Why the blind date is dead

Last week a couple of my friends tried to set me up on a blind date.

Now, I’m not averse to being set up, despite a few disasters in my twenties when I really began to wonder whether my friends really knew me at all. Bless their cotton socks for trying, but honestly -I’d find myself sitting across the table from a mute accountant (sorry, don’t mean to stereotype) or a guy in a beanie and Birkenstocks, and I’d think ‘Really? Really?? This is who my friends think would be a good match for me?’

You’d think this would have turned me off blind dating forever. It hasn’t. I’m 34 and single; clearly I have no idea how to find an appropriate mate myself. I’ll take all the help I can get.

But what I found at last week is that there isn’t actually such a thing as a blind date anymore. In fact, the blind date is as good as dead. It’s been killed by social media.

See, when I was in my twenties, I had to rely solely on the judgement of my friend when it came to the looks stakes of my blind date. You know, a description that went along the lines of ‘He’s perfect for you! He’s tall, and he has brown hair (under the beanie), and…..well, he’s really tall!’ So you’d turn up at the agreed meeting point armed with nothing but a vague description that could fit half the men in Brisbane, and a single red rose clutched between your teeth.

Not anymore. Now you can jump on the internet and pull up their Facebook photo faster than you can say ‘Did your grandma really knit that for you?!’. And the same goes for them. No longer am I just a tall blonde, I’m a tall blonde with a slightly lazy left eye, crows feet and a touch of regrowth. Actually, I’m wearing blue rimmed plastic sunglasses and a panama hat in my Facebook photo, so I’m a tall blonde with no fashion sense.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could look up his photo pre-date until one of the guys I work with said ‘So what does he look like?’ and I said ‘I have no idea. It’s a blind date (derr).’ And he said (slowly, to make sure I could understand) ‘What, haven’t you looked him up on the internet (derr)?’ So we did.

Obviously he looked up my photo too because at around 3pm on the afternoon of the planned not-at-all-blind date, he called in sick. He sounded genuinely apologetic, but I can’t be fooled. I know it wasn’t man-flu. It was Facebook fright. 

Damn those blue sunglasses. 

So my blind date which wasn’t really a blind date didn’t turn out to be any kind of date at all. Sigh. Looks like its back to the eligible bachelors at Bravo for me……