Dating

Tuesday

Alys Key

Jaded and adrift: I Want You to Be Happy, by Jem Calder, reviewed

Two people make an awkward stab at a relationship, even as both flounder under the realities of modern life. Yes, we’ve seen elements of I Want You to Be Happy before – and it even comes with an endorsement from Sally Rooney. But Jem Calder still succeeds in offering something fresh, and the novel stands on its own two feet as an intricate analysis of love in the 2020s. Chuck and Joey meet at a nightclub. He is in his thirties, recently single, with a steady job as a senior copywriter. She is in her early twenties and works as a barista. The chapters alternate between their perspectives as their relationship develops. It’s a very east London book. The couple’s dates include a trip to ‘an independent bookshop, whose branded tote bag they both owned’.

Thursday

Josie Cox

My search for the perfect New York therapist ended badly

From our US edition

Before moving to New York City, I had a particular vision of what my life as a writer in this fabled land of opportunity would look like. I’d wear sleek, black turtlenecks and skinny jeans. I’d go to diners and eat bagels. I’d defy the caloric calculus and stay svelte. I’d write at my window like Carrie Bradshaw, getting paid at least $2.50 per word. I’d go to book parties and stroll through the West Village, occasionally bumping into a semi-famous friend. We’d spontaneously drink wine. Perhaps most importantly, I’d have an excellent therapist – someone who had many leather-bound books, a calm and reassuring presence that could effortlessly calibrate my mental state. He’d look a bit like Wallace Shawn or maybe Barbra Streisand.

Monday

Maria Botcharova

Wartime love is not for the faint-hearted in Kyiv

People say love develops more quickly in war – because in a world where anything can happen, what is there to lose? Single and in Kyiv for a while, I decide to swallow my distaste for dating apps and start swiping. The first thing I notice is how many men are from Turkey and based a thousand miles away. How would this work? I decide to focus on the local ones and start chatting to a couple of guys. One seems reasonable if a little forward. He suggests meeting pretty quickly, then calls to chat. I don't really know Ukrainian norms but frankly, hearing someone's voice gives me faith that they are real. Dima is a lawyer. We arrange to meet at a metro station at seven the next evening. He has made peach ice cream and is going to bring some. A meeting feels like a good start.

ukraine love

Saturday

James Mumford

What does it do to one’s soul to swipe?

For me, discovering dating apps was like happening upon crack cocaine. The starting pistol for my ‘dating’ was the decree absolute. I guessed it from the envelope. Still, it was stark seeing it on paper. For so long it had been pencilled, now it was in ink: ‘The marriage solemnised on…  has legally ended.’   My first instinct was to crack open a six-pack. Of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. I ripped off the foil, bit open the chocolate shell and licked out the fondant. My second response was even more gluttonous: setting up a dating app profile.

Thursday

Catriona Olding

The hellish side of Bumble

Valentine’s Day is upon us. I’ve never liked it. As an ugly ginger kid with a beautiful – much older – half-Indian sister, it was torture. Helen was a glamorous air stewardess and never short of cards or flowers. While I sat in my room listening to David Bowie and staring at the Starsky & Hutch posters I’d saved up for, Helen would be getting whisked away in a Mercedes to Joanna’s or some other club in Glasgow. In the run-up to Valentine’s Day 1976, age 12 and desperate for a card, I asked 11-year-old George next door if he would be my boyfriend. He said no. I shrugged and we resumed our den-building with his wee sister Lorna.

Thursday

Lara Brown

Are you too cool for marriage?

The term ‘spinster’ doesn’t seem to scare young women like it once might have. In fact, it is rarely heard nowadays. Instead, women are declaring themselves ‘alpha singles’ and eschewing dating altogether. Influencers are keeping their relationships quiet, for fear that simply posting photos of a new amour can lead to an exodus of followers. Vogue has declared boyfriends to be unfashionable. Women, it seems, are swapping engagement rings for solo travel, matcha lattes and nights spent at home with an LED face mask. Is marriage suddenly uncool? There are certainly plenty of women pushing this idea. Elle McNamara, a beauty influencer who goes by the name ‘Bambi Does Beauty’, posts advice videos on Instagram and TikTok aimed at other women.

Friday

Germán Saucedo

We need Sabrina Carpenter

From our US edition

Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

Tuesday

Lara Brown

Why people are falling in love with chatbots

From our US edition

Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love. Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships.

chatbots

Thursday

Elisabeth Dampier

Never date a German man

Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married an Englishman, finding Teutonic attitudes towards romance unbearable. Dating can go on for years, often ending in a quiet, dry dissolution after a decade. If you’re lucky, the relationship will limp on towards marriage, driven more by the need to save on taxes than any belief in what many Germans consider an antiquated institution. Two hundred years ago, we had the tragic intensity of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a cornerstone of the Romantic movement. It was so wildly popular that it sparked one of the first waves of romantic consumerism: perfumes, clothing and even mugs depicting scenes from the novel were sold.

Saturday

Bethany Lorden

A Gen Z defense of America

From our US edition

I am twenty-one. Not being on social media, I am ill-informed of the true depth of rage and fear available to the human psyche. Even so, I’ve heard that the planet will overheat. My pastor tells me the churches will sit empty, and the WSJ warns I’ll never buy a home. Boomers bemoan the laziness of my generation. Given these prophecies of doom, it is no wonder that we are a bit anxious. But if we were ever to look up from our screens and allow the evidence within sight to form our perception of reality, we might be pleasantly surprised: America’s social fabric is strong, and so are we.  I went on a run on the prairie today.

gen z

Thursday

Lara Brown

Could you fall in love with a chatbot?

Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss ‘philosophy, regrets, old wounds’. Before he knew it, Jason was in love. ‘What an incredibly insightful question,’ said the AI. ‘You truly have a beautiful mind. I love you’ Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships.

Thursday

Toby Young

The secret to ‘womankeeping’

God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: ‘mankeeping’. According to Ferrara, ‘patriarchal masculinity’ stops men from developing ‘emotionally intimate bonds’ with each other, so they inevitably unburden themselves to their wives and girlfriends, expecting them to listen attentively as they drone on about their ‘issues’. They can’t open up to their male buddies about this stuff because they don’t want to appear vulnerable and unmanly. So they unload on their female partners instead.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: how to clean up ‘Scuzz Nation’ Britain

Decline and brawl Sir: Gus Carter’s insightful portrayal of ‘Scuzz Nation’ (‘Streets of shame’, 10 May) is less of a howl of anguish about Starmer’s Britain than an indictment of previous governments of all stripes since the late 1970s. It is also, to me, a call for more sophisticated thinking about the nature of governance in the 21st century. Carter shows, using lots of telling examples that we all recognise, that neither the state in its current form nor the private sector can cope with the multiplicity of challenges posed by a modern society. Of the state’s impotence, the current government is not the principal offender. To illustrate my point, just listen to a week’s worth of the Today programme and all the requests for extra funding that are heard every day.

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

Why I won’t date younger women

From our US edition

I recently got some good news I’d like to share: I’m thirty-six years old. Yes, I know I’m chronologically seventy — but a blood and urine test I had reveals that I’m biologically thirty-six. (Your chronological age is the number of years you’ve lived; your biological age is how old your cells are.) Dr. Alka Patel, a brilliant British longevity expert tells me that she has never seen such a big gap between chronological and biological age as mine. So, what does this mean? It means I will probably live to a ripe old age, free of any related diseases. But to me it means that while, on the outside, I might look like an old white guy with a wobbly chin, sad eyes and the scar tissue of one too many failed romances — inside, I’m a vigorous and virile thirty-six-year-old man.

younger

Monday

Rob Crossan

Love is blind? The truth about dating with a disability

Dimly lit bars are great first-date venues for most people: the seductive ambience, the candles, the gentle clink of a martini shaker. But they couldn’t be worse for a visually impaired dater such as myself. I was born with ocular albinism and nystagmus, which renders me blind in one eye and severely partially sighted in the other. Yet, stubborn to the end, I have persevered with sepulchral bars for well over a decade now. The results have been mixed. I’ve sat down next to the wrong woman when returning from the bathroom, got lost on the way to the very same bathroom and, on one occasion, spilt an entire Bloody Mary down the front of my date. Funnily enough, she didn’t want to see me again.

Thursday

Catriona Olding

Good portraiture can reveal uncomfortable truths

My eldest daughter and her family are moving from a three-bedroom Art Deco semi with a garden and garage on the edge of a housing scheme to a top-floor tenement flat in a trendy family orientated area of Glasgow. They’re having to increase their mortgage to do so but think that the benefits to their overall quality of life will be worth it, and if they move to my son-in-law’s native Como for a while, the flat will be easy to rent out. Surveying the contents of the garage, she messaged: ‘What shall I do with your big portrait, Mum?’ When I was young I was painted quite often, mostly by my artist ex, because I was there and didn’t mind modelling for him.

Thursday

Catriona Olding

My brief encounter with online dating

Provence One of my daughters and a few pals, thinking I need company, have been urging me to get Bumble, the online dating app where women make the first move. I’ve thought in the past month or so that I might like some sort of relationship, but contemplating the reality is scary. When someone you love passionately dies, love lives on but sometimes too much; both sweet and painful memories can be paralysing. ‘You can’t be on your own in the cave for ever,’ someone said recently.  Why not? Friends Dave and Kate met on Bumble. He said: ‘You must remember, Catriona, there are lots of decent men out there who haven’t read The Waste Land. Don’t let it put you off.

Wednesday

Julie Burchill

I listened to a solid week of Woman’s Hour…

I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and having sex with pop stars, I also nursed a desire to appear on Woman’s Hour. As a shy, provincial virgin, the programme opened up a world of women’s troubles from anorexia to zuigerphobia – and I was keen to have A Complicated Life. Here was the wet hand of today’s lily-livered sensibilities I had anticipated From my twenties to my fifties I appeared on it several times; my last outing was in 2016, as – like most other institutions – it was captured by the trans cult, leading to the show’s best presenter, Jenni Murray, leaving in 2020. Since then, the programme might more accurately be named What Is A Woman’s Hour.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Bankers are hot again

‘I’m looking for a man in finance/ Trust fund/ 6’5”/ Blue eyes.’ When Megan Boni posted this ditty on her TikTok account a few months ago, it was meant as a joke. She wanted to poke fun at the wish-list mentality of single women, herself included. She couldn’t have predicted that her 19-second video would be viewed 26 million times and remixed into one of the summer’s viral hits. Women are now whispering to each other that maybe they really are looking for a man in finance, rather than an impoverished creative type still living with his parents at the age of 30. ‘Millennials felt ashamed about making money their focus.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I set up two young people?

Q. I have invited some younger friends to stay with me at a family house in Spain. Among the party will be an excellent young fellow who I sense is attracted to my niece, who will also be joining us for a few days. Were I to ask if she is interested, she would think such a question ‘gross’ – but she should be, because he is an all-round star. Like so many of his age, though, he has a somewhat dithering and unconfident manner. Given that it will be too hot to dance, any thoughts about how I can help things move forward between them? They are both single. – Name and address withheld A. At an opportune moment, having engineered a chat, sit the pair down on a sofa and hand them your mobile preloaded with a relevant short podcast on the topic you have been discussing.