possibly most important, </span><i style="line-height: 19px;">the shocking one-liner of truth revealed in italics</i><span style="line-height: 19px;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Thus, when a twitter follower suggested I should go on a date with another date blogger, I quite fancied the idea of going on a date and maybe getting some feedback. So, I asked the lady out, to see what would happen I didn't really know what to expect - she's a journalist for Britain's most popular tabloid, and I read several posts on her blog, and she was absolutely brutal -in the way only a hardened tabloid hack can be - to some of the men she dated. To be fair, they did sound absolutely dreadful. At the end of the day, honesty was what I wanted. </span><span style="line-height: 18.99305534362793px;">Was I a fat boring monster? I guessed I would hold up a text-based mirror to myself and find out. It seemed worth it even if that led to an article entitled WILLARD FOXTON: MY BORING FAT DATE SHAME.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.99305534362793px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We agreed to meet in a lovely wine bar near London bridge. It's the sort of poncy and pretentious place I really love, where they rotate their wine cellar to let you try out a different couple of bottles of wine each week. Each bottle comes with a "wine passport", telling you where it came from, what it's about and enabling you to order the same wine again, at a vastly inflated price. In the name of epicureanism, I usually try whatever the wine of the week is. It was at about the point I was reading that the wine I was drinking was "grown from a kind of grape enjoyed by the Romans, long thought extinct, but recently rediscovered growing under a florentine villa" that something struck me. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18.99305534362793px;">Bella, the other date blogger, had recently written a post despairing about the kind of pretentious guys she met on Guardian Soulmates. Men who said they liked astronomy & 17th century harpsichord music. Men who described their interests in terms like "I </span><span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;">love traveling, but I'm no tourist. I've been known to land in New York for a week and never leave Harlem." I started to wonder "...Am I that guy?" as I sipped my Roman tribune approved wine. I realised that being on the other side of a date blog - of knowing you will be discussed and dissected in detail - is a weird experience. Was the fact I was blogging making it harder to meet "the one"?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, Bella arrived, and, no doubt to my sister's dismay, is very pretty, but no more than average sized. We got to talking. Within about five minutes of her arriving, we were laughing away, drinking more and more Roman wine and I totally forgot that I, or indeed, she was supposed to be writing it up. We compared notes on how dreadful the whole process of online dating was - I think she was slightly surprised that as a bloke, I got almost as many weird and sleazy messages as she did. Maybe we are more sensitive to this than most, but we lamented the fact that grammar and spelling had gone from a basic skill required in a person to something that had become a desirable trait.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She told me about a dreadful date she'd been on where she thought the bloke was being seriously weird and rude. I realised he was in fact trying to use the tips and tricks from nightmare misogynist dating guide "The Rules of the Game". I'd learned via my perma-tanned former housemate Higga, the particular kind of nasty cod psychology behind this book.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Essentially, it equips you with a limited toolkit of Derren Brown-esque mindtricks, which aim to pretty much fool women into sleeping with you. The promise the book makes is it will turn you into a kind of rapey Jedi, for only £9.99. It's fair to say I'm not a fan. It certainly hadn't worked on Bella, anyway. Maybe Murdoch's employees (minions?) are immune to Jedi mind tricks.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We both felt freed up by the fact we both had a ton of experience of online dating. The was no pretence, no "game" - we talked and talked, and got on to the thorny and dreadfully honest subject of why two clearly entertaining, fun, successful people were still single in our early thirties. We decided that two wrongs made a right, and shared our experiences of the exes that had left us in the wasteland of online dating. Unlike the last occasion I ended up talking about my baggage, I was able to tell the stories with a glint in my eye and a smile on my lips. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;">4 hours flipped by in what felt like five minutes, and we parted with a smile and a hug. </span><span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;">Then, about a week later, </span><a href="http://boredalonegeeky.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/its-all-in-game.html" style="color: #1155cc; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;" target="_blank">her review of the date went up online</a><span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;">. She'd had a good time; it seemed, I was a decent date after all (phew), but, sadly for Ms.Battle, I was sadly, not "the one". </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;">So, at least that's one worry out of the way, but I'm still looking for Ms.Right. But with 14 down, and 14 to go, it's really starting to feel as if I can get through this - and I'm starting to realise, even if I don't find "the one" in 28 Dates, there are plenty of lovely women out there, going through the same sort of thing I am. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; line-height: 16px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I just have to <i>find the right one.</i></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-68434971971922730102013-03-15T06:15:00.002-07:002013-03-15T07:31:21.051-07:00Date 13: The Sleazy Hookup<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, I've always maintained - this is a dating blog, not a sex blog.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But, the mission is to explore the wild wastelands of online dating, and lets face it, a huge amount of the people who are dating online are in it for the sexy-times, and many of the websites are overtly sexually weird and/or sordid. It's become a regular pastime of mine to open emails from friends that make my jaw drop, as they find new, more extreme "dating" sites that they want me to try out. Actually, the sexually strange ones - like <a href="http://diapermates.com/">Diapermates.com,"The internet's largest adult baby personals site"</a>, worry me less than the really sordid "normal" ones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Probably the most sordid site I've seen is <a href="http://localslags.co.uk/">LocalSlags.co.uk</a>. I mean, where do you have to be in your life to look at yourself in the mirror and think, "Yeah, I am a slag, I live in a small town. I suppose I am, therefore, a local slag! I'll register on that website!" </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I mean, I'd want to be a <a href="http://www.globalslag.com/">Global slag </a>("Your online portal for all things slag-related" is quite the tag-line) or a Europe-wide slag at the very least. Maybe I'm just too ambitious.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> I did create a profile on LocalSlags (sister site - Granny slags, for when your Local slags are just too damn young), but the messages were so unbelievably grim I never replied to any - although at one point I was offered the sex act of my choice, as long as I was willing to "dog" in a particular Croydon bus-shelter, which is not something many other people can probably claim. Or depressingly, probably something absolutely loads of people can claim.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, online hookups - <a href="http://www.twitlonger.com/show/lahd2h" target="_blank">even more sordid and weird than online dating</a>, and that is really saying something. But, of course, that brief look didn't leave me with a date. At the shallow end of the creepy waters of the online hookup pool is Facebook dating app <a href="http://www.bangwithfriends.com/">Bang with Friends</a>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The core concept of this is that plenty of us have friends we would like to sleep with. I'm sure we've all been in that situation where you have a crush on someone you know, and then years later you find out that they had a thing for you at the same time, but now you're both with other people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You can't help but wonder "what if?" though. It all sounds like a reasonable idea, apart from the fact that the app itself is almost indefeasibly sleazy & chock to the brim with UniLad style casual misogyny. For example, the website logo, basically speaks for itself:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQlP3jTP_V8MAV3jKdYCi8GBjE20G15IfCgpl_4_BEqdlEWls_APVPv6xLDd2JxlvTOjsBMhyphenhyphenP-sag9sBnaQzu5lsj7CxQGwbmLA2bp-ii1pinG1MZNb2E4GWo92sQboMQVwXNqFVPtEI/s1600/bang+logo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQlP3jTP_V8MAV3jKdYCi8GBjE20G15IfCgpl_4_BEqdlEWls_APVPv6xLDd2JxlvTOjsBMhyphenhyphenP-sag9sBnaQzu5lsj7CxQGwbmLA2bp-ii1pinG1MZNb2E4GWo92sQboMQVwXNqFVPtEI/s1600/bang+logo.jpg" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The "how to use the website" page features directions for using the site, with accompanying illustrations of how to put on a condom. It's the kind of thing you can imagine that three fratboy dudebros came up with in their college dormroom, hi-fiving the whole time, occasionally shouting "AWESOME!", "YOLO!" and then headbutting each other and chanting "PSI-ZETA, PSI-ZETA!" The tagline is "Skip the chatting, get to the smacking". Ahem. It's classy like you wouldn't believe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The way it works is, you load the app, and then you select the gender you are "down to bang" with (yes, that is the site terminology). It then gives you a full list of all of your friends of that gender, and you click a big button under their portrait that says "DOWN TO BANG". Nothing happens, unless they also have the app, and click you, in which case you both get a message, informing you both that you are into each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, I fired it up, (just to have a look, you understand). Here's what it looks like:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiausUISeOVAUdBFhypNyvrfJV4OFxc-EHrdhYbqAoW9HH4YJdbTWNe69pcucGrxJy5UhLJo819IgSI9nvO5E5B1bffcHVbHR0epyTpNCM_uRqjEf9ylMiLZ8ZeODnc66_KSdU4U4HgCSXk/s1600/ben+on+bang.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiausUISeOVAUdBFhypNyvrfJV4OFxc-EHrdhYbqAoW9HH4YJdbTWNe69pcucGrxJy5UhLJo819IgSI9nvO5E5B1bffcHVbHR0epyTpNCM_uRqjEf9ylMiLZ8ZeODnc66_KSdU4U4HgCSXk/s640/ben+on+bang.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br />You'll note that prominent among my allegedly heterosexual female friends is Mr.Benjamin Paul James Williams. His female heterosexuality will probably come as a shock to his lovely girlfriend, for a start. It seems the app isn't very good at identifying gender, which is even more mystifying in Ben's case, as he has not one, but four male names. I suspect it must have seen him dancing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, other than the problem with spotting genders (which, lets face it, is important), the other problems include the fact that the app claims to be completely confidential, but a bit of playing with facebook's code certainly lets you see which of your friends have it installed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It also only works if both sides have it, and men outnumber women on it about twenty to one, for fairly obvious reasons. I circumvented this problem by ticking literally every friend I had on Facebook. (yes, even the ones where their profile pic is them in a wedding dress, their cute child, the male ones, my boss, literally everyone), and then announcing I was on the app. There's actually no search function I could find, so this seemed to be the "best" way to do it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Aside from the obvious messages from male public schoolboy friends trying it out to see if I was serious ("Foxman, this is Sambo. You down to Bang? LOL!"), there was little fanfare, and I pretty much forgot I had it switched on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That is, until out of the blue, I got a message from a female friend on it. She was indeed exactly the sort of person I'd always had a thing for - a foreign lady, who I knew from university debating, who now works overseas, who I see about once every other year. Whenever she's in London, we usually go for dinner, catch up, but nothing has ever happened. So, I was pretty taken aback by the message - indeed, I initially assumed it was a joke, just her trying out the app.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, before I could write her a message asking her if it was indeed just her trying things out, she sent me a facebook message, telling me that she was going to be in London in a week's time - but also that she'd always had a bit of a thing for me, and could we make it a date? I must say, I was immensely flattered, as she's extremely attractive and incredibly successful, exactly the sort of person I'd always considered out of my league. I must admit, I consider 95% of the women I've dated as part of this experiment "out of my league", so maybe I'm overly harsh on myself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, I met her at Kings Cross Station, and we went to the champagne bar upstairs for drinks. It's actually lovely, although frighteningly expensive (£13.85 for a Gin & tonic). Fortunately, the very large, very evil organisation indeed (tm) that she works for was picking up the tab. We talked through old friends, how her career was going (short version: well), compared notes on old times. We decided to go on for dinner, and went to a lovely gastropub nearby. I regaled her with tales of what I've been doing over the last few years; she told me about a few fun adventures she's had. We compared notes on the horror of living in hotels, having your whole life in a bag; I'd traveled around the states for a couple of months during the recent election, so had a tremendous sympathy with her plight. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We agreed that if we were both single and both living in the same country, we'd love to date. Of course, that brought the issue to a head - while we were both single, I live in London, but she's totally rootless, and travels all over the place. She'd been on three continents in the preceding four weeks; and she claims that the only furniture she has in the actual flat she is supposed to live in is an ikea bed and a champagne fridge. We skirted around the issue of what would come after dinner.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We were having a great time - the date didn't feel unnatural or weird at all. It was fun - all the things that make her an appealing friend were present, but there was a fun flirtatious edge to the proceedings, as we both knew we were interested in being more than friends. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I mean, isn't a lasting relationship at its core a really good friendship with added attraction and sex? Indeed, I think there is something in the concept of hooking up friends who have crushes on each other - I just think Bang with Friends is probably just a bit too misogynistic to be the answer to this problem. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, as the evening drew to a close, she asked me to... well, like I said at the beginning - dating blog, not a sex blog. Again, use your imagination!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Next week, 28 Dates Later dates another Date Blogger (who has <a href="http://boredalonegeeky.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">already written me up</a>, so you can get an idea of what I am like on a date...) and then gets weird with <a href="http://wld.beyondpsychicdating.co.uk/help/about.cfm" target="_blank">Beyond Psychic Dating...</a></i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-11150195110059183262013-03-12T05:20:00.001-07:002013-03-12T05:20:39.923-07:00Date 12: Crazy Bland Date<br />
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So, for this post, I did high-tech, mass market dating through the OKCupid "Crazy Blind Date" app. As regular readers can probably imagine, I'm at heart much more of the sort of organic, free range, farmer's market type at heart, so I was a bit nervous about this one, and not just because the last girl I met through <a href="http://28dateslater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/date-one-love-bites.html" target="_blank">OK Cupid tried to gnaw my finger off.</a></div>
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It's all a bit odd. The core idea is your smartphone is better at finding the love of your life than you are. I was sceptical, but it's certainly better at finding its way around London than I am, so I was willing to give it a go. </div>
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The phone uses your OK Cupid dating profile - where you answer a huge amount of questions, to get your views on certain subjects - to match you with other people using the app. You then post up that you are willing to go on a date with anyone, at a particular time, at a particular place.</div>
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All you can see about the other person is one sliced up photo of them, and your OK Cupid match percentage. Hence, "Blind Date". Unfortunately, what adds the "Crazy" is the fact that the match percentage is a somewhat blunt tool, and you know *literally nothing else* about the other person. For an example of how wrong that can go, here's an example of conversation between two people who are (in theory) 92% matches:</div>
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Now, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to meet the man in question, and fortunately, the normal online dating process prevents this, because, you know, he comes across as a psychopath in the chat messages. The smiley face after describing someone as a "Feminazi misandrist whore cunt-slut", makes me seriously worry that this bloke has pile of skulls in his house. That he talks to.</div>
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Of course, with Crazy Blind Date, you could get a variation on this bloke every week for a month (assuming you survived). Still, for you dear readers, I pressed on. After a week or so of trying to arrange a date, I had no-one interested. It's an oddly cold experience - even colder and more mechanical than normal online dating, as the amount of human interaction is cut to an absolute minimum. </div>
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This is online dating as I imagined it before I had tried it. Chill, clockwork and weird. </div>
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While using the app,I found myself wishing I was just doing normal, regular, real dating, with a person I met by chance. On that note, one of my favourite, most touching stories, of how people met their partners, is from one of my devoutly religious friends. After a bad romantic experience, he found himself in a new church - he'd just moved house - and he got on his knees that Sunday, and literally prayed for a lovely girlfriend.</div>
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He then headed home from the church, and started to unpack and move in properly. Anyway, under the bed in his new room, he found a fairly large box. Opening it, he found a pair of what can only be described as kinky, thigh length, leather sex boots. Obviously, this was a little eyebrow raising for a good church-going boy, but at that point the doorbell rang, and he went downstairs to answer it, and standing at the door was a gorgeous woman, who sheepishly said she was the former tenant and she'd realised she'd left something under the bed in her room. Could she come in and get it?</div>
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He invited her in to return her kinky sex boots to her, offered her a coffee - and three years later, they are living together, and blissfully happy. Turns out, she's exactly the same kind of Anglican he is, and everything. Just with added kinky sex boots. It's the most convincing proof of the existence of the Divine I've ever seen. Sadly, as an atheist, I was having to rely on technology to fill that role in my life.</div>
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So, after a week of using the app, I was getting nowhere, and with a rare free Saturday night, I decided to head to the O2 to watch a film, as it was (somewhat randomly) the only convenient place in London that was showing this particular low-budget indie movie. Anyway, while out at the O2, my film buff "date" for the evening (a good female mate) asked me how the blog was going, I told her, and showed her the app while we were on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), a monorail that goes out to the East End of London.</div>
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We were at the point where the DLR goes from skyscraper shrouded future monorail, to monorail through blasted post-apocalypse wasteland picked over by mutant biker gangs, and it was exactly at that point that my friend noticed a lady who was an 81% match with me was looking for a date at the O2 that night. Cajoled & given permission by the cinema friend, I messaged the Crazy Blind Date lady, and we arranged to meet. Alarm bells rang as soon as she said "Lets meet in the Harvester - they do lovely food there".</div>
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So, while my chum went off to watch a movie I quite fancied, I went to the O2 branch of Harvester to meet someone my iPhone thought I had an 82% chance of liking. We met up - she lived locally to the O2, went to loads of live shows there. She was there that night to see Plan B. Anyway, we chatted pleasantly for about an hour, and then went our separate ways. </div>
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<span style="font-family: arial;">She didn't like film ("why would you go to the cinema when you can see it on DVD in a couple of months?", loved english white rappers & X-Factor winners to the exclusion of all other types of music, wasn't interested in politics or current affairs and, final nail in the coffin, hated cooking ("Ugh, all that washing up - makes the kitchen so messy"). It wasn't that she was in any way nasty - she wasn't the the skull worshiping psychopath of my nightmares - just we had </span><span style="font-family: arial;">almost literally nothing in common, apart from really liking an unlimited (and surprisingly good) salad bar.</span></div>
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In short, 82% match, my arse. </div>
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You'll be pleased to learn I made the 9pm showing of the movie, though:) Anyway, see you again on Friday morning for sleazy Facebook/Linkedin Hookup app <a href="http://www.bangwithfriends.com/">Bang with Friends</a>... where I manage to find a use for Linkedin!</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-44682998663309914232013-03-08T04:16:00.000-08:002013-03-12T05:32:52.207-07:00Date 11: The world's only other Guardian-reading Tory<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, for date eleven, I went on one of the country's online dating powerhouses - Guardian Soulmates. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The site, run through Britain's most hand-wringing, lefty-liberal newspaper, is absolutely massive, and tons of my most loveable right-on, dope-smoking, Quinoa-eating marxist chums have found love on there. Obviously, none have them have got married, but that's presumably because marriage is like, totally a misogynist cage, man. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll confess to always having had a weakness for women with multi-coloured hair, piercings, and copy of something by bell hooks in their badge-covered rucksack, so I was looking forward to this one, and had joined it at the same time I joined OK Cupid, back before I was writing the blog.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The tagline of the site - "where like minded people find love online" - gave me pause though. One thing many of my commie-coddling pinko female chums had mentioned as something they find terribly, monstrously unappealing, is if a man is a Tory. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was pretty clear from my hit rate on messages falling through the floor on this site, that yeah, admitting you're a Tory on the Graun dating site is not the way to go; so it seems lots of men hide it. "It's horrific," one friend said to me. "You go on Soulmates to *avoid* men called Toby who work for Goldman Sachs &<a href="http://lookatmyfuckingredtrousers.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank"> think cherry-red trousers are cool</a>. One managed three dates with me before I even realised." </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">No Guardian reader considers this an ideal man.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, while I am the sort of Tory who likes feminism, and multiculturalism, and is excited about my gay friends getting married, I'm still probably right-wing enough to repel the sort of woman who goes on anti-cuts marches. I do write for the Telegraph, after all, and you basically get a set of scarlet chinos with your welcome pack doing that. So, with that in mind, I decided to go looking for a horse in a field of zebras - I decide to try to find another Tory on Guardian Soulmates. I figured this was probably the best way to meet the sort of socially liberal Tory that I am. Anyway, it took quite a bit of searching, which is why this is date eleven rather than date two!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, after a month or so of looking, a lovely young Tory lady messaged me back, and fancied arranging a date. She seemed lovely; very cultured, she fancied doing a late night Gallery viewing at the Tate Modern, where she was a member. The one problem was the word "young". You see, I wasn't just being patronising in the first part of this paragraph, I genuinely hadn't realised until she messaged me back that she was 23 - almost ten years younger than me. Could I go on a date with someone that much younger than me? One of my personal nightmares is being that 56 year old man with the 18 year old girlfriend people mistake for his daughter. Still, we got on well by email, and a quick bit of arithmetic revealed she fit within the hallowed "half-your age plus seven years" rule, but I still went on the date with butterflies in my stomach. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We met at the BFI, with the plan of meeting for a quick drink before sauntering down the South Bank to the Tate. One mistake may have been going through two bottles of wine before we even left the bar, but we were getting on brilliantly. She's very politically involved - comes from a working class background, grew up in a very deprived area, and really wants to become the MP for the place she grew up, to make things better for the local community. You know, one of those rare people who want to get into politics for the right reasons, as opposed to "I did PPE at Oxford, and it's my most natural career choice after Law. By the way, do you like these scarlet trousers? That's real velour, you know". </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's a very strange thing when two people who are really nerdy about politics, who really agree, get together, drink and chat. There was lots of excited gesticulating, and "yes, yes, of course!". I'm slightly ashamed to admit we high-fived at one point talking about housing policy. It was the wine, I swear. Anyway, about 9 o'clock, we headed for the Tate. Once inside, she demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of modern art, and ticked me off on my habit of reading the cards by the works before looking at them. "Art is supposed to make you feel, not think".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, that night, there happened to be an installation going on, whereby performers would flood spaces with dry ice, giving the exhibits an odd cast in the smoky light, and changing your perception of the work. It does occur now that aside from the fact we were both self-confessed tories, this was in many ways the archetypal Guardian reader date. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, while shrouded in smoke, we ended up kissing, and it was sufficiently enjoyable as a kiss that by the time the cloud cleared, we had a small appreciative audience giving us a polite round of applause. As we were heading out of the Tate, holding hands, she looked me in the eyes and said "I want to do something really fucking shameful. I feel like I've really impressed you with all the art and politics chat...but... I really want you to take me... to Nandos."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Seems you can take the girl out of working class East London, but can't take the working class East London out of the girl:)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Laughing, we ended up eating at 10.30 near Liverpool Street, in Britain's premier greasy, spicy, piri piri chicken place. It occurred to me that we were on what my pretentious 16 year old self would have considered the best date ever - art, a kiss, and spicy chicken! It doesn't get any better than that, does it? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It turned out, the age thing wasn't really a problem at all. She's a bit more mature than her age suggests; or I'm massively immature. Either way, we got on really well. Completely randomly, in this East End branch of Nandos, we bumped into an old mate of mine - a male model who has changed his name by deed poll to "Jefferson A-Bomb McDeath: Urban Destruction". Yeah, he has a colon in his name. Pretty cool, huh?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jeff is a beautiful and charming fellow, and I was always his fat funny friend at University - it was odd being in the situation where a girl had eyes only for me, rather than him, I must say. We all got on like a house on fire. I went to the bathroom, and returned to find Tory girl demonstrating to Jeff the fact that she could put both her legs behind her head, much to the amusement/horror of the late shift of Nandinos. Later, when she moved away from the table, Jeff looked me smoulderingly in the eyes (think Magnum from Zoolander) and said "She's perfect for you mate. And she wants you. Badly." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Anyway, after we left Nandos, pretty drunk, and having had a great evening, we bid Jeff farewell, and I walked her to her bus-stop. What happened next? Well, as I've always said, this is a dating blog, not a sex blog:) Use your imagination, you terrible people!</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next week 28 Dates goes hi tech - The <a href="http://www.crazyblinddate.com/">OK Cupid Crazy Blind Date App</a>, and then the bizarre sleazy Facebook/Linkedin Hookup app <a href="http://www.bangwithfriends.com/">Bang with Friends</a></span></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-33606045304377803292013-03-05T06:57:00.000-08:002013-03-05T06:59:06.548-08:00Date 10: The Cougar<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back when I was starting the blog, I asked friends to email me any strange dating sites they might have seen or been on. Obviously, this was all on Facebook, and a huge list of dubious dating sites presented itself fairly rapidly - especially from my more, erm, alternative friends. I can't even remember the name of the most disturbing one, but it definitely was for people who get turned on by smothering each other in baked beans. But this was suggested by a man who lives year-round in a camper van and has a proudly open relationship. I mean, normal people don't do that sort of thing, do they? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thus, I was rather surprised by one very stylish older lady who I once worked with suggesting "Have you thought about CougarDate.co.uk? Lots of the divorced women at Jessamy's playgroup swear by it". She claimed it was a haven for divorced London ladies who lunch - the sort of Sex & the City woman in her late thirties who are looking for younger men for a bit of a fling. Now, I'm hardly the 19 year old Brazilian bartender /model I'm sure most of these ladies are looking for (the site divides you into "Cougars" or "toyboys"), and I'm not really looking for a fling but it seemed worth a roll of the dice. For the research, like.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'd dated older women before - notably the <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/03/28-dates-later-willard-foxton-part-six-farm-girl" target="_blank">farmgirl</a> recently - and one of the big issues is always children. Once, in my mid-twenties, I'd dated a woman who had a teenage daughter, and it is weird, having a person with real opinions who you befriended as you date their mum. That particular relationship had a very embarrassing moment where the mum in question asked me to do her doggy style while she watched Pride & Prejudice, which would be bad enough anyway, but then having to talk to the depressingly worldy teenager the morning after was, as you can imagine, excruciating: "I heard Mr.Darcy last night. You got lucky then?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That said, Samantha is definitely my favourite character in SATC, so I took the plunge. I'll confess I was a little bit sceptical - most Cougar sites I've seen look like fronts for identity theft, or pure sleazy hookup sites. I've always been adamant that this is a dating blog, not a sex blog (I'll leave that to <a href="http://www.girlonthenet.com/">Girl on the Net</a>), so I wasn't really looking for a one-time sex thing. That said, my ex-boss assured me it was full of women just like her, and she's totally a woman I'd love to date, if it wasn't for her sexy handsome husband. So, on the basis of "no-one who wears Laboutins & loves independent film could be wrong" , I fired it up, created a profile, and had a look. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's quite unusual, in that it's very location based. You can turn on a map of your local area, and it will show how many "Cougars" are around you at that given time. It's the closest I've seen to a heterosexual version of notorious (and amazing) gay hookup app Grindr. So, I turned on the map. If what my wise ex-boss had told me was true, Chelsea should have been a hot zone. I waited for the map to load, confidently expecting to be disappointed. But oh no. Once the mapping app got going, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LgPNK0EPtE">it lit up like the motion tracker in the film Aliens</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As you can see, there are literally *hundreds* of women using this in Belgravia alone. Now, it was just a matter of finding one who'd go on a date with me, rather than just pin me down & milk me inbetween the nanny leaving and her husband getting home. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's very clearly a fairly sex-oriented site - lots of the pictures are overtly sexual, with stockings, suspenders, and low cut tops a particularly common trope. After a morning of looking and messaging, I spotted a lady with a very artful set of profile pictures, where she'd cleverly obscured her face with a variety of large vintage cameras. I dropped her a line complimenting the photography, and we started chatting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We agreed to meet up down on the London waterfront, at a lovely pub called the Blue Anchor on the Hammersmith waterfront. The weather was unseasonably nice for February, so we sat outside, talked and she smoked. She was very attractive, funny, and very thin indeed. She had white wine, I had cider. We talked about her career - she had a fascinating job in the creative industries, that I can't really talk about as it would identify her all too easily. She had seen a bunch of the documentaries I had made, so I treated her to a couple of tales from the good old BBC days, which had her "laughing until her face hurt".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We talked about previous relationships - she'd read the blog, so asked for the full details on my disastrous previous form, and I filled her in on the details. I asked her how someone as successful & lovely as her had managed to dodge the wedding bullet. She was in her early forties, so well within the bracket of maybe a bad "starter marriage", or a long relationship with a guy who wouldn't commit. You know the sort, the 33 year old "professional saxophone player" who has been with her since she was 23, and has never held down a real job, because "he's an artist, man".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She said no, she'd rarely had relationships over six months long - and that usually the bloke ended it because she didn't want kids. She then said her smug married friends had always been taunting her that she'd change her mind as she got older, and she was enjoying proving them wrong, and watching them get divorced. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We talked about how the people we'd known at university had aged, got married, had kids, got divorced. I am just entering the phase of the first round of friend's divorces, but my facebook newsfeed if printed out would be pretty much a wedding-baby-wedding-baby montage for about 14 feet. It's got so bad I've recently installed a thing called <a href="http://unbaby.me/">"Unbaby me"</a> which replaces images of children with images of the Associated Press' best photographs of the day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This occasionally leads to disasters when I see a friend has posted a photo of a man skydiving into a volcano wreathed with lightning, comment "awesome pic!" and they say "I know! She's just got her third tooth!". The Cougar found this idea hilarious, and I sent her the link to it there and then. We got onto the thin ice territory of why she didn't want kids - she fairly matter-of-factly said she liked the *idea* of children, but thought as someone who'd struggled with anorexia all her life, she'd find it impossible to go through pregnancy. It was something that as a bloke with a healthy (probably too healthy) relationship with food had never occurred to me as a reason not to have kids, but I totally get it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She really liked me, and we emailed & texted a bit over the next few days. She is a bit put out that I didn't want to "lead her on" and do more romantic dating with her because I want kids. She said something that made me feel very sad, when she said "Good men always want the meat, only dogs get left the bones". We've chatted more since, and agreed that because I wanted kids, and she didn't, it probably wasn't going to work as a romance, but we are on very good terms, and have seen each other since.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She's exactly the sort of woman I could see myself with if I'm single and 50; but, sadly, I'm single and 32. It's just a shame we want different things. What can I say, I'm a sucker for a woman who knows her way around a Leica:)</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-33002511265137053842013-03-01T01:09:00.001-08:002013-03-03T00:25:31.161-08:00Date 5x2 - Cupcakes with the Veteran<br />
So here we are, date 10.<br />
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Or is it? Well,I'm sure regular readers will remember about <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/02/28-dates-later-willard-foxton-part-five-twittercrush" target="_blank">5 dates ago</a>, when I asked out a girl who I thought was lovely via twitter, and she, perfectly reasonably said no. "That doesn't count as a date! You're just trying to weasel out, the blog isn't called 27 dates and one rejected offer later!" some of you cried.<br />
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Well, as I knew when I wrote that piece, thereby hangs a tale.<br />
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It all starts a couple of years ago. A lady called CTS had started writing a dating blog called <a href="http://www.52firstdates.com/" target="_blank">52 First Dates</a>. At the time, back in 2011, I was happily in a long-term, seriously committed relationship - reading CTS's blog made me laugh, and it certainly made me glad I wasn't out there in the nightmare wasteland of the Internet.<br />
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I was with "the one", you see, so there was no chance I'd ever have to do Internet dating (the thought! Isn't it only weirdos who do that?), but I was certainly glad to be reading dispatches from the front line. The blog was very successful; it won lots of awards, contained tons of brilliant, witty writing. It wasn't all smiles and laughs; there was a <a href="http://www.52firstdates.com/2012/11/sebastian-pritchard-jones-strikes-back.html" target="_blank">genuinely chilling dark side</a> to some of the men she met, but she wrote about it with a clarity and bravery the journalist in me admired.<br />
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At the time, I remember thinking what a great idea a long-running online dating blog was, and wondering if I'd ever be able to pull it off. And even if iI could, would I? As I sit writing this at 4.30 am in a black cab on my way to meet the author of 52 first dates, to go on a date with her, I guess the question in my mind still is "maybe".<br />
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You see, the lady in question, who I asked out on twitter a couple of weeks back, was the lady who in a way, is the inspiration for this blog. Certainly, 28 Dates wouldn't exist if I hadn't read 52.<br />
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"But how did I end up going on a date with her? Didn't she turn you down?" I hear you ask. To be honest, after doing 52 online dates with all manner of weirdos, I could understand why she never wanted to touch a dating site, or meet a man "from the internet" (which I suppose I now am - how the mighty have fallen) ever again.<br />
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Well, after she had politely turned me down, a new post popped up on her blog - she was going to do a truly heroic endeavour - a <a href="http://www.52firstdates.com/2013/01/25-dates-in-25-hours.html" target="_blank">24 hour solid, round the clock, dating marathon for charity</a>, dating 25 men in a day. She was asking for volunteers to be part of her platoon of suitors.<br />
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I'll be honest, I was in two minds as to whether to apply. The competitive part of me, and the part of me that wanted to meet her, said "Yes, go for it. Seize the day". The sensible, worries-too-much part of me said "What if she says no, again? What if it's like the Odyssey and at the end her husband and son murder you?". As you might expect, the foolish "but think of the story!" part of me won out, and I sent her an email, asking to be one of her dates.<br />
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She got back to me right away, and said she'd been intending to contact me & ask if I wanted to join in. Of course, I said yes. As you might expect, scheduling a dating marathon is quite an endeavor - she asked me what time slot I wanted, and I replied "Give me the weirdest, hardest to fill slot." She also asked that so the dates didn't become just talking all night, to bring something to do - she especially wanted to be taught any odd skills we had.<br />
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I wracked my brains for what to do. Most of my skills revolve around talking, making people laugh, surviving weirdness or writing, and I suspected she was better at all of those things than I was. Obviously, manly man's man that I am, I fell back on my culinary skills, and offered to teach her how to ice cupcakes. Yes, I know, ladies, form a queue.<br />
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Thus, at 4.30 am, I stepped out into the cold London night, got into a cab, and drove across London to meet a woman whose adventures I'd read about for two years. I had with me six un-iced cupcakes and about a pound of buttercream icing in a piping bag. I was off on a competitive date, with 24 other men competing for the hand of one lady, like some kind of post-modern Odysseus (At least, I hoped I was Odysseus. I'm probably more like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitors_of_Penelope" target="_blank">Amphinomous</a>). Even by my dating standards, this was odd.<br />
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I got to the venue, which was packed to the gills with comic Reliefers, doing their 24 hour challenge marathons. It was absolute bedlam. On the main stage in the theatre, comedian Mark Watson was sweating buckets onstage, 7 hours into a 24 hour gig; two delirious, luxuriantly bearded men were staggering around the theatre bar, 18 hours into an attempt at breaking the world record for the world's longest hug. People were singing. One chap was watching <a href="https://twitter.com/25HourChihuahua" target="_blank">Beverly Hills Chihuahua</a> on a 24 hour loop. By the time I got there, he was watching it for the 4th time, this time in Spanish "for variety". There were folk in various states of undress lying asleep on chairs and the floor.<br />
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I think the closest atmosphere I can immediately conjure up to describe it was something like Jabba's palace in Star Wars. You know, totally bizarre and otherworldly, but kind of exhausted & sweaty at the same time.<br />
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Anyway, in the middle of this, I met CTS, and she's just as charming in real life as she is as a writer. Also, as I had no idea what she looked like, I'm very pleased to report she's very pretty indeed. How she's single after 52+ dates, I have no idea.<br />
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We got chatting, and inevitably, we ended up sharing dating war stories - less about the dates themselves, and more about how weird the process of being known for going on bad dates is, about your dates reading about themselves and others online, and about how strange the world of being a date-blogger is. She told me she had originally started 52 first dates in league with a gay friend, who had met the man of his dreams after about ten dates, leaving her to forge on into the wilderness alone.<br />
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As well as sharing tales, we also iced cupcakes. I'd brought pink & yellow buttercream icing, as well as assorted sprinkles and things, and we happily piped out some deeply camp cakes. There was one lovely moment where we toasted each other with freshly iced cakes. Cupcake breakfast as the sun rose - we were living the dream. (I'm massively indebted to Ellie of <a href="http://www.facebook.com/ElliesBakehouse?fref=ts" target="_blank">Ellie's Bakehouse in Peckham</a>, who helped me out with cake expertise at the last minute. You should all go there for baking lessons!)<br />
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As my time drew to a close, CTS asked me to write down a final thought on the experience, so I dashed something down on a piece of paper & handed it to her, as her next suitor arrived. I had a great time, and I hope she did too - I guess I'll find out when she writes it up in a week or so!<br />
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It's worth bearing in mind that at the end of today she'll have done 77 online dates; almost more today than I'll do in my whole dating experience. Just for comparison, at the time of writing, I've done about 16 dates in total. I recently interviewed some war veterans, who told me what it was like to join the Dambusters in 1945; sure, they were good pilots, but they were meeting these people who had done 4, 5 times as many missions as they had. Obviously, no-one is asking me to bomb a nazi rocket factory, but still, afterwards I had a vague idea of how they felt.<br />
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I'm at home now, writing the experience up - but she's still at the grindstone, and will be until eleven PM tonight. She's a lovely, bold, devil-may-care, heroic, swashbuckling (if slightly crazy) lady and she deserves to raise a fortune for charity.<br />
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You can follow the remaining dates online via Twitter @ C_T_S; donate to <a href="http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/25Dates25Hours" target="_blank">her here</a> or text "date52 £5" to 70070 and show her (and me) some love. Back to normal service next week!<br />
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<i>Last week's promised dates - Guardian Soulmates & Cougar Dating - are still pending approval from the ladies in question. One drawback of being ethical is of course, it makes a timetable hard to stick to!</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-56216013750623809572013-02-22T00:15:00.001-08:002013-02-22T07:28:09.511-08:00Date 9: 3 Jewish ladies So for Date 9, I finally listened to the nagging - wait no, "considered advice" - of a large number of my female Jewish friends, and put myself on J-Date.<br />
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For those of you <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goy" target="_blank">goyim</a> not in the know, J-Date is the most popular dating site among the chosen people. It's as much of a rite of passage in the community these days as your <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_milah" target="_blank">bris</a> or your <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_and_Bat_Mitzvah" target="_blank">bar mitzvah</a>. Once you reach adulthood, once that university relationship with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiksa" target="_blank">shiksa</a> breaks down, your Uncle Levi sits you down, tells you a long rambling story about your great-great grandparents fleeing their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl" target="_blank">Shetl</a> in the snow, & says "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oy_vey" target="_blank">Oy veh</a>, Willard, why not try J-Date?"<br />
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As the preceding paragraph of outrageous clichés attempts to demonstrate, J-Date is <u>exceedingly</u> Jewish. One of the questions on the profile asks if you are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews" target="_blank">Ashkenazi</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Jews" target="_blank">Sephardi</a>. Another asks if you keep kosher. They even have a Rabbi of the month, for goodness sake.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">To quote a friend, "I bet the Rabbi of the Month gets all the pussy" </span><br />
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There's only one problem. I'm not really *that* Jewish. My answer to the Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi question (basically "Eastern European or Spanish descent") is, "errr, which of those is more likely to come from Kent?" .<br />
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I'm from your classic, totally lost touch with the culture, atheist, British Jew. The kind of Jew that has to hide the bacon if strict relatives come round. I have been to a synagogue maybe twice in my whole life. It's not just me, my whole family is incredibly anglicised. To give you an example of the sort of thing I mean, there's often a point in conversations between Jews where you compare notes on how your family has been persecuted.<br />
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My family have lived in the UK for hundreds of years. Other people will tell you harrowing stories about what happened to their families during the holocaust; my family, well, we read about it in the Times. The pogroms in Russia? Errr... we, errr, read about it in the Times. Basically, if you want to spot Jews who had it easy, aristocratic British Jews is where it's at.<br />
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You basically have to go back to the English Civil War in the mid-17th century before I can join in, and even then it's very much "Yes, it was really hard for us to get invites to all the best parties in the late Restoration period", a tale which is unlikely to inspire a weepy Spielberg picture anytime soon.<br />
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Oh, I mean I'm Jewish enough that the Nazis would kill me, but frankly, that's not especially Jewish. I'm more sort of well, Jew-ish than "Jewish". My first worry was that the women I'd meet on J-Date would be looking for the sort of man who wears a yarmulke, asks "Meat or Dairy?" when going out to a restaurant & supports Tottenham Hotspur. My second was that as I'm sure my Great uncle Mordecai would point out, compared to many other dating sites, it's not cheap. Would it all be for nothing?<br />
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Well, Great Uncle Mordecai need not have worried. Within a few minutes of logging on, I had started to get messages from quite a few stunningly attractive women, most of whom were moderate British Jews of the same sort of stripe as myself. I can't decide whether there is an imbalance of men to women, or whether Jewish ladies are just more forthright, but either way, it's great.<br />
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One indicator of how forthright ladies on the site can be was an American woman, whose profile picture was her naked, wearing nothing but camouflage paint & an Israeli Defence Force cap at a jaunty angle. She messaged me and immediately started asking me about my sperm count & talking about her "relentless urges". This presented me with a quandary. Should I date one of the lovely normal ladies? Or this, erm, feisty specimen?<br />
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I asked my friends; while the overwhelming democratic response was "YES DATE CAMOGIRL, THINK OF THE STORY", my actually sensible friends suggested I shouldn't waste my shot on J-Date with someone I probably wouldn't want to be with. I am *really* looking for romance, after all. A hard choice to make. The story or the shot at true love?<br />
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Well, readers, I decided to steer a middle path - date all the girls, and then write it up counting all three dates as one. Having my latke and eating it, so to speak. I'm sure Uncle Mordecai would be proud. Now, there was a certain moral qualm to doing this - dating more than one person still *feels* weird and a bit wrong. But still, that's the norm on online dating. So, in one busy week I dated three lovely Jewish ladies.<br />
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J-Date (or, at least the corner of J-Date I was in), is full of bright stylish young professionals, and the first lady was no exception. Once I'd got the initial "I'm not that Jewish" chat off my chest, we settled down to a lovely evening over cocktails. She had a fascinating & secret job I can't tell you about, but trust me, it was amazing. By the time we'd discussed our mutually interesting jobs, the bar staff were turning down the lights & making subtle hints that maybe we should go.<br />
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We decided to be stubborn, and stayed in the bar through all the chair stacking, until they sent their sternest and most matronly waitress to tell us they were closing in two minutes, and then we left, giggling. Three hours had passed in what felt like 5 minutes. We then walked to the tube & bid each other goodnight.<br />
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The second date was Camogirl, although "girl" may be pushing it. She said she was 28 on her profile, although as my housemate said, carefully scrutinising her pictures, "If she's 28, I'm about 12." We met up at a nice vegan place in North London. She was very pleasant in person, from Minnesota in the USA (yah). She freely admitted she wasn't really 28, but told me if she used her real age, men wouldn't date her. Men - we are bastards, aren't we?<br />
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She worked in finance, and knew quite a bit about a few big investigations I'd done, which was flattering. She brought me a tin of Loam coloured camo paint as a gift. We had a laugh about her profile picture - she gets some "pretty cool" messages as a result of how OTT it is.<br />
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We chatted a great deal about Israel, having both traveled there extensively. We agreed it was a beautiful country, although she was a bit surprised I didn't fancy living there. Having grown up in snowy Minnesota, she was astounded anyone wouldn't fancy living somewhere hot. We both had a love of Hedgehogs in common, and she was thrilled to see the <a href="http://instagram.com/p/VzZPU3Kl1r/" target="_blank">litter of baby hedgehogs</a> I'd seen earlier in the week.<br />
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We went our separate ways, and later texted each other to say we'd enjoyed the date, but didn't really feel a spark. Happy ending though - I introduced her to an Israeli friend, and they've been on a couple of dates since. See? There's someone for everyone:)<br />
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The third and final girl was your typical hard-working North London Jewish lass. She was in charge of a very down-to-earth business, and had a sideline in hand-making beautiful jewellery. I'd never met a woman with her own Oxy-Acetylene welding torch before. We talked about our experiences of online dating - she told me her pet hate was men who still lived with their mothers, which apparently are all over J-Date like a rash. Maybe living independently explains my success?<br />
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We went out for drinks, stayed on for dinner and then I walked her to her car. Just before we got to the car, we had a lovely kiss, which was memorable partly because a man was trying awkwardly to reverse park around us as we stood there.<br />
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So, there you have it - J-Date is officially brilliant. I've met a ton of the kind of strong willed, ambitious women I'm really attracted to, and found possibly the one place on the Internet where I'm hot property. If, by some dreadful mischance I don't find true love on this adventure (and hey, I've been in 2nd dates with both the welder & the woman of mystery, so fingers crossed), then it's definitely a site I'd come back to - if only to keep my mum happy:)<br />
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Next week - <a href="https://soulmates.guardian.co.uk/" target="_blank">Guardian Soulmates</a> & <a href="http://cougardate.co.uk/">Cougardate.co.uk</a> (!)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3754359048321763509.post-45864468215891318852013-02-18T07:26:00.002-08:002013-02-18T07:26:32.941-08:00Date 8: The Officer & GentlewomanSo, for Date 8, I'm back in the mainstream. And what could be more mainstream than a TV advertised website, complete with a picture of every woman's fantasy: a burly fireman carrying her away?<br />
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Note: by "every woman's fantasy" I'm obviously ignoring the many ardent feminist friends who probably don't imagine being lifted bodily by a doubtless Sun-reading fireFIGHTER (they aren't all men, as you'll soon see). Sure they'd prefer being lifted bodily by some Slavoj Žižek quoting trade unionist, but who knows.<br />
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So, how does it work? Quite a few people have asked me how I can justify going on Uniform dating, as I don't wear a uniform to work. I'm not a Policeman or a Fireman or a Doctor. Now one imagines a rugged stubbly TV Producer passionately kissing them and then saying "Can we do that again? The Camera Operator says the light wasn't right." And therein lies the genius of the site.<br />
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You can register as either a "uniformed professional", or as a civilian. So, although I have a flak jacket in my wardrobe (thanks, BBC), I registered as a civilian, and started looking for a hot lady fireman to pick me up, while I giggled and held on my impractical Ascot hat with one free hand.<br />
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So, I scanned through the list of available professions - it's quite interesting what is or isn't considered "uniformed". For example, Prison officers, uniformed security guards and civilian air crew are on there. I mean, maybe I could understand an air stewardess fetish, but Prison guards? Really? I mean, I've seen Prisoner Cell Block H and OZ - and didn't want to recreate either. Still, each to their own, eh?<br />
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As you can see from the image above, I was keen to find a lady firefighter, mostly for the amusement of the stereotype. I was quite leery of meeting a female copper, not just because of the old journo saying "ACAB" ("All Coppers Are Bastards"), but also because the Met Police are banned from using the site - and other forces discourage officers from using it.<br />
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The likelihood is, if you go on Uniform Dating in London, and meet a copper, that person is what the army call a "Walt".
What's a Walt, you ask? Well, that's army slang for a "Walter Mitty" - a faker, who claims to be in the army when the closest he's ever been to serving in the forces is buying one of those Rambo knives with a compass in the handle when he was 14.<br />
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Anecdotally, Uniform Dating is crawling with this sort of "Yeah, I was in Iraqistan, love, and the Falklands. Twice. With the SAS. That was before David Cameron phoned me and told me to be in the Fire brigade" type. (If you're interested in the topic of "Walting", there's a good breakdown of the phenomenon <a href="http://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Walts" target="_blank">here</a> and a report on 2 fake firemen being exposed <a href="http://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Peter_Higham_%26_Barry_McGuinness" target="_blank">here</a>).<br />
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Sadly dear readers, although I messaged several suspicious looking policewomen, none responded.<br />
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Of course, that could be because Policewomen are reluctant to date journalists; or, are too sensible to want to date me. Indeed, the Police rumour is that journalists have been using the site to meet and try to manipulate officers; one cop friend told me she'd been told if she went on an online date, and the other person turned out to be a journalist of any stripe, she should just get up & walk away. Which seems a bit harsh on say, the editor of something like <i>Crocheting Monthly</i> or <i>International Cat Fancier (incorporating Kitten Week)</i>, but there you go.<br />
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So, I couldn't find a fake cop, or a real lady firefighter - but I must say, I wasn't short of attention. Uniform dating was the first dating site I'd been on where it feels like there are far more women than men - and my goodness, the women on there are keen. I started to get messages & flirts & likes piling into my inbox at a rate of knots. For the first time, I started to get messages of the type my female friends described to me - ones in ALL CAPS, riddled with misspellings & bad grammar. I'm sorry to say I didn't respond to any of them; don't judge me, but I'm not sure I could love someone who couldn't spell.<br />
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It's a very different demographic to most dating sites; as opposed to the normal metropolitan trendies who work in marketing, if you looked on the civilian side of the site, it was much more working class than I'd experienced before. Lots of ladies who work in supermarkets or factories - but I imagine if you think of the demographic who are looking for a hunky fireman, I guess that stacks up.
That said, the message I did reply to was pretty, um, forward.<br />
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It read:
<b>"Bang bang bang cheeky boy, Boats are pretty fun, I like fine chess and handcuffs. Come at me."</b><br />
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I laughed, but I must confess, I was a little scared. I had a look at her profile, where she said she was in the Navy and not much else. No picture.<br />
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I sent her a reply back, explaining that I was a journalist and had a dating blog and so on, to which she replied:
<b>"I'm too drunk to type - call me now"</b> ...and then her mobile number.<br />
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So, thinking of you dear readers, I picked up the phone and dialled her number. What followed was one of the more bizarre phone conversations of my life, where I was frequently having to turn down, ummmm....enticing offers, and say, "No, really, I want to go on a date, and then write about it". Needless to say, she found this hilarious, and, in the Nelsonian tradition, boldly took me up on my offer.
So, that was how I ended up going for dinner in Portsmouth a few days later.<br />
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The lady in question met me in civilian clothes, and we went to a nice place of her choice. We had seafood - what else? Anyway, over lobster, we got to know one another. I'd initially been worried by her civilian dress that she was a Walt, but her encyclopedic knowledge of missile systems convinced me she was the real deal.<br />
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She was charming, lots of fun - we talked about military history, had a lovely conversation about who our favourite admiral was. I surprised her by knowing a great deal about Naval history, "more than most of the people she serves with", in fact.
We had a good laugh talking about pranks navy friends had pulled - orange distress flares & laxative chocolate are both staples, it seems - and we shared an experience in having attended Glastonbury staying in an inflatable atlantic survival raft, instead of a tent. She doesn't mind me saying she has dreadful taste in music, as long as I keep her anonymous - she has a tragic, tragic weakness for both folk & boy band pop, both dreadful genres in my opinion:)<br />
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She told me about the difficulty of dating in the services, of meeting men who weren't put off dating a female officer. We jokingly discussed what would have happened if I'd taken up her offer of meeting in a London hotel room - put it this way, her attitude is very much a full on, grasping life with both hands attitude. If she wants something, she takes it.<br />
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By the time we were about halfway through dinner, we'd realised that we probably weren't compatible as lovers - she was as sure she couldn't love a man who didn't love sport as I was sure I couldn't love a lady who couldn't spell - but we had a great laugh, and a good old bitch about the government and defence cuts.<br />
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Since we've been on the date, we've been out in London - she has a great knack of finding good shellfish places, and we're becoming good friends. She's also offered me a ticket to the Army vs. Navy Rugby game in April - in her words "you'll never get a decent woman if you can't at least pretend to know the rules of Rugby".<br />
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So, a fun date, from an interesting site - and a person I suspect I'll be friends with for years - but still not "the one!"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8