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 even picking someone up in a bar, but to cast your incestuous net only as far as the puddle next door shows a lack of pluck and imagination. Agreeing or volunteering to set mates up with each other is the...

What's in a name? You don't know the half of it. The one thing they forget to tell you when you try online dating is that you have to pick a name for yourself. Yes, not only do you have to fret about whether your pictures make you look pretty or the quality of your babbling blurb, you also have the added trauma of coming up with a profile name. It has to encapsulate everything about you in one easy line. It will appear alongside your picture and could mean...

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, don’t we, and we know to give a wide berth to the first 25 men I very kindly alerted you to, but there are still some romantic buzzkills out there just waiting to spoil your fun, break your heart and...

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. “I really like that you feel comfortable with your natural smell. I mean, you know, deodorants are really bad for the ozone layer anyway, aren’t they? And there’s something so primitive about a man’s natural odour. So sexy. Oh, you do wear one? Oh. Oh.” 3....

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 holy grail of dating. Imagine all those gleaming surfaces you can have sex on! Why you really don’t want him: If he’s that fastidious about himself and his environs, think how much control he’ll exert over you and yours. He’ll sneer...

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 of sucking in our stomachs when somebody attractive walks by. I have never ‘got’ all the drooling over David Beckham – especially in the ad campaigns for his underwear range with fashion retailing giant H&M. Sure, he’s a good guy...

“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 first date, and I run for the hills, stomach churning with a dread normally reserved for statements like “The PIN you have entered is incorrect” or “And next on ITV2, a four-hour Katie Price reality show retrospective”. Going for dinner...

We hear a lot about trolls in the news these days. A sub-class of human previously restricted to the mysterious world of specialist messageboards and forums about dodgy TV shows nobody watches any more, the troll has now been brought front-and-centre, blinking uncertainly in the shimmering light that is Twitter. The adoption of Twitter to the bosom of the mainstream has finally done for social media what Facebook could not and would not: it’s made it okay to talk to absolute strangers, even if you’re not an ‘internet geek’. Those...

There are so many good guys out there -- you almost need two hands to count them. But in among the gold, is the tin. The sand in your sandwiches, the rain on your parade. The world is full of men you shouldn't date, for every kind of reason. If only there were some kind of test, or a 'tell', so you could easily divine the dregs from the demigods. There's no magic answer, but if your potential beau is a 'yes' to any of the list below, it may...