My disastrous adventure back into the world of dating...

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I have been single for around 2 years and am not the most confident when it comes to guys. I’ve been pretty lucky this far as in I’ve always been introduced to guys through friends or I’ve we’ve been friends first, so it feels natural. This becomes harder as you get older, your social circle shrinks and you get to know the majority of your friend’s mates. I have had a blast being single and don’t feel I need a boyfriend but do miss having someone there and would like to meet the right man to have fun with. However I am useless at putting myself out there! My friends laugh at me and say I wouldn’t have a clue if a guy was chatting me up, I’m pretty oblivious to this kind of stuff!

It is on my 30 before 30 list to get out there more and start dating again and I recently had a look at the dating app Tinder. Highly recommend if you fancy an entertaining evening at home, get a glass of wine and slide one way if you like the look of the man and the other if you don’t.  If they click they like you too, you get matched and can start messaging. Apart from being ridiculously vain the problem with Tinder is that hardly anyone seems to message. This may just be me but if you actually want to meet people I would necessarily recommend this one!

So on the 1^st January my 2 best friends staged an intervention and signed me up to the dating website, plenty of fish and wouldn’t let me have the password for the first week. The first message was from a guy offering to pay £2700 to do rude stuff to my boobs, to say I didn’t have high hopes for this intervention would be an understatement! 

After a week of them messaging random guys I eventually got the password. I was pretty impressed with their work and it definitely showed how well they know me with their responses. I did delete a few who I didn’t think were my cup of tea and I carried on chatting to the ones I liked. I was having a great time chatting to one guy about travelling, and then he suddenly disappeared so I’m assuming he met someone. Then another guy was I was chatting too asked to befriend me on facebook so I agreed and we became facebook buddies and then he stopped chatting to me! I’m assuming he didn’t like the look of me. Who knows?!

I then started chatting to this mediocre guy, his profile stated how spontaneous he was but his messages were a little generic and boring. However I tried not to judge thinking online dating is an awkward thing in general and he might be my amazing dream man in real life. Therefore I agreed to go on a date with him, so we arranged to meet last Sunday and he would get in touch nearer the time and say a time and place. He text me at 6:30pm on the Sunday asking if we could still meet, err no, I was already in my pj’s and having a hot date with Ben & Jerry. So that one’s fizzled out.

Then I started chatting to a nice guy, for the rest of this he shall be known as ‘wakeboarding guy’. He was entertaining and chatty, he loved being out on the water and liked snowboarding. He gave me his number so we started texting instead. I really liked him and when he suggested meeting up in real life I agreed. So last night we met up in a county pub for dinner, we met at 7pm and relieved and happy to see that he was ridiculously hot and seemed really nice. We chatted about various things, I was ridiculously nervous and talked rubbish, and I also giggle a lot in these situations. He seemed a bit nervous to begin with but then seemed to relax. There were a few awkward silences, and I don’t think me blurting out that I’m 29 and moved back in with parents last year is a particular selling point. So at the end of the evening (9:30pm, not sure if that’s a bad thing?! The pub was bloody freezing!) In true Gemma style we walked to the car park to our cars and I just kind of flung myself on him for a hug and then pretty much ran to my car. Awkward much. He said ‘ill text you’ then paused for a bit and through in a ‘...soon’, what the hell does that mean?! So as you can probably guess I quite liked him.

I arrived home to a barrage of texts from friends asking if I was okay and how it went and I don’t really know to be honest! I then went through the dilemma of should I text him and say thanks for dinner and a nice evening. My friends were split on this one and me not being able to leave things text him. I then got a text saying ‘No worries, thanks for coming x’. According my dating expert friends this is known as a cut off and I won’t hear from him again. Gutted.

This dating world feels cut throat, I feel massively out of my comfort zone, I have woken up feeling extremely anxious and headed straight to the gym to try and sweat it out. It feels like a rollercoaster of emotions and this morning I feel pretty crap.

So I am currently sat here blasting out Beyonces single ladies and attempting to pull myself together and get back out there again. Sigh....