Venetia Thompson

The market is flooded with single City boys

Venetia Thompson says that if you don’t mind slumming it for a bit, you can snap up an out-of-work banker or trader whose stock is sure to rise soon

Venetia Thompson says that if you don’t mind slumming it for a bit, you can snap up an out-of-work banker or trader whose stock is sure to rise soon

I’m back behind enemy lines in the Square Mile, thankfully nowhere near the trading floor I used to inhabit, but in a place nearly as terrifying: Coq d’Argent, the City restaurant synonymous with suicide attempts. Perfect backdrop then for a first date who, within five minutes, utters the immortal words: ‘You know, there is an upside to unemployment. Since being made redundant, I have finally been able to get around to focusing on my love life. This is my first date in years!’

CreditCrunched69 is 32, a former trader looking for love, like the thousands of other displaced City boys who are flocking to online dating sites such as match.com in an effort finally to secure a wife now that they are jobless and have nothing better to do. While their headhunters — or dole officers — frantically scour for suitable vacancies, CreditCrunched69 and his cronies have become professional romancers redirecting their pursuit of profit into a determination to find the elusive ‘one’.

I came across my date’s profile while sifting through the ‘thousands of single, hot, intelligent men’ that most dating websites boast they possess. His interests were: galleries, the theatre, classical music and long walks in the country. Pre-recession it was all cocaine, cars, strippers and Spurs. What a difference redundancy can make.

Dig a little deeper and you will find plenty of credit crunch casualties now dating online, with seemingly every profile containing the words ‘in finance’ under ‘occupation’. For anyone wondering what happened to most of Lehman’s (RIP) credit swaption desk, look no further than mysinglefriend.com, one of the many seemingly recession-proof dating sites.

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