Dating in London

London is full of busy young professionals who try to defy the odds and make money in the recession. While these modern Londoners may be in their twenties and thirties, the majority are not making wedding plans or changing nappies.

However, even the Londoner is not immune to wanting love. Conundrum: how to meet the love of your life when you are in the office from eight till eight and have a busy social life to boot? Dating sites such as Lovestruck.com offer one kind of a solution: find other singles in your work area so you can arrange a quick coffee date, a lunch date or an after-work date.

According to the website, this is ideal: you don’t have to have time for a traditional evening date or have to go through the ‘ignominy’ of speed dating. Download a smartphone app and you can date on the move.

Call me old-fashioned but this set-up worries me, specifically, the expectations of a relationship that are created – and the confusion or even disappointment when these expectations aren’t met.

We live in a world where email correspondence, once condemned for its impersonal nature, has been further condensed to a one liner or 140 characters on our social media pages. Quick and convenient but not a solid foundation for a strong relationship: how many of your 300+ Facebook friends do you personally speak to each week? How many could you call in a crisis?

‘Quick’ and ‘convenient’ are two words just not associated with relationships. Absolutely, test the chemistry of a date over a coffee but what happens after? Do you cram in lunch for date number two, when your client meeting at 11 has moved to three? Fit in a quickie in the office toilets before heading out to your mate’s birthday drinks or your zumba class?

If you don’t have time to date, why on earth look for a relationship? If you are looking for love rather than lust (in which case you should be sorted by date number three), you will have to accommodate it. Surely, wanting to love/be loved/be in a relationship is completely legit: you shouldn’t have to sneak it in on the side.

Especially a busy young professional, living in a world where time is money, should understand the value of investment. The same goes for relationships: in the end, you get what you pay for.

Image by x-ray delta one courtesy of Flickr