Right. It's October. Most people are giving up drinking this month but I'm giving up not dating for 30 consecutive days. How? With my trustee little instant date genrating device - Tinder. Ooh, but how are you going to raise money for charity by dating?
Well, by generating interest for my book about serial dating, of which I am donating 10% of all my personal profits to Macmillan Cancer Support. So there.
Tindering is now a recognized verb within the ever-expanding dating community. It's like the Martini of dating apps. You can do it any place, anywhere, any time. You can do it in the morning, on the toilet, or even both of those concurrently. Then you watch the matches roll in.
Once the matches roll in, then you have to chat, or simply let your potential love interests slip through your fingers and risk being unmatched and sent back to dating purgatory. That's where I've been hanging out for a while, so I'm putting a stop to it by attempting to batch date in the manner that everyone around me seems to be doing.
So the first date is lined up for ce soir (French for 'this evening'). It's Thursday, which is now known as 'the new Friday' according to irritating work colleagues that don't use that phrase tongue in cheek.
Anyway, Clare has agreed to go out with my tonight, as according to her, it's the 'new Friday.' Great start, I think you'll agree.
We've gathered the two preliminary pieces of information from each other, which are essential for Tinderoni's:
1. Where do you live?
2. What do you do for a living?
It's make-or-break after that. Either you keep the conversation going by pretending to be interested in each others' professions, or you cut your losses and move on.
As we both live or work in West London, we somehow agreed to meet in a bar in one of Shepherd's Bush's top dating hotspots, the Westfield Shopping Centre. Great stuff.
It had been quite a flirty two days or so on the Tindernet between us and we'd almost escalated to the WhatsApp stage, so things were getting pretty hot. Consequently I had high hopes that we'd get on harmoniously.
She turned up at 7pm - exactly zero minutes late. I definitely fancied her and I had the usual amount of immediate doubt that she didn't fancy me, so we were rocking. Of course the true test of compatibility is finding out whether or not we fancy each other personality wise though.
Anyway, turns out she's quite hard to talk to until we get onto the subject of an online compatibility test that she insists on trying out on me. Basically, you both put in your dates of birth and this test gives you a percentage of how compatible it thinks you are together.
So it turns out that we are 3% compatible according to this online dating god computer thing. This visibly rattles Clare and she instantly becomes 3% more silent. She slurps the last drops of her Gin and Tonic, wastefully leaving behind the ice and lemon, makes her excuses and leaves.
I say 'excuses'. It was actually only one excuse. She said 'I'm sorry, but that test simply does not lie. I don't think it would be in either of our interests to take this any further.' Then she went. Wow.
At first I thought 'What a FREAK CAKE!' Then I thought 'What a GENIUS!' What a great way to get out of a date. Sure, I lost an evening, but I've gained a wonderful new get out method. I can't believe I haven't feigned mental illness before.