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“It’s exhausting to be right all the time,” the Know-it-all will tell you as he swirls his drink around his glass. “But I just can’t help myself. If I see an error, I have to correct it.” You may find this charming at first. Knowledge can be quite sexy, after all. "He's so clever," you'll gush to your slack-jawed friends. You revel in your new role as Marilyn Monroe to his Olivier, drinking in his fun facts, grammatical corrections and recommendations like lattes. But the trouble with a know-it-all is that...

Aside from the mindless shagging, off-the-peg hedonism and thrilling Uber rides to the clap clinic, being single can be something of a trial. Sure, you can do what the hell you like, when you like, but sometimes you long for the touch of another, for someone to care that you've left the fridge open, the thrill of orgasming with someone else in the room. And as if all that wasn't enough, you’ve got dickhead couples pulling this kind of crap all around you, reminding you how unloved, lonely and insignificant you are: 1. Share puddings. “Two spoons, please” is a knife in...

1. If I arrive first it will make me look responsible and also like I care and that I'm… not flighty. It will not make me seem overly keen and boring, with nothing else to do tonight, or indeed ever. 2. Arriving late will make me seem mysterious and sexy, and he’ll be panting at my arrival, staring eagerly at the door. He'll be so pleased I haven’t stood him up that he’ll be overjoyed to see me and we will fall immediately in love. 3. Oh well, it’s better than...

Twitter isn’t just for cat GIFs, cod politics, think-pieces and bitching about reality TV, it’s also a place to find love! Spotting someone getting it on over Twitter is easy to do once you know how. Here are 25 signs those two faves you follow might be about to move on to being more than serial retweeters. 1. Regular liking of tweets – especially really boring attention-seeking ones. 2. Increased retweets. 3. Starting an @ conversation in response to nothing, not even a blogpost or a thirst-trap selfie. 4. Meeting...

Did you come out on National Coming Out Day? And how was it for you? What people never seem to tell you about coming out is that it’s not restricted to one day – it’s a never-ending event. See those closet doors? They’re revolving. Day after day, you will find yourself – directly and indirectly – coming out to a host of people, even total strangers. The coming out never stops. Think you have everybody covered? Relatives, friends, key people at work – check. However, you're not out of the woods...

Football I remember a very miserable afternoon – a rainy Saturday – spent in a pub that smelled of cauliflower and dog, staring with great concentration at a TV up on the wall. I didn’t really dare look away in case I looked like I was bored and I couldn’t have given two bronze fucks about what was happening on the screen so I fixed my gaze on a spider at the corner of the TV. The spider span a web and then fell onto a table and crawled into...

You know what they say: “evolve or die”. And in a world where your next French kiss might be no farther than the end of your backyard, gay dating and hook-up sites have had to change faster than most. Way back when Grindr was nothing more than just a vague wet dream in Joel Simkhai’s mind, the king of the road when it came to meeting guys was Gaydar – its array of oiled-up nipples and extreme close-ups as synonymous with the late Nineties and early Noughties as Steps, Harry...

I have always had something of a knack for talking my way out of answering difficult questions. My first instinct when asked something mildly taxing is to cause a diversion or commit the most egregious of sins and answer the question with another question. But now my luck is running out. Thanks to all these rights coming the gay community’s way, I’m running out of excuses for why I don’t want to get married or have children. You think you bigots are inconvenienced? You don’t even know the half of...

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 better in person, or coming from a disembodied voice at the end of a telephone. Perhaps it seems more personal, or means more, because it’s perceived that tapping in a few digits, then delivering a knockout blow over the phone and waiting distractedly for the stunned reply, in some way...