Oh, the perils of online dating when you’re in the public eye!
Think finding a match is hard? Try doing it when you’re a famous face, says Mail columnist AMANDA PLATELL in this hilarious account of her disasters with frauds, fibbers and desperados...
THE first thought that hit me when I learned that Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone had been ‘outed’ as a user of the dating app Bumble was one of despair.
I mean, what hope in 2020 singleton hell is there for the rest of us women of a certain age when a wealthy, searingly sexy, 62-year- old Hollywood star has to resort to an app to find love?
How ghastly for a woman, who in her day made men giddy with lust — and who still looks scandalously unravaged by time — to resort to parading herself on the fiendishly cruel platform of online dating, laying bare her hopes and dreams in a few perfunctory words.
The second thought, when I read how unsuccessful Stone’s foray into modern dating had been, (she was actually blocked by the site, albeit temporarily, as no one believed it was her) was: What on earth was Sharon thinking? This was never going to end in wedding bells. I’d be surprised if she ever made it to a second date. Famous people — even mildly well-known people like me — and dating apps just don’t work.
I am speaking from experience here. A year ago, I, too, joined Bumble, the ‘female friendly’ dating site which was launched in December 2014 and is said to have 22 million users worldwide.
Now, let me stress that I’ve never done the
knickerless crossed- anduncrossed-legs for any man, let alone on screen. i’ve never been nominated for a Golden Globe. My personal fortune most definitely does not run into the squillions. i am not famous, nor a celebrity, but am aware that after years on TV and writing for the Daily Mail, many people know who i am.
i have one of those faces that you’d probably look at twice in the street, and wonder whether you should say hello or not. i’ve got a Wikipedia entry and a Google of my name will yield quite a few screens to scroll through.
so, i am not in sharon stone’s league. What we do have in common is our age (we’re both 62) and the fact that we’re single and divorced (sharon twice, me once).
Like her, i’d got to that stage in life where i’d trawled the dating seas of friends, friends of friends, exes, colleagues and the fishing net had come back empty. so i thought, why not join a dating app? it’s how everyone meets these days, isn’t it?
Online dating has grown massively in popularity ever since Match.com blazed a trail in the mid-90s. Now apps such as Tinder and Bumble, with their speedy account set-ups and ‘swipe to like’ approach, have taken dating to another level.
Tinder launched in 2012 on the back of the explosion in smartphone use and within just two years was registering more than a billion ‘swipes’ a day. statistics vary, but it’s said that as many as 70 per cent of new relationships now start online.
But where does that leave people like sharon stone and me? as i’ve found to my cost — and i suspect sharon must have done by now, since her account was quickly reactivated under a blaze of publicity — online dating is a world littered with losers and loonies, fantasists and fraudsters. These men are thinking not of the deep pools of your eyes, but your even deeper pockets, and the thought of basking in some celebrity.
When you’re in the public eye, potential dates have huge preconceptions, leading you to become a bizarre caricature of yourself. No one knows who or what you really are, they just see the public persona. and i’m told mine can be scary, which has always bewildered me.
i’d also seen a poll, in the midst of Brexit, revealing that voting ‘Leave’ reduced any woman’s chances of being ‘liked’ by any man by around 80 per cent.
As a STAUNCH Brexiteer, i feared my dating pool would be smaller than a puddle in a heatwave. and if i’m scary, sharon stone must be terrifying.
Nevertheless, undaunted, i was drawn to Bumble as it markets itself as female friendly. For the uninitiated - that’s all you smug marrieds out there — it places women in the driving seat.
it starts with you posting a profile of yourself, describing what you’re looking for: friendship, love, whatever, alongside some pictures.
Unlike the meat market of apps like Tinder where anyone can bombard you with messages and most men on it are searching for fastfood love consumed in one night, Bumble allows only the woman to make the first move: swiping right to like, and so forth. it’s supposed to be empowering.
initially, i was hopeful. i thought i might meet someone outside my own social and professional bubble. i’d even take a Guardian reader — i’m not fussy!
so in an attempt to distance myself from the public amanda Platell, i set up my Bumble account simply describing myself as ‘ aussie amanda’. i figured that if we got to the dating stage, that would be an appropriate moment to reveal myself.
i attached a picture of me taken from a distance, an old favourite of me leaning up against an aged, mudspattered Land rover Discovery in italy, with no make-up (well, hardly any), wind-ravaged hair, striped top and old jeans and a big smile. i thought the rustic look might appeal.
NOT for me the usual endless selfies you see online of women pouting in bikinis. i was up against some stiff competition but thought an ordinary bloke might be looking for an ordinary gal.
another picture had me hugging my friend’s Welsh terrier. someone had told me men love women who love dogs. My profile just said aussie woman seeking happiness in the UK. i was not the Brexiteer, the Conservative spin doctor who worked for William hague, not the Daily Mail columnist.
i was, as Julia roberts said to hugh Grant in the film Notting hill, just a girl looking for a boy and asking him to love her.
i thought my chances would be better if i presented myself as a freelance writer working on her third novel, not yet published, so potential dates would not be able to pick me up on Google.
My cover was that i was single and solvent, two key ingredients for mid- life women in the financially strapped dating world of divorced men still supporting their families; no man wants a gold digger.
i didn’t lie, or mislead: i had no kids just an adorable grown up stepson ( both true), a good sense of humour (again true, i am told). The only spinning i did with the truth was over my age — 57 — and my choice of pet, as i’d read somewhere that men were suspicious of single women with cats. apologies to Ted, my moggy, who was turned into a canine for the sake of my love life.
i even thought about disguising myself and went wig shopping. i was channelling Lady Gaga but alas the blonde tresses i bought made me look like a drag queen.
With my parallel universe created, my Platell alter ego decided, i launched myself on Bumble, crossed my fingers and waited to see if anyone would respond.
Within minutes there were 50 of them — an array of men, literally aged between 18 and 80, despite me specifying i
It was all fine until he found out who I was and asked if I could help pay his kids’ school fees
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.