As my about page says, I am single and looking. Depending on how I feel or what happens, that may to change to nothing, single not looking or in a relationship.
I split up from my last long-term girlfriend in 2000 and have been intermittently looking for another relationship since. I have been on a fair few dates and had a short relationship since then. A lot of the time I haven’t been bothered as other things have become more important. I also have female friends I like spending time with for company and going to gigs with so I don’t always feel the need to add anything else.
One weekend I had two dates planned and, despite my lack of success so far, my mind was been going “what happens if both dates work out and I have to choose?” I’m not into the idea of dating two people at once, I don’t want that sort of complication or have to cover things up. I’d like to think that I was the only one that they were going out with too. As it was, they both cancelled.
Nowadays the thing seems to be online dating sites, even more so since Covid-19 turned the world upside down. There are a multitude of sites, some that have been around for years, some more recent, some that are general, some that are more niche. There are many that have fallen by the wayside.
Having mentioned Covid-19, I know that for some people dating online has become a thing. I can’t really get my head round the idea having an “online date” by Zoom, Skype or Messenger. Eating the same meal, watching the same video or playing a game over the screen all seem weird to me as dates. This seems to have carried on with people in long-distance relationships, something else that I have tried and given up on.
I have actually been doing online dating since early in this century, with limited success. I’ve come to the conclusion that for most of the sites I’m a bit too out of the ordinary for the majority of women. There’s the odd site that has catered for the alternative crowd but I tend to be a lot older than most of their female clientele. I have made a few friends along the way who I still keep in contact with and meet up as friends.
There are several sites that advertise on TV and I have looked at all of them. Our Time, for older people, has a very bad set of reviews so I avoided that. eHarmony shows people on a date with “compatible” animals to imply that it has better selection than other sites, however, the major selection I would like to make is for music taste, with the only choice being whether you like music or not – I can’t see myself going to gigs with someone who hates metal and loves country and western or the soulless r’n’b that hits the charts. Elite Singles claims to only want professional (I am) singles and rejected my application: whether it was my hair and beard, my age or whatever else I don’t know. Match I used years ago and I have one friend from the one date I had from there.
I had been taking a holiday from online dating until last summer as I had been concentrating on other things. As I was on an extended holiday travelling around Europe and Scandinavia, I thought I would see if I could meet women on my travels. I ended up paying for Tinder for a while to see if it would change things there but the responses generally weren’t worth it. A female friend has had the opposite experience – paying for it has allowed her to see who has liked her and filter out the crap easily.
In the past few years, I have used Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid, a couple of veggie/vegan dating sites, Grazer and Veggly and an alternative site which I have been on for quite a while, AltScene. Recently I have tried Turn Up to try to find someone musically and culturally compatible. Grazer is a bit glitchy and I have tried to give them feedback, some of which has been acted on. Veggly is more professional and I did manage to get a compatible date from that but sadly she found someone else. AltScene got me chatting with people a long while ago but when I came back to it the responses have been nil. With the others I swipe left a lot and a lot of the women who swipe right on me that I match with (on Tinder you can often work out who has swiped right on you) either don’t bother to reply, are looking for someone to keep them or have other red flags that appear.
I have had a few Tinder dates but we haven’t been compatible. Bumble has been relatively unsuccessful so far – only two matches in the whole time that I have been on there, one was one date only then I was ghosted, the other I recently started talking to but she is retired and looking for someone with a similar amount of free time. The other thing about the dating sites is, like a lot of other online sites, they are time thieves. I have deleted them all again, making sure my profiles were deleted too.