Sophia Money-Coutts on how to survive the Great Dating Drought
With light visible at the end of the Covid tunnel, socially distanced dates in the winter rain seem a waste of time
OK, I accept things could be perkier. The sunlit uplands could jog on a bit. But in the past few weeks, I’ve noticed distinct panic set in among my single, mid-30s girlfriends. “My entire life is on hold!” one wailed down the phone. “Our lives are slipping through our fingers,” said another. “A whole year gone, and nothing to show for it!” shrieked someone else.
The rough translation of this is “another year gone and no closer to a husband”. As we inch closer to March and the anniversary of the first lockdown, as all of us reach the point where we’ve had at least one birthday in these strange circumstances, at an age where birthdays start to feel less a cause for celebration and more like an hourglass, alarm is setting in.
It was fine for the first few months. We got our heads around having an altered summer where there was less opportunity to date. Proactive friends went for park walks with men from dating apps (very Jane Austen); the more idle among us stayed at home watching Masterchef repeats, figuring it would all be all right in the end (a bit less Jane Austen). Next episode please, Gregg.
But the bonhomie is fading at the idea that government-mandated celibacy will stretch long into another year, and the gap seems to widen further between those who have other halves and children, and those who don’t.
Also, my 32-year-old sister says she knows plenty of unmarried couples who have decided to “get on” with having a baby now, and then throw the big wedding party in a couple of years when they can. This, I suspect, is making those still single, still casting through dating apps, feel even more left behind. Except I don’t think it should. I can be pretty brisk and intolerant about relatively fortunate people whinging, and I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic.
But I find it so strange that my generation of women are still capable of moping about like Georgian heroines, staring forlornly through the window pane waiting for a man in a top hat to gallop up, as if that’s the answer to life.
I’m not saying I don’t have my moments of wishing the same. I swipe through the dating app on the sofa: no, no, maybe, no, definitely not, that looks like a mugshot, no, yes, no.
But right now, when the only opportunity to meet in real life would be to wander about in the rain 2m apart, it hardly feels worth it. The New York Times ran a story last week about a man and a woman who met up on a park bench and used a remote-control vibrator at a distance, and honestly I’d rather watch someone make a chocolate fondant 10 times over. Also, in answer to the line “a social cause I care about”, one man I spotted on an app recently had answered “Julian Assange”. Not for me.
With any luck, restrictions will be eased in a few months and, as optimistic pundits keep saying, the pandemic will give way to a period like the Roaring Twenties. Probably, we’ll be sick of dating again before long and desperate for a night in. Until then, there are plenty of diversions if you look hard enough. See my Thermos tip below, for example.