Internet Dating Is For Everyone

The two questions I am asked most often are: (1) Are you single? (2) And (2) Why don't you try internet dating?

The first is a consequence of being fantastically eligible, but it's actually because I wrote a book about escaping an arranged marriage. The second, meanwhile, seems to be the question posed to everyone nowadays if the answer to (1) is yes.

It's astonishing how big internet dating has become. According to one survey, half the country's single population have dated online. And while a few years ago these people would no more have broadcast this than discussed their haemorrhoids, the stigma has gone.

Four of my most glamorous colleagues and friends met their partners online and are not at all sheepish about it. Not that I have succumbed. It would, of course, be nice to settle down, retire from the series of short-lived relationships that have made recent years feel as bloody as Reservoir Dogs.

But online dating seems too mechanical and appears to require engagement with people determined to misinform, with five-year-old photos, lies about their age and euphemisms such as “drinks socially” (ie, alcoholic); “voluptuous” (recently had stomach stapled); and “adventurous” (pervert).

If I were permitted only two objections, though, one of them would be that internet dating reverses the normal narrative of relationships. You begin with the kind of questions that you would normally pose only several years into a relationship.

Shall we call our kid Rayburn if he's a boy? Where do you see yourself living in 2014? It's unsexy. And also, paradoxically, unrevealing. A two-minute chat about Big Brother is infinitely more revealing than an exchange of emotional CVs.

Then there's picnic syndrome. You know how it goes: you go out to find somewhere nice to dine alfresco - and find it, but can't helping walking on, looking a bit farther, just in case there's an even nicer spot around the corner. It's the same with internet dating: you might meet someone wonderful but you can't help thinking that there might be someone even better around the corner and never really give it a proper shot. It's horrible.

At least, I thought it was horrible until I came across a news article recently in which The Right Rev Willie Walsh, the Bishop of Killaloe in Ireland and president of the Catholic marriage service Accord, was quoted complaining that “internet dating is superficial and reduces human relationships to a commodity”. True. But his comments were made at the launch of a survey which showed that 23 per cent of married Irish couples met their partners ... in a pub.

Is getting drunk and pouncing on the person least able to resist really less superficial than meeting someone online? It's hardly going to give you a great story to pass on to Rayburn. And what about the other popular way of meeting a partner: at work? Surely office seduction is fraught with potential humiliation and sexual harassment lawsuits?

Indeed, internet dating gets attention as it is relatively new, but conventional ways of meeting people are even more shrill and desperate, if you analyse them.

Meeting people at random seems romantic but it's, well, random and when you hit 30, most people you come across are already involved. Relying on friends to set you up becomes increasingly futile: once they get married, their matchmaking efforts rarely go farther than occasionally remarking “But you're too great to be single!”

Moreover, there's so much money being made in online dating that not only are there internet sites for every demographic imaginable, from Christians to the obese, there is a site out there th at provides a response to any anxiety you may have.

Worried about the amount of choice? Certain sites require customers to undergo personality assessments and match members accordingly. Concerned that your colleagues may see your advert? There are sites that restrict access to your profile.

Devil Called Love.com, meanwhile, which involves people being put forward by friends, and where every profile seems to begin with the remark “I never thought I would do this...”, seems to be directed at people who think they are too good for internet dating.

And this is what it comes down to: pride. Those of us who resist online dating come up with all sorts of explanations for our reluctance: we are meeting enough people; reversed narratives; picnic syndrome, etc.

But in truth most of us resist because we view online dating as an admission of loneliness (something that people would rather die of than concede); because we think we're better than the desperate saddos online; and because we are expecting someone with the looks of Cameron Diaz and the brains of Salman Rushdie to flounce through the door at any moment.

But sitting here, I have to acknowledge that (a) this person, or even someone with the looks of Salman Rushdie and the brains of Cameron Diaz, for that matter, is showing no signs of appearing; and (b) not only am I no better than all of those saddos online, but having written a book and now a column about my singledom, I am probably significantly more desperate than them.

The fact is that internet dating is a no-brainer if you're serious about finding a partner. Besides, doing it doesn't mean that you have to give up on real life. I should really give it a twirl. And I may do, if I can find a copy of that nice picture taken in 1998...