PSA: It is your moral duty to set your friends up with other sound people

When embarking on the terrifying and tumultuous world of dating, it’s easy to feel like you’ve just moved into a brand new neighbourhood; a town aptly called Singledom.

This place might not appear so bad at first and despite the overwhelming, lingering odour of red wine in the air, everyone seems nice enough.

At least, that’s until you try to engage with your fellow Singledom inhabitants (“singletons”, if you will). From there it doesn’t take long to notice how they spend their days: scrolling through their phones, passively waiting to “find” someone.

Well, they don’t look like they’re searching very hard, you think to yourself. They insist, however, that they’re looking for “that special someone” who will guarantee them a one-way ticket out of Singledom (which is based in the greater Solitude area).

They all seem to resent this place, and you can’t quite figure out why. The ones who’ve been living here for ages seem the most embittered. When you ask what’s so wrong about living here, they give you one simple explanation: in Singledom the private act of “spooning” refers only to that which takes place between singleton and hummus tub.

Oh. I see.

Ok, obviously the above is an elaborated stretch on the truth. A lot of people really embrace singledom and thrive off the independence (and endless flirting opportunities) that it brings. But what what about the ones who are looking for true love’s kiss, and children, and a crippling mortgage by the age of 35? In those cases my description is generally not too far off.

For the modern singleton who really does want to settle down and find a partner, they will probably face a future spent swiping through dating apps, utterly invested the hope that they may strike up conversation with the one. This is someone who they know nothing about, someone who they may have no proof is actually who they say they are on their profile. Someone who they would never dream of approaching in person, “because that would be way too weird”.

That’s just the state of the dating environment at the moment. We all go through the same rigmarole until one day we decide we’re sick of the Tinder creeps and Bumble bores, and we delete the dating apps, announcing that we’re using our newfound free time to work on our own self-improvement. And we do, until someone mentions in passing how their boss met her husband online, and that’s all it takes to send us back at it again.

And this, my friends, is where you come in.

In the past matchmaking was a vital component of societal workings, and rightly so. It seems totally obvious that two people who are looking for love (and seem compatible) should be put in the same 3 metre radius, at least. No pressure; just meet and then let face-to-face interaction run its natural course. Maybe it’ll lead to a future of blissful companionship, and maybe it won’t, but the odds of success must be somewhat higher if you know there similarities and connections from the get-go.

It seems so practical, and yet it’s just not the done thing. Instead we’ve reached the point where conversing with new potential mates is only acceptable online, and with a large percentage of words now being replaced with emojis, even they don’t really count.

My plea is that we might go back to the good old times when we looked out for our friends and actively sought out ways to make their lives better. Because everyone deserves a chance at romance, and when apps just aren’t cutting the cheese, then the responsibility falls upon us to get proactive in our “wingman” and “wingwoman” duties. How cool would it be to know that you were the catalyst responsible for getting two great people together? At the very least it would get you an honorary mention at their wedding.

At the end of the day this is about considered, well thought-out matches, so get those awful Notting Hill blind date scenes out of your head once and for all. Make matches based upon interests, demeanours and personality types, and as a general rule it’s best to leave the “fruitarians” to do their own match-making. That’s far too niche a market to be dealing with altogether.