Wednesday marked a low point in the holiday blues…had already binge watched all 15 episodes of Greys Anatomy I had hoarded on the +box whilst I’ve been away, my bank balance is still the wrong side of “going out out” and jet lag is proving to be a cruel and persistent mistress. This coupled with a glassy eyed trawl through my holiday snaps sent me down the dark and dismal one way street to Tinderland

After some hearty *cough* patronising “encouragment” (/ badgering) from various contributors to my life about needing to “get out there and meet a man now I’m home”(…erm,why?), I had largely decided to shun the dating world in favour of being eaten alive by a hoard of cats. Surely a simpler response to “Not met a nice man yet then”, “Oh STILL single are you”, “don’t need a +1 for the wedding I take it” is just looking someone dead in the eye and saying “But cats will always love me” and holding their gaze until they are too uncomfortable to ask follow up questions!

But we all know that the shallow allure of Tinder is just too much on the unemployed days where your calorie count app has basically told you you’ll be diabetic by tomorrow if you eat as much chocolate as you have today, you’ve not changed out of pjs and it’s 4pm and all you have to show for the days achievements are an array of snapchats!

And so like a moth to a catalogue of men based flame, I opened the app! Within 30 seconds, perfectly apparent as to why I hadn’t been on there since last summer. 80% of the people in my local area look like a bloke in the background of TOWIE (not even the foreground…) The rest believe the key to a woman’s heart lies in shirtless Tinder selfies. Yes, I’m aware I am the first person ever to use the words “heart” and “Tinder” in the same sentence.

First candidate’s opening gambit was this:

Hi Kerry, knock knock….

my response: “my name is Emma, wrong house” garnered no reply!

Second bloke advertised himself as a published author and fell down by pasting the link to his amazon page under his picture. The enammeringly titled: “how to be a modern day viking” had received some phenomenal reviews, I’ve included just a handful of my favourites below…

 

The best seemed relatively nice, North Londoner, charming, debonair and polite. Chatted for a bit over a couple of day before he told me how he’d been spending a lot of time thinking about what our children might look like (including a paragraph on details like how they’d have green eyes in summer, brown in the winter apparently!!)

He then sent me 10 seperate messages over the course of 2hrs despite me not sending a single reply. One of the charming latter of which just said “oi…..” followed by “laters then, nice to meet you I suppose” (we haven’t met!) as I hadn’t immediately responded. I decided the most mature and grown up response was this meme of Ron Burgundy….

….no reply!?! Can’t possibly think why?!

“Real life” little better. After being asked by a delightful gentleman to “Wey get em out” on my walk to the station, I have concluded romance is dead.

In short, first venture back into the world of dating post hols, not a resounding success I’m not going to lie…but on a positive note it did affirm all my previous thoughts about Tinder as an online recreation of the worst bar you’ve ever been to!…except one where it’s ok to physically bat people away, so at least one plus!

Single independent life continues and after that, turns out if that’s what I could’ve won, I couldn’t be more fine with it after all!