You thought I ghosted you right? I know, I know, it has been quite a while. But don’t go thinking that I’ve been off having a whole heap of dates and not telling you about them, or that I finally met a great guy who has been consuming all my spare time. 

All that has been keeping me in bed for hours on end is the Real Housewives of Cheshire. Yep, it’s not even one of the good Real Housewives variants (I think?!) but I’ve watched almost 5 seasons in the past month or so 😳

Earlier this year I set myself a hard deadline for getting back into dating on May 1st. In April with May 1st fast approaching, I decided to have a few sneaky looks at what male delights awaited me on Tinder. Ten left swipe in and I had seen a guy I had dated before, my neighbour and 8 truly hideous men that have been on every dating site I’ve used in the last five years, with exactly the same pics as five years ago. 

Ok, maybe I’m not quite ready yet for the torture that online dating can be I thought, so I gave myself an extension to June 1st. 

Again I occasionally dabbled with logging back onto Tinder and having a little swipe. When I was away in Noosa late May (with my Mum 😬) I thought I would check out some Qld boys. Mostly I expected to find married 40 somethings who were bored and Tindering whilst sitting outside shops on Hastings St waiting for their wives, but all I found were ferals. 

I wasn’t finding much inspiration on Tinder, but I did have some on Bumble. I read an article in April about the Bumble BFF feature where you can swipe through profiles aiming to connect with other people seeking friendship. They plugged it as a great way for singletons who have found that all their wingpeople have disappeared off to get married and have babies. 

Sounds like a good idea to me! I had spent the past year and a bit totally consumed by work and hardly going out, plus many of my child-rearing friends were now up to new baby no.2 and it was much more of a challenge to get them out than it used to be, so some new friends could be good. 

I swiped through the profiles and I was surprised (you probably won’t be having read my blog…) by how much physical appearance played as big a part of picking a friend by their profile as it did in dating. I saw a few Kardashian types that I certainly swiped left to despite my love of binge watching Keeping up with the Kardashians. I didn’t want no high maintenance friends! I saw a few quirky chicks that seemed to be into comic books and video games, also not my thing. But the worst ones were the boring looking ones. Hardly a smile and nothing in their pics that indicated any real passions. 

Interestingly these would have been the same pics that they were using on the app for dating too. Good luck with that!

I swiped right to a few girls that had pics of them smiling and laughing and occasionally drinking champers. These chicks seemed like my type! 

As per all dating apps, when you both swipe right you get the opportunity to chat. I got chatting with three girls who all seemed smart, independent, friendly and fun. After a few days chatting I had lined up ‘dates’ with all of them over the weekend. Yup, there’s my ‘all or nothing’ personality kicking in again!

The first BFF date was a late lunch at my fave all day breakfast place in Balmain. I arrived first and sent BFF No.1 a txt to let her know I’d be waiting out the front to avoid any awkwardness searching for each other inside. The usual thoughts of ‘what if I don’t recognise her, or what if she doesn’t recognise me’ were in my head, but we recognised each other immediately. Guess our pics do actually look like us huh 😉

Lunch was great, I instagrammed my corncakes with bacon and smashed avocado #obvs and we moved across the road to the pub for a drink and more chatting afterwards. BFF No.1 is a great mix of super intelligent and outrageously fun. Which now I write that, I’m going to steal it for my upcoming tinder profile description hahaha. 

The next day I met up with BFF No. 2 at a wine festival on the Northern Beaches. BFF No. 2 seemed like a great connection. We’d been texting back and forth heaps since we’d met online, at the frequency that if it was a guy I would think he was too desperate and clingy, but it felt ok from a new friend. We agreed to meet at the entrance to the festival as it was packed and we also recognised each other easily. Boom, more realistic profile pics! 

We wandered around and chatted and soon met up with my BFF No. 3 who was also going to be there with some of her other friends. The three of us hung out for a while but BFF No.3 drifted off when her friends arrived and I never heard from her again. It was an amicable parting though I believe!

I spent the rest of the afternoon with BFF No.2 and we talked non-stop about everything from travel, to work, to dud dates. As the festival was soon to end and we wanted to get a jump on the traffic exodus, we headed off and said our goodbyes loosely discussing catching up in a few weeks as I was away the next weekend and it was her bday the week after and she had plans. 

We exchanged a few txts after that, but they were lacklustre. Then we just stopped messaging each other. Yup, it’s the ol’ story of the magic first date with strong indications of a second, only to be left wondering what went wrong. Was I not pretty enough? Was I not funny enough? Perhaps she’s met someone she likes better? Typical online dating, everyone is always looking to upgrade to the next best thing 😂

Anyhoo, BFF No. 1 was a winner and we’ve kept in contact since and had an outrageous night out recently….which I’ll tell you about shortly!