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.