As anyone who’s downloaded a dating app knows, looking for love online is an absolute cesspool; men holding babies that aren’t theirs, still figuring out their dating goals (you’re 37 years old, Ryan!) and insisting on letting you know they’re six foot … if it matters.
Meanwhile, if you’re a gay man people are now meeting on an app called Sniffies, which is like Grindr but without faces.
Whatever happened to romance?
While the prospect of approaching someone at a bar without knowing what they looked like holding a fish filled me with as much dread as any other burned-out millennial, I decided to do something radical: I deleted the apps and tried 47 different hobbies to meet the man of my dreams in real life.
Here’s what I learned: anxiety is temporary.
Walking into an artisan cheese-making class for the first time can be terrifying. Will they be nice? Will they talk to me? Will they disown me for my lactose intolerance? I’ve discovered that everybody feels this way when they start a new hobby (the lactose intolerance bit didn’t come up at my ventriloquism course) and the solution is simple; walk up to someone before your brain can tell you to stop and start a conversation. Trust me, Geoff desperately wants you to ask him his opinions on different types of rennet.
As I stood in a room full of 19-year-olds in artfully baggy sweatpants, I had to confront the question, “What if my white upbringing hasn’t made me naturally good at hip-hop dancing?” Thankfully, almost any class you take in the outer suburbs is the natural habitat of a middle-aged woman, rediscovering herself after kicking her children out of the house. She will be your spiritual guide and become among your best friends. Can Barbara crump? No but neither can you.
Not all hobbies are good opportunities to meet people. Much like your future partner, choice of hobby is crucially important. Book clubs spark conversation. Improv classes remove awkwardness. Introduction to taxidermy gives you an understanding of what your potential future partner sees as a “natural pose”. But at the risk of offending the medieval sword fighting community, it proved quite challenging to develop rapport with the cute knight I met through three layers of chain mail – his, mine and the person who “died” on top of me on the battlefield.
When my hot pottery teacher grabbed a sponge and squeezed it over my hands, that wasn’t foreplay. It was because my clay was too dry. Your instructor is getting paid to pay attention to you. It turned out his intense eye contact was mostly because I was very bad at pottery and he had a duty to usher me towards some sort of progress throughout the term. Also, he was straight.
You will do things you regret in the name of love. Twenty-eight kilometres into a marathon, I realised that I really didn’t like running. I’d fallen for someone in my running group and was literally chasing after unrequited love. This approach is doomed to fail. Instead, pick hobbies that bring you joy – and don’t chafe your nipples off.
People bemoan that it’s hard to find a hobby – not true. If the last year has taught me anything, it’s how many people there are with the same niche interest as you and at least one of them has decided to monetise it. Radio announcing. West Coast swing. Advanced hula-hooping. A movie club where you shout your rating out of 10 as the credits roll. There’s no end to the opportunities available. And, if you max out your dating prospects with those, there’s a class that will teach you how to fire an arrow from the back of a horse, which is both dangerous and sexy.
But when you’re on a date with a gay man and you tell him you spent your weekend learning to climb a silk in circus class, doing trivia with your team and attending an American accent course, he will be terrified. My broad surveying of gay men who’ve dated me suggests they can handle one adult hobby. When I start speaking in a transatlantic accent, they tend to call for the bill.
After a year of trying 47 new hobbies, did I achieve my goal of finding a boyfriend? No. Have Barbara and I now explored five different types of dancing? … Yes.
But through these hobbies, I have discovered a much more fulfilling life. One that swaps waiting for a disappointing man to ask me a question for self-growth, actual enjoyment and almost doing a cartwheel.
Then again, the instructor for next term’s tarot reading course does look pretty hot …