Swipe Right, Strip Down, Repeat
I met Houdini via a swinging website, which has become my go-to place to find single, available men who enjoy sex and, generally speaking, know their way around a woman’s body — which is more than can be said for the men on the more vanilla apps, in my experience.
If you want a man with a high libido, then you’ll find them on swinging sites, with the advantage being that men outnumber women by about 100 to 1. If you want a man who will endlessly text you before eventually meeting you in Café Nero for a subpar coffee, you go on Match.com. I don’t drink coffee. I like to feel wanted and know that I won’t have too much competition on Swinging Heaven (SH). Being a single woman on SH, even a single woman of 60 (give or take a few years), is as rare as seeing the sun during the average UK winter and just as desirable.
As a woman who likes to feel like a unicorn, such as I am, then I know I can have both my ego and the more intimate areas of my body stroked within a short amount of time. I’m not a big fan of texting, preferring to try and arrange a first meet quickly and hook-up sites do tend to deliver those whom want the same.
On sites such as Fab Swingers, for example, you can almost be guaranteed, no matter what you look like, provided you have a pussy, of receiving upwards of thirty messages within the first 24 hours of registering. It can be overwhelming, sifting through them all, especially when it quickly becomes apparent that very few of these men have bothered to read beyond a line or two of one’s profile, if that. Clearly, profile reading is regarded by many as a deeply optional extra whereas showing you their engorged appendage seems to be the prime picture as opposed to say, the standard headshot or man sitting astride a racing bicycle.
What unifies the swinging sites, and any of the other more traditional dating sites I’ve tried, is that it doesn’t actually matter what I say I want because the majority of the time my requests are completely ignored. If I specify nobody under 50, for example, I’ll still receive numerous approaches from men in their twenties or thirties. If I am adamant that if a guy has a beer belly to please pass me by, I receive images of guys who looked like they swallowed a beach ball.
You may wonder, why do I bother? I often ask myself the same question but the honest truth is that I know, hidden amongst the dozens of profiles of men for whom I am completely incompatible either because of age, distance or because their desires do not align with my own, I still do always manage to find a few that I have a sense will be a good match. The rest, I suppose, are simply there to keep my inbox looking full. The good ones, the ones who can spell, take a reasonably good photo, express themselves without resorting to cliches like ‘You’re so hot’ can be surprisingly fun.
Which is how, after a 48-hour stint on ‘Fab’ (I couldn’t cope with the attention for any longer), I ended up on a date with Houdini, a 6’4” a guy who looked like someone you might see guarding the door at an upmarket club, broad shoulders, with a tan the colour of weathered oak, hair buzz cut to a number 2, ten years my junior and formerly with the SAS and Special Forces, sharing a drink at a pub in Notting Hill. Not a scam artist, not a Walter Mitty as so many of these SAS guys often are, but the real deal.
