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Your support makes all the difference.Just when I thought romance was dead, along came Tinder and a whole sweet shop of men appeared before my eyes. Yes, Tinder. Please don't judge.
Admittedly the dating app has been credited with a variety of dubious accolades, from the invention of casual sex to the death of morality, but critics miss one crucial point: it's free.
The beauty of free is that, unlike its paid-for predecessors, it allows even the laziest, cheapest people who can't even be bothered to build a profile to dip their toe in the dating pool. So before you could say "swipe right" I was inundated with date offers, and one cold lonely Saturday evening I picked a possible suitor, left all 17 cats watching X-Factor, and off I went.
This could be The One. "Mark" turned out to be perfectly adequate company and we had a pleasant evening discussing love, loss and desperation over a Chinese meal, washed down with a bottle of wine.
Now, without trying to sound too much like Beyoncé here, I'm a modern independent woman with my own flat and a "job". I put job in inverted commas as my freelance position is oft mocked by those with real, proper jobs. Anyway, assuming the accounts people aren't on holiday, the "system" hasn't gone down and all the stars are aligned, I sometimes get paid enough to feed myself.
So when the bill came I naturally offered to pay my share. Mark insisted on paying. I tried to give him cash. He threw down his credit card, waving my notes away. I offered again, he refused. The waiter hovered awkwardly.
Despite an intensely competitive nature, I eventually conceded, put my money away and thanked Mark for the meal. How generous. What a lovely chap.
I woke up (alone) the next day with a headache and the realisation that my search for the future Mr Lunn was not over. The infamous "lack of spark" had struck again.
So when Mark "WhatsApped" me suggesting another date, I politely declined. This is where the story of me and Mark should have ended – both of us flattering each other with faint praise about how much fun we'd had and wishing each other luck in the search.
But no, fate would thrust Mark from pleasant, nondescript, just another "not-the-one" to a Buzzfeed-worthy lifetime anecdote of what not to do on a date.
Thwarted, Mr Chivalry had a change of heart. He asked for a refund. Yes, a refund. With the possibility of what's these days called a "hook-up" off the table, Mark, several sexless days later, wanted to retrospectively take back his gentlemanly gesture, and split the bill for dinner. A sort code, account number and request for £50 duly arrived in my inbox.
I've had my fair share of romantic disasters. I've been stood up, let down, messed around. Now I'd been invoiced.
Twitter: @emmalunn
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