Letter from the editor: Dating websites - I had no idea

The older I get, the less I know. A conversation at i about the sale for £15m (!) of a dating site I’d not heard of led to some of the other dating sites out there. My gast was flabbered!

I have, of course, heard of match.com, but I had no idea about the others, having gone through my long-lost single years when there was only Time Out and The Guardian “lonely hearts”. And, you wouldn’t have been seen dead....

Today, it’s clearly a different story. Take the £15m mysinglefriend.com. If you have a fabulous single friend who just can’t seem to find ‘the one’, you can nominate them, and brag about their fabulousness in the hope they might then meet someone else’s fab single friend. Who knew?

Charlotte, the feisty Geordie designer with all the GCSEs, that’s who. She knew a hell of a lot of about a site she wasn’t on. One you ONLY get on if a friend nominates you. I was a little slow to take the hint.. Then, the younger contigent on the desk told us slack-jawed oldies about a list ranging from uniformdating.com for “anyone who works in uniform or fancies those who do”(I’m not joking) through to beautifulpeople.com - you nominate yourself as beautiful, and members vote on whether to accept you or not. Don’t confuse this with the self-explanatory hotornot.com.

Then there is the hugely popular (650,000 UKmembers) illicitencounters.com the “trusted married dating”service - which sounds a a touch oxymoronic to me. This one’s for those “married but looking for more” hopefuls. Funnily enough, no one in the office rushed to admit to being on that one - although someone had a friend who had tried it , and did find more, in the form of his inevitable subsequent divorce.

I write this dreading what my ma will say reading it, but needing to get home fast to nominate my fabulous single friend Donna. Oh, and Charlotte of course. See you on Monday. Yes, Monday! No rest for the innocent.