I recently went on a first date with a man who told me that he’d once been on a date with a girl who wrote a blog about it afterwards. He’d read it – somehow – and although he could tell it was about him, he was somewhat perplexed as to the point of it all (not to mention his confusion about whether they had been on the same date based on her write-up…)
Surprisingly enough, I didn’t tell him about this blog. This blog is not for the men – and them reading reviews of (/stories about) their date offerings is entirely not the point. But I found it interesting that there are more of us. Veritable hordes of us, in fact! Tube-carriages full of us, if you will! Not insignificant volumes of gin-drinking twenty-something hot messes of women in London blogging about their dating experience. Because although it really is an uphill battle with moments so bleak that you want to throw yourself into the Thames and hope that the RNLI are having an off-day, there are some moments that you just have to share. Because they are spectacular. Or because they’re hilarious. Or romantic. Or just so honest and (I hope) relatable that surely someone else has been through the same thing: “I can’t possibly be the only person this has happened to, right?!”
And that’s only those of us who are writing about it. That doesn’t include the many, many more who – much like my gorgeous housemate – have been on two dates this week with two very-promising sounding men, and had to actually run away from one of them because he so lacked conversational merit. (I don’t endorse running away from dates; I’m merely pointing out that this is how she chose to deal with a dire-sounding situation.) By all accounts, we need an avenue to share these experiences – in whichever way we choose – to assure ourselves that “we’re not all mad, here” and that, actually, it’s nothing that we as individuals are doing wrong/any differently from any other girl. In fact, we’re all equally perplexed as to why the others are still single!
I promised this man that I wouldn’t blog about our date and – in my opinion, at least – that isn’t a lie: I haven’t told you his name, or what he does, or where we went. But that promise might get a bit trickier to keep if things keep going so well…
Drinking, dating and bad decisions 