Fear and loathing on Feeld

“Everyone seems to have said fuck it, we love feet,” my friend Lola is telling me. I’m panting up the stairs to my fourth floor flat, listening to the voice note that’s just popped up on my phone. We’re swapping tales from the dating trenches. 

Really? I ask, pausing on the third floor landing to reply. Feet? Maybe your feet. My feet are terrible. 

Lola is an antiques restorer who looks like Rita Hayworth, if Rita Hayworth was married to Al Capone. Think voluminous leopard print coats and scratchy cow print miniskirts. 

“It’s non stop feet men,” she insists. “And none of them are embarrassed or seem to think it’s even a kink any more. It does make you wonder: are they all sort of into feet a bit?”

Apart from the feet men, Lola says she’s having a great time dating in London. This renders her an anomaly. Bar that, she fits the profile of the majority of women I’m acquainted with in the UK capital: beautiful and wildly accomplished, both personally and professionally. She dates men. She’s single. And it doesn’t sound like she’s asking for much: “All I want from dating in London is one good date.” 

Unfortunately, a lot of women dating men have higher hopes than just one good date. And many of them feel like they’re having a uniquely terrible time. 

Those in London might have grounds: research conducted in 2023 by birth-rate analyst Stephen Shaw found that when it comes to starting a family, London-based women aged 25-35 were almost one and a half times as likely to report that actually finding a partner in the first place was their main barrier to settling down, compared with the rest of the UK.

Of course, not every woman who dates men wants to have kids, or get married. But the stats prompt an interesting question: is London really that dire a landscape when it comes to straight dating? 

God, yes, says friend-of-a-friend fashion marketing copywriter, Samatha. She’s 26, with a shaved head and an Instagram grid populated by artfully styled Toast pinafores and earthenware dinner plates. She, obviously, lives in East London. At the beginning of 2024, Samantha decided to really go for it with dating in London. Over the phone, she recalls these ghosts of courtships past, consulting notes she made at the time. 

The experience she dwells longest on was with Max, an Australian recently migrated to London, who Samantha saw three times because, “it takes me three times to learn”. Physically, Max was in an open relationship. Emotionally he was in purgatory. On date two, 48 hours after their first, they ended up at Max’s house. His girlfriend was out, with the man she had been seeing for a while. After fooling around for a bit, they settled down to pillow talk. 

Max was more than happy to chat, predominantly about his relationship which was non-monogamous but maybe not all that ethical. It had been instigated by his girlfriend, he said. Max had agreed because he didn’t want to be the “face of constraint” in their relationship. In fact, their three-year anniversary coincided with the day he and Samantha had first gone out. 

“I was like ‘sorry?’,” she recounts. “And he said ‘but she wasn't there, so I went on a date with you’.” 

In the darkness, Samantha shot him a horrified look that failed to register. Max blithely continued, insisting he was “cool” with the set-up and his girlfriend’s other boyfriend. No, they hadn’t agreed terms like whether they were just open in a sexual sense or if there was scope to be fully polyamorous. Did that matter? 

“Then he was like, ‘oh, but I'm a bit nervous if she maybe falls in love with somebody else. What if she wants to go on a weekend away with someone?’” Max mimed being stabbed through the heart. Then he asked Samantha if she minded if he finished himself off beside her in bed. When he was done, he offered Samantha an eye mask. 

“I realised it was his girlfriend's immediately,” she says. “And I was like, actually, I'm good, because I don't think you've discussed this. I don't think you have boundaries around this. I don't think you have boundaries around any of this.”

Max doesn’t sound deliberately malicious, just thoughtless. Still, it’s a complaint that keeps cropping up, especially when I speak to Moya, who shares my name and profession. She’s 32 and also shares most of my opinions about dating. She has been single for four years in the city after a big love, and has made her peace with it, as she’s not too fussed about babies or marriage. Her life – full of friends and professional satisfaction – is lovely. She's the only person willing to go on the record with her government name attached.

She tells me about a man she saw for three months, in an increasingly frequent fashion. She liked him. After one Saturday spent together wandering the city’s museums, she finally said “Don’t you think it’s weird we’ve been seeing each other for three and half months and we haven’t once discussed what we’re doing or what we want?” 

It was weird, the guy agreed, and actually he’d been thinking about it. But, he said hopefully, did Moya actually want to discuss or could they just acknowledge it was weird and move on? 

She did want to discuss it. This was for the best; it was revealed the man was also just out of a big relationship and didn’t want to get into anything properly again. But he hadn’t wanted to tell Moya this because he enjoyed her company so much. She asked him why he just hadn’t been clear with her from the start; it was a totally reasonable position to hold but by not acknowledging it, he’d robbed her of deciding for herself whether to invest. 

“And he was like, ‘well if I had said that you, what would you have said?’’ Moya tells me, adding dryly: “Well, I probably wouldn’t have spent three months listening to you talk about your relationship with your dad”. 

This example illustrates a theory she has. Namely, that a lot of men dating women will say or do things based solely on whether it feels good to them in the moment, with little consideration of future consequences or the implications dates might draw from their actions. 100%, says the male serial dater/friend she puts it to. 

It’s a good theory — but perhaps implicit in it, is the sense that men here are having a lovely time. That London’s bachelors are living for the moment, making hay while the sun shines. I don’t realise that I’ve partially subscribed to this theory myself, up until speaking to my male interviewees. Because, as it turns out — on the whole, their anecdotes aren’t much more cheerful.

I call on Liam, who sports the requisite moustache and a panel cap of a 31 year-old living in Peckham. He’s looking for a long-term relationship, and is open to this with a person of any gender, although, to date, his serious relationships have all been with women. Liam’s been single a year; his last entanglement was a “very intense” six-month thing before travelling South East Asia. 

“Now that’s a London trend!” I crow. I’ve been noticing more and more relationships with sell-by dates popping up, begun in the knowledge that one party will be leaving the country soon. 

My thesis, which I outline to Liam, is that Londoners prefer the safety of an in-built end date. Certain short-term hurt, neatly scheduled, is safer than the constant looming spectre of surprise heartbreak down the line. 

Liam agrees; he’s reflected on his six-month relationship a lot. And yes, he says, he probably let it develop into something deeper because he “knew there was an out”.

Like Moya, Liam believes that men – especially straight ones – are often hamstrung by a lack of reflection behind an action they take in their dating lives. His friends just shrug when asked why they might have suddenly ended a budding relationship. And in London, populated by “so many people”, it’s so easy to just mindlessly keep sharking, especially via apps. “I've had this conversation with quite a few people where they feel that there's always somebody new. There's always another date to go on,” he says. Of the men I speak to, Liam is the most able to articulate his feelings.

“Yeah, men don’t speak about this,” says Tom, 26. He’s gregarious, a man who happily chats up women in the pub via props like baklava (“you ask them if they want any, give them five minutes of chat and then if they come back to talk later, it’s on,” he says). I’m giddy with the insights I’m amassing from the men who answered my Instagram call-out. It's like getting cheat codes to a video game I’ve been slogging away at for years. 

London, one well-travelled date once told me before I cut things off, was the most “commitment-phobic” city he’d ever experienced. Tom, who estimates he goes on an average of seven dates a month, says he finds it really hard to get past the fifth date. I laugh at this; I haven’t made it past a second date in two years, let alone fought my avoidance and aversions to reach five. By the time I headed north, my version of dating in the capital had become so predictably rote, I was long in the tooth and cold to the touch. I felt like the Greenland Shark of Hinge. 

Tom finds it easy to meet women; they’re on apps, in bars and are friends of friends. But after date five, they duck out. He puts it down to timing interrupting momentum. Everyone in London is so busy (another man I interview says he goes on biweekly dates because his friends aren’t free), it can be two to three weeks before he and a potential paramour align schedules and make it on a second date. 

In that time period Tom might have met “like four different people that I fancy.” He can’t remember the original date at all, what they discussed, or the emotions he felt. Everything has become hazy and less urgent; eventually the spark fizzles out. He calls this “ADH-Dating”. 

I add this to the growing symptoms list I’m cataloguing of London’s dating sickness, naively hoping I can provide a diagnosis. There’s something there. The amount of options, plus a fear of uncertainty and getting hurt, taking a risk. First dates are easy in London, and provide great conversational fodder. But sticking with something longer, making it real… that’s where the block seems to be for a lot of single Londoners. In this city, there’s an obsession with return on investment and dating is the riskiest punt of all. 

I’m thinking about this as I listen to 29 year-old Ella, who works in private equity, give me a familiar speech. I’ve asked what she actually wants from dating. 

“I'm not really in the space where I would want to be in a relationship, per se, but I would like the boyfriend experience,” she says. Ella is referencing a familiar fantasy: the miraculous appearance of a man who can offer regular sex and the prospect of going on a date (or two), every seven to ten days, without the demands of a committed relationship. 

“Maybe I’m just lying to myself though,” ponders Ella, after she’s delivered the spiel. “Maybe I do want a relationship but it feels so elusive, I’ll just take what I can get.” 

Mostly, she says, she’s getting hook-ups. She tells me about a “very vain” Spanish musician she recently met from Feeld, which she prefers to Hinge for its more open communication. On Hinge, everyone is both guardedly hopeful and hopelessly guarded. 

The Spanish musician looked like a cross between Liam Gallagher and Jack Sparrow, Ella recalls. No dreads, she adds, quickly. But he did write like a pirate, typing out “yarrr” and “arr thar sounds good to mee”. She assumed this was just an app-based affectation, to stand out from the crowd. When he and Ella took their connection offline to a low-lit Dalston bar, it transpired this was an in-person quirk too.

“He was genuinely talking to me in pirate patter,” Ella tells me. “I think it initially started off like a joke on his part and now he does it with everyone”. But he was so funny and charming, they hooked up anyway. She wrote it off as a random idiosyncrasy and saw him a couple of times. Then he went on tour and is now an anecdote rather than an ongoing chapter. In London, this is par for course. People just drop in and out. Usually out.

There’s a game I introduced my friends to, inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s seminal memoir Eat, Pray, Love. On the Italian leg of her journey, Gilbert gets talking to her language partner about how she loves Rome, yet doesn’t feel it’s her place. 

“Maybe you and Rome have different words,” the language partner replies. He explains that every city has a word that defines it and the majority of people in the street are unconsciously thinking – or living – the same thought. This is the word of the city. If your word doesn’t match or align, this isn’t your place. He says Rome’s word is ‘SEX’. I personally think it is ‘DECAY’. But my friends and I like to ask people what a city’s word is and what their words are: do the two correspond? 

London’s word, we decided early on, is ‘MORE’. And maybe also ‘NOW’, but it’s cheating to have two words. Very London though. Never do I feel so sure that MORE is part of the city’s psyche than when I think about dating in London. 

But Ella also says something that supports my theory that fear of losing face and time to heartbreak is playing a huge, paralysing factor in London’s dating landscape. 

“I think people are really desperate for connection and want to feel loved and wanted and seen,” she notes. “But fundamentally, everyone's really scared about how to get that.” Chris, another respondent, frames it similarly: people are scared of presenting a sincere account of who they are and what they want. “It feels like you have to get past a few layers to get to the good bits,” he says. In London, who’s got time for that? 

It’s a city of social surveillance and frail, enormous ego. At one point, the other Moya and I discussed ‘eligibility’; everyone wants the creme de la creme of partners. How they define that is hugely varied but results in the same outcome: people searching not just for somebody to love; but also someone to show off to the world. One interviewee tells me he went viral not once, but twice, because his dates used him for content. “This is sort of the third time, I guess,” he says, wryly. I must clarify, we kept it professional. 

Aesthetics are important and social media has warped expectations. During my reporting, men diplomatically outline how expert women have become at digital presentation, only to look different in real life (they’re calling you catfishes, ladies). 

Meanwhile, women bemoan the lack of ‘eligible’ men, which Other Moya defines as “reasonably kind, reasonably intelligent, employed, reasonably groomed, a bit of a personality.” Samantha declares if a date’s badly dressed – especially in, shudder, trackies! – she’s out of there. I’m not even going to get into height discourse. 

I think of the men I’ve interviewed; all of them agree the calibre of women they are meeting is incredible. “It is insane,” one 30 year-old tells me bluntly. “And from all over the world too!” London: the Booffi World Buffet of dating. 

The same sentiments are not present in the women I talk to. Select complaints include the charges that London men are: unavailable (emotionally and temporally), unable to communicate, unable to make them laugh, unable to make them cum, unable to cum themselves, unable to clean the plaque off their teeth, unable to wipe the bogeys from their nose, unable to afford Hakkasan, unable to not cheat, unable not to be cheated on, unable to be in a happy monogamous relationship, unable not to be in an unhappy polyamorous relationship, unable to just be the straightforward man of their dreams (and occasionally their friends’ envy), without hesitation or complication. Oof. 

Women in the UK now outstrip men, from average earnings to education. Also in the mix are traits we are socialised into cultivating from young – the emotional intelligence, the painstaking grooming – and the rise of romantic love, rather than practical alliance, as the glue that is meant to bond heterosexual pairings. 

The result is a generation of far more self-sufficient women who believe in romantic love but are only looking for the most ‘eligible’ of men. In London, the bloated career capital, these women abound. Whisper it, but many don’t even know what they’re really looking for, beyond a romantic fantasy. Only Lola, the rare woman who tells me she’s having an unmitigated blast dating in the capital, knows exactly what she wants: one fun date.

What you need to conquer London, says Lola, is a PMA: positive mental attitude. She also recommends the complementary HMA: Hottie Mental Attitude. 

“Dating is a lens to explore the city,” she instructs me. “You’re out the house and you’ve got a little outfit on. For me, it’s been generally positive interactions. I don’t have anything bad to say”. It should be noted Lola has been in London for six months. 

Ella currently has one person she has neither discarded, nor been dismissed by. He’s the first guy she’s met IRL in ages; they’ve been seeing each other for eight months and counting. Well, she had contact with him before that because her lover happens to be her landlord.

It just happened. The landlord came to fix something one day. He and Ella got talking. They kept talking after he left, via long phone calls and texts, discovering things in common. Suddenly, they were meeting up and then they were having sex. They still talk, every day, Ella says, and fight all the time, about capital gains tax, about politics, about their dynamic. The landlord refuses to call it a relationship and she doesn’t want to either, but there needs to be some word for it, a label. 

An affair? I venture. 

But both of us are single, she rebuts.

Ella and I pore over the landlord’s appeal. Ostensibly they’re so different, from ethnicity to political opinions. He has at least 30 years on her 29. But she says the dynamic is “liberating”. It’s also, crucially, not boring — posing a contrast to the usual London situationship — and is being conducted with a man who exists as flesh and blood in her orbit. Neither can disappear into the digital ether, or back into the city’s eight-million strong population. For the moment, they’re real and they’re here. Maybe that’s all it takes.