dating

‘You gotta trust, give it time’

Posted on by Charlotte_Sometimes

This week I’ve had a new mantra, running on repeat in my head.

‘Love is like a fart, if you have to force it – it’s shit.’

And that’s sort of where I am right now, still in the state of acceptance I described last week, except there’s now an added layer of apathy which I quite like as it shows how secure I have become within myself. 6 months of therapy + 28 (and counting) adventures + much self-reflection = a whole lotta personal growth. That’s really significant considering the week I’ve had dating wise. At any other point of my life, this week would have pushed me over the edge and sent me spiralling. Instead, I can see it all logically for what it is. And that none of it is a reflection of me.

This week I’ve:

  • Been zombied
  • Had two Breeze dates postpone
  • Experienced sexual harassment from a match on Bumble

It’s not that I’m numb about it, or desensitised to it all. It’s sucky, and it’s disappointing and, in the later instance, plain gross. But none of it is my fault or a reflection of me. All 4 of these men are strangers I have never met, who barely know me. What they did, on this wide spectrum of the bleak side of dating, is all about them. Let’s get into it.

At this point, we all know what ghosting is. Zombieing is what happens when the person who ghosted makes a return. A sudden return from the virtual dead. My zombie was this guy, voice note guy resurrected himself back into my life via Whatsapp – with an apology, a quasi-explanation of why he went ‘AWOL’ and statement of intent about how much he’d like to ‘reconnect’ with me. After thinking about it for most of the day, I decided to reply that I was open to it. I had liked talking to him, it was the most connection I’d felt with someone romantically this year. Everyone goes through things, maybe he hadn’t done the right thing – but his message suggested an emotional intelligence that warranted another chance. I suggested a tentative date to meet and, well…

Can guess what happened next?

Two days of radio silence, then some non-committal messages and we’re now onto our second round of days of radio silence. If he resurfaces again, I’m going to have to perform an exorcism (polite message stating my boundary and desire for consistent communication) and end his haunting. If he actually wanted to ‘reconnect’ and meet me – he would do that and actually follow through. I deserve more than this half-hearted, half-arsed, half-attempted approach.

On a similar, but different note, this links to my two postponed Breeze dates. As outlined before, Breeze is a newish dating app without a messaging function. You match based on profiles (which have the option to be filled out more than profiles on other apps, although not that many people seem to make the most of this) and then go for a drink.

In theory, this is dating with intention whilst also a slight return to pre-app dating – no messaging beforehand minimises creating a false impression of the other person and hopefully reduces expectations. You’re just going for a drink with someone you liked the look of. To have both dates postpone within a 24-hour window was unfortunate timing. One is apparently ‘travelling’ and the other ‘now can’t make sunday.’ This would have made me so upset at any other point in my life, perceiving these as rejections and my not being good enough or attractive enough. But, again, it’s not a reflection of me at all.

There are lots of possible reasons for why they asked to postpone, and both have put a new date in the diary. It does feel a tad sucky, like they’ve found a better option and decided they’d rather do that than follow through on our date. But, I also just don’t give a fuck. Their loss. Evidently, neither man realises how lucky they are that I’ve even given them a chance…

Whether something has genuinely come up which has resulted in the need to postpone, or they got offered something else they’d rather do, that is not a rejection of me. They do not know me. They might get to meet me some day. Maybe they’ll even regret that they’d ever had to delay meeting my wonderous self. But that’s not my business. What is my business is how I choose to react, and my reaction is [insert shrug here].

That’s also how I responded to what happened on Bumble, with an added layer of anger and determination for consequences – call me the Judge Dredd of dating. I was thrilled when I realised I’d matched with D. A primary school teacher. Several mentions of being a feminist and supporting women’s issues. A photo and reference to his younger sister. Funny responses to the prompts. A photo at Hobbiton. His dating goals are ‘long term relationship’. And he’s super fit? I envisioned a proposal being imminent. We’d obviously have a LOTR themed wedding.

Finally, this was the kind of profile that made it all worth it. It was just like rummaging around for ages in the aisles of T.K.AXX then suddenly finding a Keith Haring leather jacket in the sale for only £20 (a true story). Now, as it’s Bumble, he just needed to reply to my opening message within 24 hours otherwise the match will expire. True love was finally within reach!

He replied within a minute! Oh my god, it’s finally happening. I’ve found him and he likes me, thank you Gods of dating for everything that has lead me to this man. We’re messaging, there’s a zappy back-and-forth. Oh my word, he writes too?!? He’s talking about how he wrote a short story today. Be still my beating… Wait. ‘Need a little post writing relief session’. Did he just make a joke about him masturbating right now? Maybe I’ve misunderstood? Oh, he’s based in New Zealand but has his profile on passport mode so he ‘can see if there’s any good reasons to come back home’. I don’t feel so good about that. But…

‘Charlie let me cum first I can’t type at the same time. I’m very horny’ is something that you might expect to receive on an app like Feeld. Not so much on an app supposedly for dating, sent by a man supposedly looking for a long-term relationship. There’s then a reference to my photos and how I’m ‘fit as fuck’ and – oh, now he’s describing he’s masturbating over my photos. In shock, I call him out and am swiftly blocked. After reporting it to Bumble, I hear back within 24 hours that they’ve removed him from the site.

It’s been a couple of days, and I still feel icky over the whole thing. Within the space of just a few minutes of messaging he had been beyond inappropriate; I have no idea what he thought would happen next after he said those things. Whether he was actually doing what he implied is irrelevant, he did not have my consent to say those things to me. The fact it was by someone whose profile had been such a delight did make it hit harder. It’s made me wary of who I were to match with next and what could be said, reluctant to risk being exposed to a similar situation happening again.

So, what does that all mean?

Those are all really pants dating experiences, in a week where there genuinely haven’t been any good ones to address the balance. It genuinely feels impossible to even find someone to go on a drink with and have a flirt – it’s all I want at this point, I no longer have the lofty ambition of suddenly stumbling across the love of my life on an app. That’s sort of because I’ve become so emotionally fatigued and wary from a conveyor belt of experiences like these. But, here’s the positive, I am not taking any of these experiences personally. These things are not unravelling me or my sense of self. They’re not dulling my light or belief in my sparkle. These things may have happened to me, but they do not reflect me or who I am or what I have to offer in a partnership.

I still believe that romantic love is out there for me, even though the hope well is running a little drier than I’d like right now. I’m calmer about it all than I ever have been, I don’t need to fix or control it all right now – there’s a peace to be found in accepting what is, even if it’s not what I want most deeply. Nothing is permanent and things can change in an instance.

Time to trust the process and not keeping forcing it, otherwise it’s shit.

‘Where have all the good men gone…’

Posted on by Charlotte_Sometimes

It’s been a couple of months since I last wrote here. In that time I’ve written half a dozen pieces, in my head. Undoubtedly they were Pulitzer-winning pithy takes on life, some positive and some negative – I just didn’t have the time or energy to write them. I mildly resent the the fact that the first time I have something to say and the time and energy to say it, it’s about boys, but maybe I can vent this up and then move on.

Here’s my latest situation. I matched with a guy on an app a couple of months ago, but we kept missing each other due to respective breathers from apps until our timelines finally overlapped. He moved us onto voice notes (I love me a personal podcast). We consistently send voice notes for several days – they’re very good voice notes, heartfelt with a side of flirt. We’re both clear on what we’re looking for and that we’re interested in each other. We both go away on – separate – week-long holidays, but keep messaging and sending each other pics of our respective adventures. We both return to London and I suggest an evening to meet up. And I never hear from him again.

It’s not a tale-as-old-as-time, but it’s an increasingly familiar one – an experience that anyone who has been single will know, particularly if that singledom has occurred in the last few years where it really feels that ghosting has become alarmingly normalised. People seem unable to use their words and say they’re either no longer interested or have met someone else, instead leaving a tumbleweed to do all the talking on their behalf.

The last few months on the apps have genuinely been the worst I’ve ever known it. Undoubtedly I was returning to them somewhat unwantingly, after having my heart bruised and being ghosted by someone that that I had really come to care for, but I remained open to love and possibilities. It’s a shame that both of those things feel in short supply on the apps these days. Breeze felt like a game-changer, until I had:

  • The third worst date of my life
  • A second date in the diary, who then decided he ‘wasn’t in the right head space to date’ but popped up again on the app the next day.
  • A really good first date which lead to a very weird talking stage with a month between first and second dates. The second date he then cancelled the night before as ‘he’d sprained his neck’ and ‘needed to be wooden the next day. When he got back in touch a week later, and I said I wasn’t going to keep talking to him unless we actually had a second date, wished me luck and told me I’d ‘seemed super fun’.
  • The guy who cancelled our date two days after matching because he was ‘going out of the country’. Our date wasn’t for 3 weeks. He popped up on the app a few days later.
  • The guy who postponed our date 4 times, then decided he had ‘family issues’ and couldn’t date.

When listed like that, it’s hard not to want to bang my head against the wall. Because it’s not just that one app.

On Hinge I didn’t get any matches for three months, until I paid £75 for 3 weeks usage of it’s membership. Whilst there was an improvement in the quality and compatibility of prospective partners I was shown, and some matches did happen, no dates have occurred. Very rarely did any of the men message or reply to messages. And when they did, none of them actually asked questions or made any conversation easy.

On Tinder (which, btw, returning to after 6 years away felt like a season regular returning to a show they were no longer wanted on) I got 35 matches within about two weeks. I only received one message, but he seemed a good one. We got a date in the diary. The day before the date, I logged on and found out I’d been unmatched. For research purposes, I didn’t messages any of the others first for two weeks until, totally exasperated, I sent them all the opener ‘What’s the most embarrassing song you know all the lyrics too?’ Yes, I know, a generic opener is far from ideal, but I was weary and at capacity of witty openers. I didn’t get a single reply. Not only that, none of them unmatched either. The 34 one-sided exchanges sat in my inbox for a further two weeks until I deleted them all out of mortification.

Well, ‘why not to try and meet people in real life?’ I hear you cry. I’ve written about some of those events before here, here and here. And still I continue to try, and I promise you I do go in open-minded and open-hearted. I went to a singles pottery class on Friday. There were 5 men there – 3 sweet men way younger than me, 1 who arrived with his GF (long story) and 1 who was just there to do some pottery. 5 other men had booked and didn’t show up. Whilst I am very aware that it was exceptionally unlikely one of those 5 men would have been the great love of my life, or a Mr Right Now, the ratios of these events are just so damn infuriating.

I know this experiences are not unique to me, I hear so many similar tales from friends, friends of friends and strangers I trauma dump with at singles events. I am not saying this is exclusive to heterosexual dating. I am not saying that these experiences are exclusive to women, I’m sure men who date women are also finding things just as frustrating and exhausting.

What I am saying is that your single friends who are trying to date are not okay right now. We are tired and disillusioned. We are in the trenches, the talking wounded, trying to find love and stumbling into all sorts of minefields. If you have a single friend who needs to vent, please let them vent. Please don’t advise them with adages like ‘it’ll happen when you least suspect it’ or ‘maybe you’re being picky’. Just listen to them for a while, let them be sad about it. Because these experiences, whilst I sometimes can reframe them as funny and ‘for the plot’, they do sometimes make me sad. I have so much love to give, and keep on trying and being open to the universe and just keep being disappointed. I do all the right things but am yet to experience reciprocal romantic love; it requires so much willpower to avoid being disillusioned and cynical.

I want to believe it will happen. Finally. Pretty please.

Adventure 3: Try out a new dating app and go on a date

Posted on by Charlotte_Sometimes

I have been in the trenches of London dating for 11 years. Like any good solider, I do tours of duty – heading onto the battlefield in full protective gear, trying out the apps and events and even trying to project ‘approach me vibes’ for this thing I’ve been told about called ‘approaching someone in person’. Every single tour has ended the same way, with me returning more wounded and jaded. Essentially I have become the dating equivalent of that trope of the world-weary colonel – sat in the corner, patched up and scratched up, endlessly smoking cigarettes as I relay how I’ve seen horrors you wouldn’t believe (yes, that is an Apocalypse Now reference, I’m cultured and classy like that). Sometimes I forget just why I keep trying, so I sit it out for a while, then something happens to give me hope to propel me back for another go. (It’s hope or madness, I’m undecided as of yet…)

It makes sense that at least one of my Project 52 adventures involves dating, and a new dating app at that feels like something of a novelty. Particularly one that does feel a bit different to the now-homogenous unholy trinity of Tinder, Bumble and Hinge. (I’m writing this part of the post pre-date, I’ll be fascinated to see if/how my tone changes in the post-date section)

Breeze proudly declares itself ‘is the dating app without a chat function’, a fact that is both true and compelling. Any frequent users of the aforementioned banes of my existence (‘the apps’ to be more polite) will have become bone-tired with the ‘talking stage’ that occurs. For the uninitiated, on most apps, once you have matched there will be a degree of talking before committing to a date. The ‘talking stage’ isn’t an automatic predecessor to a date, many matches will in fact not make it beyond an exchange of ‘Hey! How was your day?’ Then, if you eventually do decide that you both want to meet, we have the risk of not being able to meet for a while – which can result in a weird limbo as you try to maintain momentum and interest. It’s a danger zone of messaging and wasted time & energy that is rarely anything other than interminable.

With Breeze, you cannot message your date prior to a two hour window around the appointed time if your date – although there is the function to postpone/cancel your date if needed. It means I’m going into this date with no intel beyond the detailed bio. And my gods is that liberating! I’ve got some initial starting points for conversation courtesy of the bio, but the rest is there to be discovered. I’ve got no idea what T sounds like, his messaging style or tone – we are going into this date as literal strangers.

We matched on my first day using the app, when his profile came up at the 7pm drop of profiles that is another of the apps USPs. Every night at 7pm you will be shown a few profiles, usually no more than 10, for you to take your chance on. That’s it. No seemingly endless swiping of the apps, a few minutes consideration when you log on and then you’re done – which feels so much healthier than the hypermarket of seeming endless choice of the other apps. The match preferences aren’t hidden behind a paywall, unlike other apps, and you can also select a matching pool according to what you’re looking for – from the more casual to the more serious.

Another difference is that a ‘like’ here has more currency in that when you ‘like’ you’re also saying ‘yes, let’s go on a date’. If the other person feels the same about you, you pay a drinks token (£9.50 for 1, or £21 for 3) which is essentially a deposit for your date. It means your first drink when you arrive at the date venue is already paid for when you arrive, saving awkward conversations over who is getting first round – plus once you’ve finished that drink you could always use it as an easy ‘well that was nice, but I’m going to go now’ exit pass if needed.

When you’ve both ‘paid’ your drinks token, you’re then shown a calendar of upcoming dates and times. You tick and cross your availability, your date does the same, then the app picks your first point of mutual availability and your date is booked. You don’t message each other at all, aside from if you need to change/postpone/cancel your date when you’re given the option to send a singular message using their proforma. There’s also a chat window open from two hours before the date to five hours after, but this is encouraged to only be used for emergencies only. Otherwise that is it. No swapping emails, no socials, no chat. If you cancel a date, you’re frozen out of the app for a week. The intent behind that, and the drinks token deposit, seems to be that this app is taking dating seriously with no option for the ghosting and standing-up that happens on the other apps. And, should that happen in some way, or the behaviour on the date is bad, there are genuine consequences where you are frozen or even banned from the app.

24 hours before the date you are told where you are meeting your date. For my date with T we were assigned Apples & Bears, a bar on Brick Lane. And, for my first ever Breeze date, it was a really nice introduction to the process. In stark contrast to every other app date I’ve ever been on, we’d literally spend 5 minutes (if that) on admin prior to the date, which makes the date feel far lower stakes and removes so much expectation from proceedings. There was liberation in going into a date knowing what he looked like, some key facts and some entry points for conversation – the rest was for us to discover in person.

We stayed at Apples & Pears for a couple of drinks, then headed for a walk and moved onto Shuffleboard for a couple more rounds before calling it a night – it was a school night for both of us after all! At the end of the date we agreed we’d like to see each other again, deciding to swap numbers via the app as it was both convenient and gave me a chance to properly try out the app. Post-date you’re given the option to rate your date, the venue, the app and if you’d like to swap numbers – which we’ve now done. A nice and Breezey time was had and I’d be open to a second date.

Breeze genuinely does feel like a fresh alternative to the other apps. Whilst the current most popular dating app in the UK, Hinge, claims to be ‘the dating app designed to be deleted’ – for the last couple of years it feels like the only reason you’d actually delete it is because of despair rather than meeting the love of your life. Breeze, with it’s slightly more curated approach, could definitely be a way forward.

Singledom bites at 6.48pm on a Saturday

Posted on by Charlotte_Sometimes

On average, I feel most single at 6.48pm on a Saturday. Oddly specific, but as today’s 6.48pm on a Saturday reminded me, totally accurate.

I’m writing this part of this post whilst on the leaning section of the tube. You know the bit, by the doors. But on the side where the doors won’t open, at least on this leg of the journey. Jubilee Line at Green Park if you want me to continue the theme of oddly specific details. I had my spot all sorted, head deep in a book when, on either side of me a couple (both male/female) took up residence. In both instances with little interest or awareness that they had ended up being incredibly close to me and were in fact intruding on my personal space. The person they were with was their world, all that matters is that their person was safe and comfortable. 

Both assumed the position heterosexual couples subconsciously seem to find themselves in these situations. Her tucked up against the plastic divider, he the warrior defending her. He helping her stand in case she falls, two world-weary people leaning on each other, safe in the knowledge that no matter what happens – they’ve got each other. No matter the scenario that arises in this journey, they have a partner to accompany them as they face it.

I know full well this is an idealised view. Any number of things could have happened in their day and could await them after this journey. The arguments, fights and betrayals that could await them. But, from the outside anyway, they look sedate. Safe. At peace. Found.

That’s when I feel the pang, that want for what they have – or what it looks like they have. 

I’m journeying home from a fantastic day with my best friend. We saw a superb comedy show, having a taste of normality in amongst the chaos of the last 18 months. I’m going back to my awesome housemate. I might even watch the football. You never know, we may even win it.

But right now, all I can feel is this pang that defies all logic. I’m 6 weeks away from my 29th birthday and I have never experienced what these couples have right now. I’ve never had someone to lean on like that, with this degree of intimate certainty. And this pang is reverberating in my bones – rattling and ricocheting along until, as hyperbolic as it sounds, it makes my eyes water.

I don’t need what they have. I’ve never had it, and I’ve made do without it for this long. I also literally don’t need it. At 6ft tall and built like a Viking – I don’t need someone to bodyguard me on the tube. Statistically speaking, when it comes to average heights and builds of a man in the UK, there’s very few who’d literally be able to achieve this physically so I rarely entertain the notion of it ever happening in the way these couples are curled into each other right now..!

But I want it. And I feel like I’m meant to feel embarrassed about admitting this to you, whoever you wonderful people are who read my ramblings. But I’m not.

The only way to keep navigating the hellhole that is dating is to maintain hope. Like with anything in life, we hope that things happen for a reason – that our lives are structured in a certain way, with certain things happening (or not happening) at certain times, for a certain purpose. One which we may never understand, but the fortuitous fruits of which we will always appreciate.

One of my maaaany self-deprecating jokes when someone – usually a very comfortably coupled someone – asks after my non-existent love life is to respond ‘Well, you know what – I’m starting to think maybe the factory shut for the day after making me and they forgot to make my partner!’ It’s self-defence 101, cloaking a genuine and innate fear with a half-hearted laugh and an accompanying good-humoured slap on the table. Desperately concealing the depleting quantity of hope retained in my body, which seems to face surge charge deductions at 6.48pm on a Saturday.

But, as I wearily look ahead to the speed dating event I’m going to on Tuesday, if I want to find my tube buddy – I need to keep trying and keep that hope going. I need to innately rely on the universe revealing my person and their having a reason for having kept me waiting for so long.

And, on one Saturday in the future, it’ll be 6.48pm and I’ll know it was all worth it.