Pulling With My Parents Andrea Byrne gets the lowdown on a brand new dating show
A dating show with a difference, Pulling With My Parents shows what happens when parents take over their progeny’s dating apps. Andrea Byrne speaks to some of the families who took part
Imagine you are young and single and a regular user of dating apps. en imagine handing over your phone to your parents and allowing them to take over your dating pro le and activity. Could they nd you a suitable date? is potentially excruciating scenario is exactly what six brave singletons did for a new TV show, Pulling With My Parents.
e result is super TV; funny and uniquely Irish, that also exposes the di erences in attitudes and experience between Ireland’s digital natives and their parents.
In the rst episode, we meet Jason O’Byrne and his parents, Ann and Pat from Arklow, Co Wicklow. A typical Irish mammy, Anne is comedy gold. Her reactions to her son’s digital dating endeavours are the stu of belly-laughs. Ann and Pat discover Jason’s Instagram account which he has labelled ‘ e Happiest Arse in Ireland’. “Ah For God’s sake Jason,” Ann despairs at one of the photos, “in the middle of a eld with a load of cows and nothin’ on ya. 30 going on 10.” Her shock factor is brought to another level when she gets to read his innuendo-laden exchanges with women on Tinder. “Are ya a sex maniac?” she asks him, which prompts a conversation about one-night-stands, a topic no man should ever wants to discuss with his mother. Surprised by the smut, Ann is determined to nd Jason ‘a nice girl.’ Ann turns to more ‘traditional’ methods, at one point running around in the rain, asking young women whether they’re single. “We’re looking for a woman for our son,” she says to one girl, “He has a dowry and good frontage.” Pulling the girl closer, Ann jokes, “Come here now and meet your mother-in-law.”
In the same episode, we also meet Sophie La Touche and her mother Andrea and Nana Mary, who live in Limerick. Sophie has been single for three years. “I wasn’t full time at work because I had been sick (Sophie had Lyme disease and was sick for over a year). I thought, this is di erent, let’s just try it. And actually, I am really shy when it comes to guys. I thought what better way to get over your fear than to face it head on.”
Sophie did, however, have a job convincing her mother to get involved in the show. “I was very hesitant,” Andrea tells me, “but then I had to look at the bigger picture. Sophie wanted to do this. Part of it required support from parents so from that perspective that is why I did it. I am more of a private person than a public one.”
at said, Andrea admits that she relished the opportunity to get a glimpse into her daughter’s digital life, especially given Sophie’s track record for dating the wrong type of man. “ ere was a fun part of it, you know, I am going to get an insight, actually looking at her level of interaction, how she engages. It brought up discussions about alcohol and dating. If you’re to be really pragmatic about things, why would you be under the in uence when you’re trying to choose a life partner? I am not perfect and I am not going to say that I didn’t do that. I don’t think I would have necessarily have had that conversation with Sophie before. I was able to challenge her about ideas she had about herself. I was able to make her step out of her comfort zone.” Andrea completely revamped Sophie’s dating pro le, swapping the saucy sel es for something with more substance. “Maybe if you have got a clearer pro le, it would work better, you might get a better class of people contacting you,” Andrea tells Sophie, reacting to an exchange she read which le her “traumatised.” Andrea felt that Sophie wasn’t showing her true self and was pretending to be something she wasn’t – a common criticism of the Instagram generation. “My Mam’s approach really taught me a lesson about how I should be myself,” Sophie tells me, “I hadn’t been revealing my true self. She kind of made me more comfortable and con dent with that. She really instilled her values. My Mam has been single all my life as well. She had a few boyfriends here and there but I think because she has been so resistant to putting up with something and someone, it made me more resilient. I don’t know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing but I’ll never take sh*t.” Another positive to come out of Sophie’s participation in the show, according to Andrea, is that it has helped Sophie reevaluate what sort of man she could date. “I felt that Sophie had this image of the type of guy that she wanted and he needed to be someone like her. Sophie is quite dynamic and I felt she shouldn’t pigeonhole herself that he needs to be A, B and C,” she says. “ e basics are important. You don’t have to have someone who is earning 20 grand a month, you can be happy with someone who is earning whatever amount; happiness is about how you feel inside, and that the person beside you makes you feel happy.”