I’ve had a spate of bad dates. That’s predictable when you consider that most people seeking sex in the UK, whether single or married, are using the same one or two hook-up sites. You have to fuck lots of frogs. It’s a numbers game. Somebody told me that 1% of the entire adult UK population is on Fab Swingers – somewhere in the region of half a million people. I once blocked 174 people in one go who were entirely inappropriate on account of distance, age or incompatibility, and I’m still waiting for my prince.
(Fab, incidentally, was the subject of a BBC investigation into women being coerced by their partners into sex with strangers they hadn’t consented to. That’s a story for another day, but it’s a reminder that no dating site is foolproof when it comes to keeping women safe. It’s why I built Catfish Detective. Check it out.)
I know there’s a trend towards real-life encounters, but my experience of singles nights was that they were mainly aimed at people desperately seeking a long-term relationship, not a short-term situationship. I wish there were a better way to meet sexy heterosexual people looking for casual fun, in the same way gay men have Grindr. For now, those of us seeking less than permanent partners have to make do with Fab and Feeld, which are both pretty dreadful for different reasons, especially if you’re older: Fab for the sheer volume of candidates most women have to sift through, and Feeld for the complete absence of anyone aged 60 and above.
Even the vernacular is woefully inadequate. “Dating” is one of those one-size-fits-all words that covers everything from meeting up with the intention of simply having sex to establishing whether the other person has the potential to be your life partner, give you babies and take out the rubbish with some degree of frequency. I’ve never thought of anyone I’ve met lately as much more than an interview: likes and dislikes, whether the picture on the screen tallies with the person sitting opposite me, and whether we find each other attractive enough to move swiftly to a more intimate arrangement. Sometimes this involves dinner, sometimes a coffee, sometimes merely a sixth sense from a series of WhatsApp messages and a Google search that I’m in safe hands.
And sometimes it’s a disaster despite all the vetting.
Wednesday night I had a date with a guy who stays in London a couple of times a month at a centrally located hotel.
