It was all fine until he found out who I was and asked if I could help pay his kids’ school fees
AUSSIE AMANDA’S DATING APP SNAP
was looking for someone in the 50-plus category. Like a bizarre online shopping expedition, I was then required to get swiping, filtering out the no hopers from the potentials. The general protocol is text initially, and if you like what you read, move onto a phone call quickly — up to a week, maximum. The ‘catfishers’, i.e. those who just want to scam you, are always reticent about taking things beyond the text phase.
First there was the former
Guards officer, now something in private equity, divorced, two kids, hoping desperately his ex would marry the guy she was living with in ‘his’ home so he could cut back on his maintenance payments.
Bumbling away on our phones it all seemed to be going great, until he found out what I really did. Within minutes he asked if I could help out with his kids’ school fees. When that wasn’t successful, he asked for selfies of me naked doing something sexy in bed.
Crikey, we hadn’t even met! Needless to say, we did not move onto the next stage.
Next, was the former Wall Street boss who now ran a ‘food empire’. It turned out to be a vegan café in Hackney, East London.
He was as proud and secretive about his recipe for organic sweet potato waffles as Colonel Sanders was of his KFC. Hardly the food of love for a committed carnivore like me. On his profile he said he was single, co-parenting his children. It turned out he was still living at home with his high-flying City wife (who paid all the bills and did not know he was dating online), mother-in-law, three kids and two dogs.
More hilarious still was when I got a call from a newly divorced girlfriend of mine, also on Bumble, who sent me a picture of the same guy, as she recognised his waffle chat-up line from an earlier conversation we’d had as we compared notes.
Then there was great-sounding contender who loved Shakespeare and worked in banking. I met him in a pub in Soho after weeks of texting. He had chosen not to mention he had Parkinson’s and was in a wheelchair.
When I gently asked him why he hadn’t told me, he replied accusingly: ‘You didn’t tell me you worked for the Daily Mail!’ It wasn’t the best start.
When he announced, uninvited, the following evening that he was ‘on his way to my house right away, with a nice bottle of wine,’ I blocked him.
And yes I’ve also been catfished by a wonderful Frenchman with a divine accent who declared he loved me on our second phone call, even though we had never met. He loved my soul, he insisted. Every time we agreed to meet, he had to cancel.
I got a male friend to call his number and a woman with a thick French African accent answered.
It was on our fifth phone call, when I had rumbled him but wanted to see how far he’d go, that he asked for £5,000 for medical treatment for his son who was ‘dying from a rare bone cancer’.
And, finally, my last Bumble date. He sounded lovely on the phone, a 6ft 4in architect, divorced, on good terms with his ex-wife. I arrived first at the bar in Notting Hill (the home of happy endings —just ask Julia Roberts).
Again I hadn’t told him what I really did, just that I was a struggling author. I’d figured out it was best for them to meet you first, without any preconceptions.
He leant down from his huge height, kissed me on the cheek and said: ‘You’re lovely, so much prettier than your pictures.’
At that point a woman not of my acquaintance, in fact a total stranger, came up and hugged me. ‘Amanda, I can’t believe it’s you,’ she squealed very loudly.
I whispered in her ear that I was on a first date with the tall bloke who had no idea what I did and she turned to the packed bar and shouted: ‘Amanda Platell is on her first date with this guy.’
FACE clouding over he asked: ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’ I was clearly not what he’d bargained for.
He had seen the beaten up old Discovery, and thought he was getting a simple country girl. We agreed, over an awkward curry, that ‘our lives probably wouldn’t work together’.
If you create a nom de plume, as I did, there always comes the tricky bit when you have to reveal who you actually are. Or that awful moment when you walk in to the bar and spot the glint of recognition and dismay in his eyes as he puts down his copy of Greta Thunberg’s short speeches, and wonders when it would be polite to make his excuses and go.
But then, I have also discovered that for every man who is put off by ‘celebrity’ there are ten who revel in it — for all the wrong reasons. They envisage a comfortable life, them moving in to your home, you paying for everything, them loving that you’re on the TV when all you want is someone who likes you for who you really are.
So, after nine months and nine unsuccessful dates, there will be no more fumbling with Bumble for me. If I did decide to return, I’d post a picture of myself on the Andrew Marr show, with links to my columns in this newspaper and the tagline: ‘Wealthy divorcee seeks freeloader.’ At the very least it might attract someone with a sense of humour.
Or I could, as a good friend — another well-known columnist — has advised, join a cycling club. She swears this is the best way to meet attractive men of a certain age.
Plus, she says I have the legs for Lycra. I might just give it a go.