Shifty First Dates: Love Me Tinder – The Her.ie Guide To Dating in Ireland

In a new weekly feature, Her.ie goes behind enemy lines to see what it's really like to be single in Ireland. From speed dating to making speedy escapes, our no-holds-barred blog will follow one girl's attempts to venture into the dating jungle, play the field and share any wisdom that she finds along the way! _____________________________ Week Two: Love Me Tinder When I recently moved to Dublin, somebody told me that the place would become ‘like a village’ to me before long. But, I had certainly expected it to take longer than a few weeks. Having lived in Galway for ten years, one of the main things I was looking forward to in ‘the big smoke’ was anonymity. As anyone who has spent time down West will know, it’s a serious achievement to manage to walk from one end of Shop Street to the next without bumping into someone you know, which makes it pretty much impossible to avoid anyone that you don’t want to see. Over the years, I've spent large portions of nights out helping my mates hide when last weekend’s conquest walks into the bar, strolling straight into ex-boyfriends while cosying up on a promising date and realising while in various states of undress that the guy I had brought home was actually my friend’s brother/flatmate/ex. So, now that I'm living in a city that it is home to millions of people, I was looking forward to carrying on my love life with reckless abandon, happy in the knowledge that if I ended up drunkenly scoring someone on a Friday night, I could kick them out the door the next morning and never worry about running into them again. Turns out, things ain't that simple. In last week’s column, I filled you in on my initiation into Tinder and setting up my first date with a fetching American doctor. While I’d been slightly taken aback by his swift and business-like manner in asking me out, I hadn't much previous experience on the dating app and assumed that this was just the way things worked. The day before I was due to meet Dr Dreamy, I arrived home from work to have a catch-up with my flatmates (the Serial Dater and The Psychologist). While the former is, as the name suggests, a big fan of meeting and greeting Dublin’s male population, the latter only just re-joined Tinder so she excitedly told me about a date she’d set up for the weekend. Our conversation went a little like this. Me: So, sounds promising, tell me everything. Her: Well…he’s a doctor, he seems really nice. He’s American and I’m meeting him for a drink in Smithfield on Saturday night. Now, it doesn't take a detective to see where they is going and, after comparing notes, it turned out that not only had we both set up a date with the same guy, he’d sent us both the exact same opening line. The chancer! After having a good laugh at the ridiculousness of how small Dublin’s dating pool seems to be, we both decided to cancel and I sent Dr (Not So) Dreamy a text that said ‘I'm really sorry but I'm going to have to cancel tomorrow night. Have fun with The Psychologist on Saturday though!’. I got a rambling message full of apologies in reply but he was definitely spreading himself a little too thin for my liking! Anyway, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The following day, I received a message from another very cute potential date and ended up swapping a few hours worth of basic information and witty banter. This one is a 30-year-old Dubliner with nice smile, a complicated sounding job that I don’t really understand and only a small percentage chance of being an axe murderer. As he is heading away on holidays in a few days, we've decided to meet for a drink...but there is one small problem. The trouble is, I'm not a big fan of dating. I probably should have taken this into consideration when deciding to write this column but the very idea of meeting up with a guy I don’t know to make polite small talk sends me into a cold sweat. To me, the first date is an obstacle course of embarrassing, uncomfortable awkwardness. First off, when it is set up through something like Tinder or a well-meaning friend, you have to deal with the fact that you could end up committed to spending an evening with someone who has the personality of a dishcloth and the sex appeal of Mr Bean. Long before the advent of Photoshop, people have been taking advantage of lighting, shadows and better looking friends to con the opposite sex into a date so a cute profiler is no guarantee of a sexy partner-in-crime for your evening out! Once you get there, there is the awkward silences, the grapple over who pays, the anxiety over whether it is going well and, occasionally, plotting a safe escape route from an overenthusiastic date who looks like he’ll start humping your leg if you stand still for too long. Yup, first dates are a bit of a torturous exercise but as I’m not quite ready to hand in my cards and join the convent just yet, I’ve set up a meeting in a busy bar in town (safety first, girls!) and am ploughing straight into my very first Tinder date. Bring it on.