I'd Hate To Date Online

I think Shakespeare was half right — music is an entrée to beer-goggles. Or rather, it used to be. Songs played, drink flowed, we danced badly, and hooked-up if we were lucky. Now mobile apps have smashed the guitars and kicked the drums in, and dating looks utterly dire. I thank God I'm married to someone who tolerates me. Almost every time I speak to my single friends, I get that horrid feeling on the other side of empathy — pity. Almost every time.

With one friend, however, I peer over the proverbial fence and see a field of lush, green grass. He earns good money, and looks like a Calvin Klein model. I'm exclusively heterosexual and I'd probably shag him, so will a very long queue of women — his phone never stops pinging.

Twenty years ago (sorry, this is a "back in my day" article) things were easier for men of a more average calibre. We'd go to clubs and approach women — and it was ball-clenching embarrassing — and once all the attractive singles had paired off, those of us lower down the food-chain would sometimes do the same. Frequency was always correlated with attractiveness, but it never had to be zero.

"The pull" was still awful, though. I'd have brief spurts of confidence as a young man — a month or two, here and there — but I was usually a wallflower. I'd have given anything to have dating apps that let me swipe from a distance instead of speaking face-to-face. What a poisoned chalice that would have been.

... upgrade to read the full article