"Go on, just suck it. You might like it."

I roll my eyes. Yet another date who confuses sleaze and innuendo with flirtation. For me, they're uneasy bedfellows.

I'm sitting in the park on an unseasonably warm day for the time of year. Before me is a mini banquet of...

My date has just got back from New York. I know this because he mentions it every five sentences. The shimmering neon is still visible in his starstruck eyes, and has blinded him to the fact that my own glazed over some time ago.

I tune back in to hear...

We've all been there. You wake up, slightly disoriented, amid bed linen which feels unfamiliar. Strange sounds emanate from a mass not too far from you. As you open each eye slowly, cursing them for the amount of time they're taking to adjust to the light, you realise you've done...

Getting a first date is fairly easy. Or so they tell me. But getting a first date and going on a first date are nowhere near as big a deal as the ultimate prize, the holy grail of dating, the BIG ONE: securing date number two.

So many of us...

The Apple Store is a strange place. It does its very best to pretend it isn't a shop. There are no tills ringing or sour-faced shopgirls stacking shelves with garish product or hurrying along pretending they're too busy to help you, no groaning rails or higgledy-piggledy stacks of boxes. The...

My recent post on dumping someone by text proved to be pretty divisive. It seems that many people prefer a face-to-face break-up or, at the very least, a phone call.

It's a common fallacy that bad news like this is...

There are some dates you feel you should go on, even if you really ought not to. Maybe it's because somebody incredibly handsome has deigned to ask you out, or perhaps you are lonely, and your diary tells you this coming Friday is a blank space, its page a polar...

Is there ever a nice way to bid adieu to an affair of the heart? Is the blow any less crushing because you have communicated it via a gift-wrapped box of (live) white doves, after an afternoon of champagne or during a shuddering orgasm? Probably not.

But there are many...

Imagine at what distant depth of ebb you'd have to be to ask a friend to set you up with someone. To be plundering your friends' friends for potential dates, like Google with a stiffy, you must have truly run out of options. People may scoff at online dating or...

One of the many things they forget to tell you when you try online dating is that you have to pick a 'name' for yourself - a handle for your profile. Yes, not only do you have to fret about whether your pictures make you look pretty or the quality...

As you schlep your way through single life, you find yourself arriving at a lot of parties alone. At first, you try to avoid it, and make plans with friends to meet up at least 10 minutes beforehand at a nearby tube station or off-licence so you don't have the...

When dates are over, I try not to think too hard about what my date thought of me. You can drive yourself mad pondering the whys and the wherefores when they don't call. Was it something I said? Was I too ugly, too stupid, too sane? Enough. Yes, the self-doubt...

Dating can be a drag. You never quite know what you're going to get next. Back off with your "life is like a box of chocolates" shtick, Forrest Gump - we've never had a box of Milk Tray with this many nasty surprises.

Well, we know you're the perfect date,...

1. "So having weighed up all the evidence and considering the fact that I was quite drunk at the time and I didn't technically put it all the way in, do you think my ex was right to say that it was cheating?"

2. "What do you think of the...

Breaking up is hard to do. I know; I've done it. Relationships can be a long, languorous drive around winding country roads. The break-up is the huge tractor or speeding idiot who appears from nowhere, slicing through your cosy hatchback of coupledom. If you're lucky, the end of your romance...

Mr Neat And Tidy
Who is he? He's never got a hair out of place and his flat is a monument to order and hygiene.

Why you think you want him: A man who cleans up after himself is the rarest of beasts; to find one is surely the...

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And in the land of everybody looking fairly average in their underpants, it seems that David Beckham has ascended to the throne - a huge magisterial knickers magnate presiding over us mere mortals who live in a perpetual state...

No. It's a simple enough word to say. Just the solitary syllable, after all, and one I always delighted in spitting out as a child when asked to do something. And it's the word I'm focusing on as I sit opposite Alistair, a good-natured, OK-looking civil servant who's been sitting...

Commuting is a dull, necessary evil only a few of us can avoid. Usually, I work from home, the full journey from bed to office via bathroom taking around 90 seconds. But, on landing myself a new contract in a suburb of London, I am to rejoin the rat race...

"Let's meet for dinner. 7pm."

As statements go, it's fairly innocuous. No hidden agenda, no gameplaying. As far as you're concerned, you'll be eating, chatting and maybe worrying internally about how much wine you can allow yourself on a school night. But transport that remark to the run-up to a...