Shifty First Dates: The Her.ie Guide To Dating in Ireland

When Randy Newman sang 'It's A Jungle Out There', he probably wasn't talking about the dating scene but the song's title definitely serves as a solid warning for Irish singletons. Whatever your preferences, it seems that very few people can manage to escape the romantic battlefield without a few scars and all we can hope for is to manage to make it out alive. Trouble is, it seems that many of us are suffering from a serious case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the baggage from our previous relationships can tend to make its way into our shiny, new ones. Having recently come out of an doomed dalliance with someone completely unsuitable, I'm hoping that this won't be the case for me. The Ben and Jerry's has been devoured, the drunken texts have been sent and I've spent many's an evening drunkenly singing along to Adele as if my life depended on it, but now I'm back on the dating wagon and I've decided to share all the trials and tribulations of my journey through singlesville with our lovely readers. So, each Tuesday, I'll be sharing my dating diary here on Her.ie to, hopefully, entertain you all and reassure you that you do not have the most disastrous love life in Ireland, as that title undisputedly belongs to me! Luckily, having just moved into a new house, I've accidentally stumbled upon a treasure trove of information as one of my flatmates is a self-confessed 'serial dater'. While I'm still an advocate of the traditional 'get drunk and see who you bump into at the bar' approach, she has firmly informed me that this is the dating equivalent of having a Nokia 3310 and all modern singles are employing technology in the hunt for Mr Right, or Mr Right Now. Tinder, it seems, is where all the cool kids are at. My only previous experience of online dating was a 24-hour stint in 2012, when I was forced to delete my account after waking up to a stream of angry emails from an irate suitor. My crime? I'd gone to bed without answering one of his messages. And while I know it's wrong to tar everyone with the same brush, this was more than enough for me and sent me running for the hills. However, this online trend does not seem to be going away and my flatmate's continuous stream of stories about dates with eligible men eventually got to me. So last week, I downed a glass of wine and then downloaded Tinder to kickstart my dating odyssey. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Tinder is basically Ikea for men. You sign up and choose pictures from your Facebook as your profile. Then the fun begins and you can flick through a catalogue of pictures based on your chosen preferences (so if you like older men or are a bit of a cougar, this is the app for you!). You swipe left if you don't fancy them and right if you do and then Tinder will tell you if you have a match. The best thing is that nobody can message you until you've indicated that you fancy them, which eliminates the (apparently very common) problem of receiving unsolicited penis photos that some of my friends have experienced on other dating websites. In short, Tinder is great craic. I've had plenty of matches and no angry messages so far, which I'm counting as a victory, and I've set up a date with a cute American for one of the nights this week. I guess it's too late to back out now so I'll be back next week with a full report and promise to spill all the gory details! Have you got any great/hilariously bad Tinder stories? Leave us a comment and tell us all about it!