Brief history
Before i start this blog i would just like to start by saying I am married now!!!! Not sure how she puts up with me but I am. However prior to this I had a period of about 6 years of being single and not really finding the right girl following a really long 10 year relationship from like the age of 15 to 25!!! It was a weird time of my life from going from being so young and really into someone knowing nothing else to an emptyness and feeling quite lonely.
I was also in a group of friends that were either all married or had long term partners. for your average single person this can be a bit poo and you kind of feel like a 3rd wheel which I’m sure you will all agree is not much fun.
Internet dating
So following ages of mopping around feeling sorry for myself my friend Jenna (who sadly passed away recently but if she were here I’m sure would smile) set me up on this app she called “TINDER”.
If i am completely honest I had no idea what it was or what you did. I generally thought that internet dating was something that sad lonely people did because they were feeling sorry for them selfs and did not have the confidence to chat people up in the more traditional manner. However when thinking that statement back to myself I realised that the person I was imagining in my mind was actually me!!!! Based on the fact that i had just branded myself a sad and lonely man i decided to hand my phone over and let her set it up. I think there used to be a stigma around online dating but I soon found out loads of single people did it as every one is so busy to go out and meet people!
Literally couple of minuets later she had already set up a profile with a photo she had found on my facebook page and began to start swiping my phone. At that point I was not ofay with the ins and outs of working the app but apparently swiping right is a yes to a picture of a girl and swipe left or no (little shallow i think). So when jenna was continually swiping left i thought I better ask what she was doing. Basically she was going through the girls picking who she thought would be good for me!! I took control of my phone and started to have a go.
Problem number one of internet dating when you are dyslexic……. getting your rights and lefts mixed up can cause you issues. It soon became apparent that I was swiping left to people i did want to date and right to the ones i didn’t!!!! This finally clicked when i realised that both parties have to like each other and then it comes up with “YOU HAVE A MATCH”. However the people I was matching with defernantly were not the people I thought I was swiping for!!! I wonder how many of the ones i mist might have actually wanted to go on a date…. ?!?!? lol I hopping at least one!!
Following cracking the simple task of knowing your left and rights I finally started getting a few matches. Although there was another hurdle that appeared! in the text box the person gets to write a little blurb about them self or who they are looking for. 9 times out of 10 people would put “whats with people that don’t know the difference between there theirs , theres and the 3rd one i can never remember!!!! Basically in a nut shel if you can’t spell properly don’t bother messaging me!!!
How the hell was this going to work!!! spell check usually stiches me up because it auto corrects my words to something completely different and properly offensive with out me knowing. I even considered getting my mum to spell check however discounted that idea after 30 seconds. “Hi I am sams mum, please dat him he just can’t spell thats al, he has a loverly personality”!!!!
But I thought sod it ,what is the worse that could happen, I picked up my phone was stunned to see that a really pretty lady had matched me, took a deep breath and messaged her. Its hard making the first approach but decided not to follow my original plan of using smaller words as I may sound a little simple and chucked in some bigger more sufisticated words such as; Eligant, intriged and intreadsted. I can’t fully remember who i used Eligant but i did!! however I am guessing by the red line currently underneath it that I have once again spelt it wrong.
Anyway back to the story… So I received my first message. For anyone that has not used tinder before I can tell you now this is a truly exciting time of your life! However that excitement was soon to be crushed as the message read. “Is that actually a picture of you or is this a silly joke as your writing is like a 10 year olds”! Apart from the admission that she may have over generously predicted my writing ability age i did make me sad as that was the last message from her. Should of got my mum to write back!!!!
So after many a message coming back about my spelling and on many a date me not interpreting the photo correctly as some seemed older than the picture they put up, I decided to give internet dating up. However i did meet some amazing people and have some amazing memories.
In the end I met my lovely wife at my best mates 2 year old at the times birthday party which doesn’t sound weird at all when i read it back to myself. She was actually his neighbours daughter. Very pretty and extremely bright I gave her my number and then we started dating after about 6 months later when she realised she had missed a message from me on her phone.
Even now I still read things wrong and it has an impact on our dates. So early in the relationship we decided to go over to france for a couple of days. Me again wanting to look good and be assertive decided to book the ferry and organise the trip. Got onto the boat and started the closing to france. She from both being bright and also from living in france for 5 years pointed out of the ferry window and said “the ferry seems to be going past calais” which was meant to be our destination. Me being slightly confused said that maybe the ferry does a bit of a big loop. Then the tannoy went BING BONG you will shortly be arriving in dunkirk!!!! I had read the information wrong and acsidently booked the wrong destination.
To this day she always does the bookings!!!!!
Moral of the story – don’t judge a message by its cover, it could be that the persons mum has not checked it before sending!!!!!