At the beginning of March, I had a long overdue dinner catch up with a friend. Up until the summer of last year, she lived super close to me and like all things that you think will last forever, I never took advantage of it. During the years when she was only a walking distance away, I didn’t see her as often as I could have and yet, I was a little saddened to learn she’d be moving further afield.

At the same time, I was of course incredibly happy for her. She and her husband (also a long time friend) have three beautiful kids and the move to a bigger home was the natural next step in the progression of their family life. Whenever she comes to mind, I always think about how infectious her laugh is, so I’ll call her Little Miss Giggles (LMG).

After getting comfy in the restaurant, we caught up on all of life’s key areas – family, work, health, latest TV programmes, etc – and then moved on to the topic that had initiated the meet up – dating. As an avid reader of my blog, she’s pretty much up to date on my, for want of a better term, ‘love life’ but this was an opportunity to fill her in on the other bits that didn’t quite make the cut for my posts. There aren’t many details that I spare but at times, some parts are either too tricky to succinctly explain or just too mundane to inflict onto others.

Starting from the end of my time with The Vegan in 2018, we journeyed back to present day, leading LMG to follow up with the question “what are you doing now?”, referring to the apps. I told her I was pretty much done with them and then offered to demonstrate how unimpressed I was by the current batch of suitors on Hinge.

Now, some people are truly fortunate enough to have met and settled with their partner long ago enough to have completely bypassed the requirement to seek love via your phone. So at times, the prospect of browsing for ‘the one’, even on behalf of someone else, is completely enticing and LMG saw an opportunity. She wrangled my phone from me and began to flick through the catalogue of gents.

I didn’t put up much of a fight to begin with but soon realised she was deadly serious about reaching out to some of the guys. And she did. She certainly did. Despite my desperate pleas for her to hear my case for not liking some of the profiles, she simply batted off my excuses and continued on. Even I have to admit, I was offering the most lame reasons in trying to dissuade her. The one that sticks out the most was “he’s wearing cropped trousers, on two different occasions, so it wasn’t even an accident!”. Lame but I still stand by it and it’s one of the very few arguments I won that night.

Of the however many guys she reached out to, which honestly felt like 20 but was probably only seven, three came back: one that same night, another the following morning and a third the day after that. We’d glanced over their profiles with such speed in the restaurant, I didn’t have any kind of gauge of the sort of interactions to expect when they responded. It’d be rude of me not to continue and foolish not to explore the possibilities, so I decided to embrace the chance to connect as if I had personally sought them out myself. Unfortunately, my initial instincts weren’t wrong and conversation petered out quite quickly on all fronts.

Definitely a lot more despondent about the whole process, I shortened my usual ‘non-response cutoff’ period from seven days to three. I do get that people are busy and I myself have had spells where I just can’t get it together to respond promptly. But judging by the lack of momentum in the interactions from all three, I felt fine about cutting my losses and removed them all.

Since then, I have been a bit more more active on the apps again. Can’t say I’ve been excited by the offerings on Hinge but Bumble unearthed a few potential gems. None thought the same about me though and hasn’t resulted in any matches. So all in all, my progress on the love front so far this year is, well, nil. There isn’t any.

I feel more inclined to explore other options. It’s true that it’s now a year since I went to the speed dating event, I could maybe try that again. Plus there are a whole host of dating sites targeted at those wanting to establish a more serious connection. Some of them you have to pay for the service but if it takes a bit of money to try and circumvent the time wasters and/or less committed bunch, I reckon that’d be money well spent.

Thanks for the push Little Miss Giggles.