Cinderella can’t go to the ball... she’s too busy with a sex app
THE sun has got his hat on! It’s even hotter out there than Amal Alamuddin (if that’s possible), the sultry fiancee of George Clooney who made headlines last week by, um, ‘going back to work’ in a blue skirt to her job as top human rights lawyer who looks like a film star and speaks many languages.
Therefore the news is: spring has sprung, phew what a scorcher – the weather/Amal – and the subtext of the news is, some enchanted evening you too may meet a stranger across a crowded room. For in the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love and… er, cut. Cut!
While we all moon over the betrothal of gorgeous George and Amal – and vicariously plan their fairytale wedding in a lakeside palazzo on Como – for those lower and younger down the food chain the magic, the loving feeling and the happy Hollywood ending are mostly AWOL.
Sex – not love – is all around, but romance is all but dead. It would be too easy to blame the internet, but it is a factor. As are smartphones.
I did a Question Time show for students at City University in London the other day. One of the questions asked was whether online dating affects social interactions.
I threw it back to the audience, asking: ‘How many of you are on Tinder?’ This is the disturbingly popular mobile phone hook-up app where you can browse profiles and photos of people within a determined radius and within your specified age-range.
IASSUMED students in their early 20s, at university in London, would be spoilt for choice and opportunity, like kids in a candy shop, and would have no need of such a pick-up boost. Two-thirds put their hands up. Traditional boy-meets-girl scenarios seem to have hit the buffers. ‘I’ve given up trying to meet people at events,’ says Olivia Bateman, a broadcast journalism student of 23. ‘I don’t have time. It’s easier to flick through some people and then meet someone in a bar and see how it goes.’
I’ve been trying to track down a woman called Margot who put an ad on Gumtree, soliciting a ‘blonde, talkative, age 19-22’ woman with an ‘honest and sincere attitude’. Why does she want a bubbly blonde? Well, her son is an undergraduate at Cambridge, and there’s a May Ball. The mother is prepared to meet all the expenses, simply so her darling boy gets a date. I remind you: this brainy kid is at CAMBRIDGE where half the undergraduates are clever GIRLS. But asking a female contemporary to be his plusone for the night is a step too far. Maybe I’m being blinkered, and old-fashioned, and it was ever thus. Maybe Tinder and all these hook-up apps are only the newer, faster version of the old tried and trusted techniques. Maybe romance has always needed lubrication, and acceleration, from outside agencies – think of Mrs Bennet’s matchmaking; the high school hop; the freshers’ disco; the single-and-mingle. Last week I visited the Basilica of St Nicholas in Bari. Every year on the saint’s feast day, December 6, the spinsters come from miles around for the rito delle nubile or the ‘rite for unmarried women’.Those wishing to find a husband can attend early-morning Mass, during which they have to twirl around a column seven times.
Milling around the square outside are the bachelors of Puglia, all of whom have been too wet to do anything before, on the grounds that they will never find a woman to love them as much as Mamma does, but are now prepared to contemplate wedlock.
We are used to sex being everywhere – in every song, every TV show, every advert and every news story, and the promise of sex on every smartphone. But a country so saturated in sex is short on romance, and seems to be breeding a sad generation of Cinderellas.
Dating may be digital, but we still live in an analogue not a virtual world. A boy still needs to know a girl – an actual girl – if he wants to go to the ball.