Ask someone who is single about their dating life, and the answer might sound like Oliver singing “Where is love?”
According to the headlines, nobody knows how to flirt, dating is dead, sex is over, and so is love.
But happy couples do exist – and are meeting each other all the time. We asked Guardian readers to share their stories of falling in love this year.
‘I called him to say I was having a heart attack’
Ollie, 64, from Yorkshire, arrived in Chiang Mai for a cycling holiday in November last year. He got a Bumble notification from Elizabeth, 55, an American living in Thailand. “We messaged a lot and she asked me to ask her on a date so I suggested sushi,” Ollie says.
“She told me on the day that she was ill and couldn’t come. I thought, ‘just swipe left if you want to say no!’”
The next day, Ollie messaged to see how Elizabeth was doing. “Not very well. I’m in the hospital and I’m having a heart attack,” she replied.
“She said she was scared,” Ollie recalls. He asked if he could visit her. “She said that she absolutely did not want to meet me for the first time in the intensive care unit.”
But the following day, he felt “compelled” to look up the hospital where she was staying, and messaged her from reception.
“I decided, well, you might as well come up,” says Elizabeth. He found her upstairs and they shook hands.
“He seemed like the perfect gentleman,” she says.
About 20 minutes into their first date, Elizabeth said, “Can I ask you a weird question?”
“Is it weirder than having our first date in the ICU?”
“Will you come home with me? Because I’m afraid to drive home.”
Ollie helped her get home and they kept in touch daily until Elizabeth was well enough for their sushi date. “We had the sushi and it all just kicked off from there,” says Ollie. He’ll spend the autumn and winter in Chiang Mai with Elizabeth before they return to Yorkshire for the summer.
Elizabeth recalls that she had two scheduled dates for the week they first met. “One was with Ollie, who I liked more, and then another coffee date. And as soon as that guy found out [about my heart attack], he hit the hills.”
“The fool!” says Ollie.
‘It took us a long time to say I love you’
Steph, 38, from London, met Will, a musician and events worker, on a sunny day in Hyde Park in September last year. “I wasn’t in the mood,” she says. “I was experiencing dating app fatigue. I hadn’t [even selected] men as an option on the dating apps for about 12 months.”
She arrived 10 minutes late on her bicycle. “When we met, I thought, who is this man? I was struck by how gorgeous he was and how easy he was to talk to. We discussed music and our jobs. I’m too old and too serious to be playing games, so I texted him after the date that I would love to see him again,” Will agreed.
It was only after their date that she realised he was nine years younger than her. “That took me a few months to get over, and tell people,” she says.
Although they feel secure in their relationship now, Steph says she was “anxious” at the beginning. “For the first three months I thought he would leave me. It was hell. The only person who understood was my friend, a fellow therapist, who had experienced something similar when she first started dating her now husband. The honeymoon period for me is now, a year in.
“It took us a long time to say I love you, so much so that I didn’t know if Will truly loved me. I brought it up nine months into the relationship and we both cried – we’d both been waiting for the perfect moment. He told me that he loved me on a night out with friends in a pub garden shortly afterwards. Now we tell each other all the time. It’s definitely the most fun I’ve had in a relationship.”
‘We’ve had more fun dates in the last year than I can recall in the previous 20’
In late September last year, Ryan was sitting around at home in Victoria, Canada, with a broken leg, scrolling through Hinge when he came across Kristin, 42. “We hit it off immediately and ended up messaging each other for almost five hours,” says Ryan, 43. “Who does that? I wouldn’t message my best friend for five hours.”
They clicked right away. “We’re both gingers, which is awesome. We share a similar taste in classic rock and both enjoy tea and chocolate. I’m a carpenter. She’s a teacher. We had similar upbringings.”
At one point their marathon conversation turned to Ryan’s prior divorce. “[Kristin] wanted to know why, so I gave her a pretty long answer. But while I was typing, she thought I wasn’t responding. She was like, ‘oh, I guess I’ll talk to you later’. And then, boom, I send three or four paragraphs. And she thought that was pretty cool because you don’t normally do that while texting. I just felt she was inviting and open.”
Ryan and Kristin have children of a similar age. “They get on pretty well. We don’t live together yet. We’re looking at making that happen next summer,” he says.
“We’ve had more fun dates in the last year than I can recall in the previous 20. We’ve been kayaking, whale watching, and racing in go-karts. We’re off to Thailand next March for our first big trip together.”
‘After 23 years of no contact, we started messaging on LinkedIn’
Erin and Brandon had crushes on each other back at college in the late 90s. “But it never lined up right for the both of us,” says Brandon, now 47. “Every time I saw her out somewhere, we would talk. And then we graduated in 2001, but by then I had a girlfriend and she had a boyfriend. I just thought I’d never see her talk to her again. Every time I thought about my college days, I’d always wonder what she was up to.”
After 23 years without contact, Brandon, who works as an engineer, received a message from Erin on LinkedIn. “We started messaging. We were both divorced and living far apart, but we reconnected and things started to get intense. Old feelings were resurrected, as well as developing lots of new ones. I had never forgotten about her or the feelings I had. She is the love of my life.”
Brandon lives in Alabama and Erin in Denver. “We are both committed to trying to build a long distance relationship to eventually live together,” he says.
‘We thought we’d keep it secret’
In July, Luke, 34, a healthcare researcher from British Columbia in Canada, was on vacation in Mongolia, “never dreaming that I would fall for somebody on the road trip”.
He met Adina, from Sweden, on a tour with a group of six and a local guide. “Adina and I first bonded over being the most adventurous and latest-to-bed tourists on the tour. Our love of nature and interest in exploring spirituality also helped. I would have been happy to simply make a friend, but I began to suspect there was more there when she said she’d go stargazing with me on a completely cloudy night,” he says.
The couple initially wanted to avoid “throwing off the group dynamic”.
“We thought we’d keep it secret for a while – with stolen kisses and sneaking out of the ger [yurt] at night. We thought we were being very clever. But of course it turned out everybody else knew.”
At first they thought the relationship would last only as long as the tour. “But after a couple days at the end, we started asking: why should that be it? We have messaged every day since we parted, and we are meeting up to travel again in a couple months – this time, just the two of us.”
Luke is currently back in Canada, while Adina travels on through east Asia. “I never thought I would have a travel romance like this, and some days it feels delightfully impractical. We don’t know if it’s forever, but we know it’s real, and that’s enough for us.”
