I keep reading these heart-warming pieces in the quality press about sad and lonely people’s lives being utterly transformed by internet-dating websites. This person says her sex life has gone from zero to something resembling the stampede at a Harrods sale. That person says he thought his life was effectively over and has now found the person of his dreams, and their union is shortly to be blessed with issue. Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests that internet-dating sites have something for everyone. One of the chaps I go to football with, Pie and Mash Pete, is always talking about this friend of his with whom he goes fishing. Roger is nearly 60, says Pete incredulously, and not the greatest-looking guy, but since he’s joined a dating site, he’s ‘managing to get his hands on some game old sort nearly every week’.
But for me internet dating has been a dismal failure. Twice I’ve paid for subscriptions and gone through all the rigmarole and I’ve not landed a single date. The first website was affiliated to a right-wing newspaper. Nothing. Not even a nibble. No one contacted me and those I contacted didn’t bother to reply. With the Tommy Sheridan trial then being reported, I thought perhaps people with socialist tendencies might be more free and easy when it came to that sort of thing, so I next signed up to a website affiliated to a left-wing paper. Same story. Not a blinking sausage.
I tell a lie. For a week or so I was corresponding feverishly with what turned out to be a cynical and unscrupulous man sitting in a room in a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. He was pretending to be this staggeringly gorgeous woman, whose hobbies were needlework and sex and who definitely preferred older men, and who needed £1,000 as soon as possible in order to set her life in order.
She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve it, but her luck had changed for the worse recently. Her mother had been killed in a car accident and her father had succumbed to a deadly disease in the same week. She’d had to leave her flat in Kensington and fly back to Lagos to arrange the funerals and set the family affairs in order. Owing to an injustice, however, her bank was refusing to allow funds to be transferred from London to Nigeria and she was stuck there unless some kind, understanding and handsome man could help her out of her present difficulties.
All that was keeping her going was the thought of all those long and passionate nights she was going to spend with her knight in shining armour. When I contacted the website’s moderators and said I thought I was being targeted by a scammer, which was better than nothing, I had to admit, they were pretty relaxed about it. After a day or two I received a message from them. ‘Dear Mr Lovepants,’ they said. They had ‘investigated’ my claim, found it to be true, and removed the subscriber with the username Snake Hips from their list. No apology. No sympathy. No money-back offer. I should get used to it, in other words.
After that I lost interest. Or, rather, I repudiated the idea of self-advertisement before my amour-propre became wholly undermined. About this time I remember walking down the aisle of a train to go to the buffet. Two teenage girls were sitting just inside the sliding door to the next carriage. Just ahead of me another man was also heading down to the buffet. As this chap passed them they leaned in close to one another and said, ‘No!’ It was a somewhat theatrical exclamation tinged with horror and disgust.
What they were doing was obvious. I saw it in an instant. They were whiling away the journey by making snap decisions as to whether any man who came through the door was good-looking enough to countenance sleeping with. The chap ahead of me passed on, happily unaware of the damning and unanimous verdict. My turn. Four saucy eyes fell on me for a split-second and they collapsed, shrieking with mirth at the very thought of it.
I’ll never learn. I’ve joined another one. But having tried both right- and left-wing sites, where to go next? Reptile Breeders Weekly doesn’t have an affliated dating website, so I chose one, more or less at random, aimed at ‘people in love with the Great Outdoors’. I’ve been on this one for a fortnight. Here is the state of play as of this morning. Members who have viewed my profile: 45. Members who have shown interest: 0. Roger, said Pie and Mash, with utter amazement when I last saw him, is ‘getting spliced’ next June.
Comments