Two events have occurred in the last week that have made me wonder about a sideline business writing people’s online dating profiles for them. I’m sure there would be a market for it – no one I know (apart from me!) has enjoyed writing a dating profile for themselves.

Firstly, I had lunch with a woman I met recently at a networking event. She showed me her current profile and I offered some tips. Essentially I told her, (hopefully in a nice way), that her profile was a bit dull and basically said the same as everyone else’s.

Let’s get real here, who doesn’t like socialising with friends, Sunday lunch in a nice pub and curling up on the sofa with a film and a bottle of red wine? If you’ve ever spent any time on online dating sites you’ll know that about 97% of people say these exact same things. I suggested instead that she try to think a little deeper and be a bit more specific – what books had she read and why did she enjoy them? What music is she listening to and how does it make her feel? Essentially you have to tell people what makes you tick as these are the details that people connect with. Yes, you risk putting some people off, but by keeping in generic you miss the chance to really appeal to anybody.

Later in the evening I had a message from her:

“Jo Middleton you are a genius. I have rewritten my profile and just uploaded it. Three new messages have come in in five minutes. I am laughing out loud. You are a star.”

Obviously that’s going on my testimonials page when I get the new business website set up. View Post

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How long did it take you to fall in love? How many dates before you were officially boyfriend and girlfriend?

According to recent research, we are falling in love quicker than ever, with it now just taking 224 tweets and 163 text messages for us to woo our partners. Approximately*. Apparently it now takes the average couple just 24 days to refer to each other as girlfriend and boyfriend, compared to 78 days a generation or two ago.

Do you think we are falling in love quicker than ever? Does social media make it easier to get the girl (or boy) or is it an artificial intimacy?

What isn’t made clear in the article is whether you actually have to spend any face to face time together, or whether the 140 characters alone is enough to seduce a future partner. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people on Twitter that I have shared 224 tweets with over the years, but I am under no illusion at all that I actually know anything about them, let alone that I am in love with them.

Sure, it’s nice to have ways to communicate quickly and easily, but those things can’t replace physical closeness, that time spent lying face to face in bed with someone, sharing stories from your past. While phones and social media can compliment that, I simply don’t believe that you can know someone from a tweet.

Or even 224 of them.

What do you think?

*Waits patiently while you go and count how many texts you have exchanged with that potential new partner

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Someone asked me this week what I was looking for in a man.

I started thinking about it – because I do want someone in my life – and began reeling off a list of the things I thought were important to me. It was the usual stuff, the sort of thing anyone would say; honesty, loyalty, company, compassion. It was kind of a dull list. I tried to think a little broader. I decided it was important to me to have a partner that listened to me, that took a genuine interest in my life and my interests and who wasn’t afraid to challenge me, emotionally and intellectually.

Still it didn’t feel right. When you think about it like I was, it somehow becomes a to-do list. It felt like I was creating a sort of relationship check list, a template against which I would be marking a future partner regularly to see how they were performing.

That isn’t what I want though, obviously.

I tried to distil it down.

‘I want them to be nice,’ I thought to myself. Well, that’s all well and good, but there are plenty of nice people around, it has to be more than that.

‘I want them to love me,’ I thought. Getting there. But still, I have been loved by people in the past and it hasn’t made everything OK.

‘I want them to love me enough,’ I decided.

Better.

All I want in a partner is for them to love me enough that all of the other things come naturally. I want a man who is honest with me because he loves me enough to respect me and not even think of hiding anything from me. I want a man who wants to challenge me and nurture me and take care of me because he loves me and it is instinct, not because of a sense of obligation or a list of requirements.

I want a man who loves me with a passion that means he will do whatever it takes to make sure we stay together, however annoying I might sometimes be or whatever issues I might have, and I want to love him back the same way.

Is that too much to ask?

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The big day is nearly here. Tomorrow I am leaving Bristol.

Although the last couple of months have felt like forever, moving has at the same time crept up on me and I suddenly feel like I have an awful lot to do and not enough time to do it in. I have spent the last half an hour running up and down the stairs with boxes and bags, hoping to clear my mind of the worry and the doubt, but still it lingers.

Moving under any circumstances I know is hard. You spend so long building up a life around you, collecting stuff, surrounding yourself with things, and then suddenly there it is, just a stack of boxes. You literally have to pick up every single thing you own, see it, put it in a box, take it out again. You unpack, try to recreate what was there before, or maybe something different, but what does any of it even mean?

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These things of course are more than just things – they represent interests, hobbies, passions and shared memories, which is why I suppose that having to look at every single one of them, when so many of the memories are no longer shared, is so sad.

Everyone keeps telling me that a fresh start is a good thing, that once we are in a new house everything will feel better, and I know that’s true, that feelings do fade, but I’m just not convinced I want them to.

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It used to be that people wrote letters.

When an elderly relative died you would discover a box of musty smelling postcards and love notes, written in a consistent, swirly hand, the letters looping elegantly from one to the next. You’d search through them, trying to piece together the history of a relationship, the feel of the paper in your hand somehow bringing the story to life.

Nowadays we send emails or texts – often short, poorly spelt missives that do little to conjure up any sense of romance or intrigue.

Emails aren’t all bad though. Just because you can’t physically hold them, can’t bring them up to your nose and inhale deeply, imagining you catch the scent of the other person, doesn’t mean they can’t tell just as powerful a story. Thanks to Memeoirs, you can now capture those stories, pin them down onto paper and tuck them away in an innocent looking cardboard box in the garage, ready for future generations to discover and get excited by. View Post

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When I was about 15, we went on a school trip to see Romeo and Juliet. If you could conjure up an activity as a prelude to a perfect first kiss, surely this would be it? On the way home on the coach, I sat next to a boy from my class, whose name I shall keep to myself just in case.

It was a long journey, and at some point I dozed off. When I woke up, said boy appeared to be stroking my thigh. I kept my eyes closed and hoped that if I could just pretend to be asleep long enough that he would give up. (At 15 I was pretty scared of boys).

I must have drifted off again, because the next time I woke up, it was from a dream that I was having my face licked by a massive, slobbery dog. Except I wasn’t, I was being kissed by the boy. It was such an all-face-consuming kiss, that when he had finished and I was allowed to breathe again, I literally had to wipe my face with my sleeve to dry it. As you can see from the infographic below from e-harmony, men do prefer their kisses moist. View Post

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Was the postman waiting for you this morning with two dozen red roses and a giant teddy holding a shiny red heart?

(I’m talking in a delivery person capacity rather than just as a secret admirer. That might be awkward.)

No. Me neither. I’m glad though. Those teddies are awful. View Post

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“Do you think there is anyone in the world,” asks Bee, “who has never said ‘I love you’?”

We’re in the car, listening to Paul Simon’s Something So Right.

Some people never say those words I love you
It’s not their style, to be so bold...

“Yes,” I say.

“Really?” She sounds surprised. “Even to their mums? And I don’t mean babies or anything.”

“Well, how about orphans?”

This is one of Bee’s favourite games. The sentences always start with ‘Do you think there is anyone is the world who has never…’ or ‘Do you think there is anyone in the world who has ever…’ and they tend to end with something ridiculous like ‘…tasted a food beginning with a vowel?’ or ‘…eaten a moth on purpose?’

I tend to always just answer ‘yes’. It seems pretty likely to me that whatever you can think of, someone will have thought of it before you. Plus there are some really strange people about. Someone is sure to have deliberately eaten a moth.

I’m even more certain that there are people who have never told anyone that they love them. It’s sad to think about though, and even  sadder to think that there must be people who have never had anyone tell them that they love them.

How would you feel if you nobody had ever told you that they loved you? Worst still, how must it be to never have felt loved, even if by someone who couldn’t say it out loud?

Some people never say those words I love you
But like a child, they’re longing to be told…

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Last night Bee and I went for dinner at Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Bee does love a good chain.

The restaurant was entirely glass fronted, so we chose a table in the window, where, once we had run out of things to say to each other, we could amuse ourselves watching people loitering about outside, trying to decide whether to go for a burger or Yo Sushi.

About three minutes later, we were watching a woman on her own, who was spending an unreasonable amount of time looking at the menu outside. “Maybe she’s meeting someone,” I suggested.

“Nah,” countered Bee, “because then she wouldn’t be looking at the menu would she?”

“She might,” I said, “if she was just trying to make herself look busy.”

Bee didn’t look convinced. “To be honest,” she said, “she does look like the kind of person who’d go to a burger restaurant on her own.” View Post

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It is very distracting. You try to focus your mind on the things you know you have to do, but sometimes it just won’t. Sometimes it just floats about, and you can’t pin it down. You spend a large amount of time staring unhelpfully into the distance and sighing.

Time speeds up and slows down. At all the wrong moments. The time you spend apart feels like years and then when you want time to drag, it’s gone in an instant. Perhaps someone is fiddling with the clocks.

Being in love makes you selfish and boring. Other people try to talk to you about their lives and their problems but you find it hard to be interested. Instead you’re just looking for an opportunity to turn the conversation around, to drop in a name. It’s oh so casual though, surely no one will notice if I just mention him one more time…

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I have never left a partner for someone else.

I don’t now if this is unusual or not, but despite a good mix of long-term, short-term and half hour-long encounters, I have never ended one relationship to start another – no overlaps, no angst-ridden dilemmas, never even anyone else waiting quietly in the wings.

I’d like to say this is because I’ve always been smart enough to end a relationship when I knew it wasn’t working, before it fell apart enough for me to fall for someone else, but anyone who knows me will be snorting derisively at that idea, so that isn’t it. What can I say? I’m not good at endings.

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No, is the short answer. But that wouldn’t make great reading, so I will try and expand…

I want to believe in the idea that at some point in my life, I will meet somebody and know. Know that this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, the person who completes me, the person I will love forever. But I don’t believe it. It’s a lovely idea, but in my mind completely unreasonable. How can you say that you will love somebody forever? How can you know?

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