Thou shalt not have a Carrie Bradshaw moment

I wrote this a while ago for Vickys Zine on Singledom, its a bit of a read so I wont be offended if you give up a couple of paragraphs in:

“Dating for the paranoid generation”

I am twenty-three years old and I have never been on a date.

Not even an accidental one.

You see I met the boy I dated, and I use that term in its loosest sense; mainly due to his wandering eye (and by eye I mean penis) in High School Maths when he threw a ruler at me.

Naturally I took this incident, as any gullible fifteen year old would, to be one of the most romantic gestures I had ever bore witness to; rather than using my nouse and realising it was probably the earliest indicator of his remarkable ability to be a bit of a dick.

Yet it was this stationary related incident followed by a proposal of Shakespearean proportions “So are you my girlfriend or what then?” that rendered my dating career over before it had even begun.

Once you pass the honeymoon period and start wearing your laundry day clothes in front of him you can kiss the notion of dates and your table for two and a nice bottle of Merlot goodbye. But it is at this point, as you and your sweatpants are waving romance off into the distance, another type of dating becomes entirely possible;

You see that fancy dinner he’s treating you to tonight isn’t a date,
It’s a “Sorry, I’ve been a right shit” evening out.

You just don’t know it yet.

Now with these type of dates the general rule of thumb is that the fancier the restaurant the dumber the situation he will have gotten himself into.
Take for example if the date merely consists of a trip down to your local; You can pretty much rest easy, he probably just got drunk and tried to snog your best mate, again.

However if the restaurants is the sort of establishment that offers you a separate wine list with your menu you should be fairly worried by this point, and if the cheapest wine on that list is over forty of his guilt ridden pounds, you should definitely be worried; its more than likely that someone,
somewhere, is definitely pregnant by this point.


You’ll have to forgive my bitterness at this point, I’m sure not all
relationships are this unhealthy and I would also love to believe that there are men out there that aren’t emotional fuckwits, its just that they seem to be hiding.

If fact I would go as far as to say they are Hide and Seek champions in the making.

A fact I was quick to discover over the course of the next six months after the ruler throwing delinquent announced he was leaving me for his Manager, the Manager of our local Blockbuster I hasten to add.

So with the dating experience of a fifteen year old and a pile of overdue DVDs I left my charming Ex and his Manager shagging ways and set off into the mysterious world of dating.


With three single house mates to guide me through the impending mind field I started my quest feeling fairly confident that I would eventually find
someone remotely stable who wouldn’t request a wine list with his meal and whose wallet didn’t contain a Blockbuster membership card.

This optimism lasted about a month, after which I quickly discovered that the aforementioned mind field was about as fun as the game and it became apparent that my house mates had been right all along;

There are a worrying amount of villages outside of Leeds who are missing their Idiots.

Now if any of those Villages are desperately seeking their now University educated fucktards back me and my house mates would be more than happy to point them in the right direction, in exchange for the promise that none of us will ever have to endure them and their emotional baggage and terrible pick up lines ever again.

Beacsue as entertaining as the stories we could tell you about these idiots are, stories wont watch DVDs in bed with you, take you out for a pint or even just remember your name the next day, hence the coining of the phrase:

“I’m one more awful chat up line away from Match.com right now”

A phrase which seemed to encompass our combined desperation in a more socially acceptable way if nothing else.

Little did we all know a friends of mine was about to take that more
literally than any of us had imagined.

“Your writing is wittiest when you write about relationships, you should try to work with that as a theme”

So after racking our brains for possible article themes, other than my determination that the only thing myself and Bridget Jones would ever share would be our surname, we finally concluded maybe there was an article somewhere in our phrase of desperation, but was I really prepared to try online dating?

Surely the only people to date via the anonymity of the Internet are people whose hobbies include dogging and antiques?

What sort of reputable and more importantly mentally well balanced person would advertise themselves online like a spare room for rent or your mates old sofa?

Was it really about meeting “the one” by speeding up the elimination process?

So against my better judgement I logged into Match.com, made myself a large Vodka and Coke and set about finding some answers.

I started with the patience testing task of creating a virtual version of myself, which is by no means an easy fate, especially for someone with the attention span of a goldfish.

And if you thought dating in real life was a mind field, just try filling in the Match.com questionnaire.

Pets I like? Pets I don’t like? Do I want children? Do I like other peoples children? How often do I exercise? What are my views on marriage? What do I consider my best feature? What is the square root of Eight hundred and twelve?

After many hours spent pondering and a couple of cheeky white lies, “No of course I don’t mind if he has children” Match.com now knows me better than I know myself.

This done I moved onto trying to describe the ideal qualities of my so far fictional partner, Unfortunately you cannot simply enter, “Anyone that wont kill me in my sleep” so I then had to spend the next couple of hours
deciding if I cared whether he had a “sweet tooth” or not.

The mind boggles.

Hours and numerous glasses of vodka and coke later I got to the final stage of my profile creation where I had the pleasure of trying desperately to describe myself and “what I do for fun” without sounding like a twenty something alcoholic with a mild case of OCD.

After hours of redrafting myself and my hobbies and interests pleasantly reworded with “Neat” and “Sociable” I launched my virtual self out there.

Within minutes Match.com had helpfully provided me with a “Photowall” of pictures of other members I may be interested in, apparently I simply had to scroll through ticking the ones I found marginally attractive.

Crude? Yes,
Vain? Completely,

but also totally consistent with Darwins theory of Evolution, Natural
selection and all that, and who are Match.com to argue with Darwin?
So I clicked away the “matches” that looked like they had a murky criminal past or an unhealthy self tanning habit and before I knew it I had wasted an evening.

Other bizarre features of Match.com include a “Wink” button, I am assuming this is a device used to indicate your interest in someone; you click on the both hilarious and sinister looking little smiley face and the other person receives an notification to tell them that you are too shy to send them an email but interested enough to use a feature that you would never think of using in a real life situation.

A lot of the features on Match.com require a subscription, which comes in at the recession friendly price of £30 a month. After a moments pause I calculated this was a least a bottle of Vodka and a new top and decided to use the three day free trail before committing to such madness.

I spent the vast majority of Day One creating a cyber me but by Day Two I was sold.

I had spent an entire afternoon stalking peoples profiles, But wait had there been a Match.com photo opportunity day that I had missed out on? Why did everyone else’s profile pictures contain at least two photos of them either hanging out on top of a mountain or skydiving? Who were these well-travelled individuals?

My inquisitive nature was soon to be satisfied as my inbox filled up with all sorts of conversation starters, compliments, jokes and genuine questions.

I was hooked, I even found myself using the wink button on a couple of occasions despite my better judgement and by 8pm, I had struck up email correspondence with a primary school teacher, a lecturer, a solicitor and fashion buyer, all of whom seemed to be missing the all important serial killer gene and had so far yet to mention their interest in dogging or the occult.

I was thrilled, all four talked passionately about their lives which seemed not only to be fairly normal but also quite free of emotional baggage, a welcome change from the boys of late who seemed to have me confused with their therapist. I was also surprised how openly people talked about their reasons for trying Match.com, which ranged from moving to a new city for work to being fairly shy in social situations, but for me the icing on the cake was that none of them said all this whilst staring intently at my chest.

But by day three however the cracks had started to appear.
It would seem that I not only attract the mentally unhinged in real life but in a virtual reality as well.

Emails came through that bordered more on worrying than amusing, promises to “pray for me” and corny one liners a plenty filled my inbox, Me and my spam filter were working overtime and my house mates were worried they had lost me to a virtual reality. I’d become so focused on massaging my own ego that I had forgotten what I was supposed to be researching let alone writing an article.

I decided enough was enough, online dating was taking over my life and I was officially in a relationship with my laptop, I needed to delete my profile before things got too serious between the laptop and I.

Despite the mixed reaction I had to online dating I learnt two valuable lessons during my time as LeanneMarie23, catchy no?

The first of which was not only how to spot serial killer tendencies in emails but in profile picture too and the second being that problem doesn’t lie with online dating it actually lies with us as a single nation.

Were all so preoccupied with playing hard to get that that is precisely what we have become, too afraid of rejection to actually interact with one another.

It’s this fear of rejection that seems to be the driving force behind most peoples motivation to join sites such as Match.com, after all rejection is much less crushing when it comes in a politely worded email rather than in a bar full of your peers.

Now I am not saying Match.com is the home of the all single, attractive and well educated men, that would be madness, but whilst there are people on Match.com that do appear to be one or more of those things they are currently house sharing with some total fruitcakes,

but then who isn’t?

I mean everyone has had a roommate that talks too much about dogs or spends too much time with their collection of military knives at some point haven’t they?

So when it comes down to it you’re no better off either way, online or in real life you can forget having to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet a prince, these days your more likely to have to scan hundreds of profile pictures or faces in various bars just to try and decipher peoples possible criminal intentions before accepting the drink they insisted on buying for you.

I don’t know about you but I half miss the days when boys just launched stationary at you.


Congratulations if you got through that, I hope you enjoyed it and as ever feedback is welcomed with open arms.
This also seems like a good point to mention that I am in fact NOT dating anyone from the internet, contry to popular belief.