Online dating

So online dating? What's that all about eh?

A refuge for hermits, sanctury for the socially inept, and den of iniquity for the questionably moraled underbelly of society? Maybe.

Populated by a surprising amount of people from Clapham who, if you go by their pictures at least, seem to enjoy skiing? Definitely in my experience.

I'd say that online dating no longer suffers from the stigmas it once used to. To my mind sites like My Single Friend have done a lot to change attitudes (A site fronted by a tv personality, where you have to recruit a friend to write a paragraph telling everyone how great you are).

Whereas once you'd probably have felt your blood run cold if someone found out you were online dating, nowadays you're more than likely to tell your friends about it the day before and then regale them with stories the day after. You see, places like MSF made it a social, fun, and most importantly shared experience. I'm sure back in the day, guys had less of a problem to go online, but for girls I think it was a darker, more predatory space in ways.

For the rest of us - each and every day we all send messages, view pictures, and interact with people online, some we know well, others less so, some not at all as our inner voyeur peeks through the curtains of a perfect strangers unguarded security settings and at their holiday snaps. So meeting and getting to know people online makes sense.

You see for me, when I'm out, I'm out with my friends so I've no intention to spend my night casting meaningful glances around the room, ready at any minute to leave my friends and embark on a woo-a-thon. Since I don't go to meat markety places and I don't have many stella drinking single male friends, I have no wingmen to go out 'hunting' with. Plus I find it kind of cringy the idea of going up to a stranger at a bar, intruding on her night and then needing to deliver in the space of 4 minutes: chat which makes her think I'm funny, intelligent, caring and convinces her I'm in possession of the genes and a delivery device to pass them on which make all over men in the bar fade away (*ahem* I am, I am, I am, I do, I kind of do).

I like that you get to meet people who you'd not normally get a chance to meet on these sites. Either through geography, circumstance or prejudice. There have been a fair few girls I've hooked up with, even gone out with, who I'm sure either wouldn't have paid me attention in a bar, or who I wouldn't have bowled over to and chatted up all night. It's good that you can talk beforehand, sound them out, see if there's common ground, banter, a sense of humour etc. When you do meet up you've almost got all the awkward stuff out of the way as you've got a rapport of some sort already going on.

Now all of the above is retrospective reasoning. The main reason I joined up to the online dating world was due to what my friend told me a year or so ago. She said she had a friend, a guy, who went onto My single Friend looking for a girlfriend to settle with. After a few weeks of dating she asked him how it was going. He said it was not going so well, all of the girls he met up with just wanted to have sex. She said it seemed to him like it was just one big hook up site.

I was a fully paid up member by that weekend.

Up next: My first and third dates of the year. In chronological order.