Stressed about being single? Janus demonstrates a worse alternative
This time of year, apparently, is all systems a-go-go for dating sites. New users are signing up in their droves, and traffic from existing users has risen by 15-20%. According to a nominal bunch of ‘experts’, this is due to season-specific desperation. In our bid for a New Year snog, we’ve resorted to renting out people’s lips on the internet.
One such expert – the author of a particularly progressive-sounding book called The Panic Years: A Guide to Surviving Smug Married Friends, Bad Taffeta and Life on the Wrong Side of 25 Without a Ring - says, “Women still feel huge pressure around the holidays, and certainly exacerbated by New Year’s, to have a date. I don’t think that moment has passed.”
Now, it troubles me that ‘the wrong side of 25′ is now a thing. And it may trouble you to find that I am quoting from the Daily Mail, a paper whose editorial stance effortlessly fuses village busybody with wife-swapping vicar. Nonetheless, there is indeed a certain degree of pressure at Christmas. Christmastime entails family time, and families can be notoriously judgmental. “When are you going to bring a nice boy home for the holidays?” says the archetypal overbearing mum.
Christmastime also entails bumping into more of your old schoolmates than you’d wish. There’s always at least one eye-opening encounter in which you discover your Year 9 nemesis is now on baby number 3. I’m lucky with my family – I dodged the nagging mother bullet – but every time I’m home, I’m hit by a whole hail of prematurely-married peer-group bullets.
“What are you up to these days?” will say some erstwhile acquaintance of mine who used to copy my homework.
“I live in London,” I’ll reply. “I’m a magazine journalist.”
“I meant, do you have a partner?” they’ll clarify, their tone a mixture of pity and pregnancy hormones.
“Nope,” I’ll say, “but never mind. Nice engagement ring!”
Still, while the holidays do tend to foreground the fact you’re single, I doubt that anyone is specifically fussed about New Year’s. Who arranges a first date for New Year’s Eve? People who don’t want to enjoy themselves, that’s who. People who want to see in the new year in a blitz of bad small talk and garlic breath. Meet your friends if you’re halfway normal, grab some absinthe and have some fun.
New Years kisses are overrated, anyway, as my last few years can testify. Imagine a graph, in which levels of festive debauchery are plotted along the y-axis and successive New Years along the x-axis. Mine shows a steep decline from NYE 2009 (in which I disgraced myself) to NYE 2010 (launched myself upon a stranger in a devil mask) down to NYE 2011 (unmemorably pecked a few friends on the cheek). NYE 2012, should the trend continue, will be a passionless melange of cocoa and economic-policy-related banter.
One night does not set the tone for the year to come.
My take on it is, if people are turning to online dating at this time of year, then surely that is down to heightened introspection. New Years are about reorienting yourself in relation to your goals – making peace with the year that has passed, and resolving to do better in the next. Out with the old, in with the new. And dating sites, with their ever-replenishing parade of ‘people you might like’, are forever urging you on towards the new. (Watch out for the ones with garlic breath.)
Here’s hoping that 2012 brings good things to you all, irrespective of whether you have a date on Saturday night.
