Date who came to my flat with a camp bed!

WHEN I got divorced I found that, in the two decades during which I’d been attached, dating had undergone a seismic change. Meeting someone online was no longer slightly weird and desperate. Swiping left on Tinder was the new normal. So I signed up to Bumble and got a few real-life dates, each one slightly more disappointing than the last. The first was Kenny, who touched me frequently on the hand and, when I said I needed to go to the loo, claimed he did, too. There was Alec, who WhatsApped me hand-drawn pictures of flowers before we’d even laid eyes on each other, which was sweet, but when he messaged the next day saying he’d written a song about me, it all seemed a bit much. Then there was the guy who spoke on the first date about how his last relationship had ended because his partner had gone through several rounds of IVF and how difficult it had been… for him. My friends would be in stitches when I recounted all of this and it’s true that one of the great things about failing at dating is that it gives you so many entertaining anecdotes.

But dating in my 30s taught me much more about what I wanted in a partner: I was deliberately experimental in terms of the kinds of people I dated.

Coming out of a divorce meant I had lost a substantial chunk of faith in my own judgment. After all, I thought I’d married a man I was going to be with forever, only to realise I had effectively conned myself.

The dating experience that taught me most was a man who on paper seemed to offer everything I wanted. Jonathan was my age, bright, funny, financially solvent and with no emotional baggage.

Sure, he had a habit of making a few too many puns, wore bow-ties with casual shirts, and stopped to smell the flowers every time we passed a bush, but that first night we had drinks, which turned into dinner, which turned into my taking him back to my flat, which turned into surprisingly good sex.

But then things started to get very deep, very quickly. He sulked when I told him I had plans for the rest of the weekend – he told me I’d triggered his abandonment issues and it hadn’t helped that he’d slept so terribly in my bed, which had a bad mattress, apparently. I kept ignoring the warning signs and telling myself that maybe it was good for me to be with someone who wasn’t my usual type. After all, my usual types had all ended in break-ups, hadn’t they?

On our fourth meeting, Jonathan came to my flat with a camp bed. We had sex, and then he rolled off and into his bed, like a faithful dog lying at the feet of its master.

THE next day, I had to break up with him. I realised, then and there, that despite all my internal self-doubt, I did actually have reasonable instincts and that perhaps the key was not allowing those instincts to be drowned out.

I began to view dating as a coaching exercise to get me match-ready for when something real and pure came along. As soon as I started viewing it like this, my energy shifted, almost imperceptibly.

And as soon as it did, all those happily married friends of mine who said to me repeatedly ‘when you’re not looking, that’s when you’ll find someone’ while I clenched my fists under the dinner table to avoid exploding… all of them were proved right. I met someone. He’s great.