Ugh. That glorious world of online dating. You see, people these days are too lazy, too awkward, or have too little social skills to be able to actually go out and have a real and proper conversation with someone else. Instead we resort to sitting on our couches at 9pm, being judgemental wankers and swiping left and right to people based on the very small information they give you in their bios or through their photos. Myself included.

And let’s be real, some of them can be real wankers. There are an array of apparently headless men on here, one with who my friend jokingly matched with that she calls “Torso Tom” because she was unaware of whether or not he has an actual head. Then there are those who write down all manner of  weird shit in their bio… some fine examples of this would be:

“I think the only thing lower than my dopamine levels are my standards”

“Have my own teeth and my own home”

“Married. Is there a beautiful woman out there looking for company? Interests include gym, tai chi, massaging and meeting nymphos”

“Ethically non-monogamous”

I also love looking at guys take fifteen selfies of themselves sitting on a weights bench in the gym and posting them all up. Which of course is city fare. If you are ever in the countryside expect a million photos of men with fish and cars.

Then once you get past the actual part of matching, you have to get them to actually write you back. Some start with the very boring “Hi” and then don’t really get much more interesting than that for the thirty minutes that you attempt to tease some kind of personality out of them. Here’s a thought….. I have asked you ten questions already. In case you didn’t realise, the question mark is to be found on the bottom row of the keyboard on your phone once you click that little button bottom left that indicates numbers and punctuation marks. You should really thing about using it sometime in conjunction with a little bit of initiative and taking an interest. If you can’t show a basic interest in getting to know who I am instead of spouting a whole bunch of unintelligible shit about yourself or nothing, I am done! “BYYYYEEEEE FELICIA!!”

Some are really entertaining to talk to online when they have some time to think about what they are writing and then they lose all of their shit completely when you meet them because they have no personality in real life. Some choose to message you at 11pm “The night is young! Let’s meet up now!” and when you tell them that real people with real jobs like to go to bed at 11pm on a weeknight and meet crazy types off Tinder in the day time in public places they disappear faster than you can say ‘booty call’. Some don’t even message back at all to be honest because they are just collecting matches for self validation.

With such a selection, it is a wonder we even bother at all to be honest. There are married men looking to screw around on their wives, angry psychos, guys who are completely full of themselves, guys that know exactly what to say to get you where they want you and then disappear when they do, doms looking for subs, couples looking for threesomes, some polyamorous folk and a whole load of boring. To be honest, where are the nice intelligent and funny men? Oh yeah, married and not on Tinder. Or maybe married and still on Tinder.

It has never been a sadder time to be single and trying to make a connection. The world has gone mad with too much choice and easy access. There is no working for anything anymore. Even when you do have a great conversation on the internet, it very rarely translates into anything more. People are poisoned by the idea that if they settle down and choose just one thing that they are going to be perpetually missing out on all of the other awesome options floating around out there that they could have. But I ask, what fucking options? Because I am not looking at any really great ones on Tinder right now.

Relationships and forging real connections with people is hard. Much harder than swiping left or right and because of this grand idea that there are always loads more to swipe on we become complacent and lazy in the efforts we make to show ourselves to others and to take an interest in them in return. Maybe it is time to go back to the more authentic way of meeting people. Maybe it is time to balls up, walk up to the hot person in the bar and strike up a conversation, and if they are boring, or there’s no spark, move on, it will take up five minutes of your life and will be far less than the actual amount of time you spend talking shit to someone on Tinder and then organizing to meet them only to discover that you are not compatible. Real spark happens in real life. So grab it by the proverbial balls and get offline and go and find it.