Just Singles 3 Dates 3 Months - Challenge One

The thing that puts me off writing about current longterm relationships is what to do when they end- do you go back through your posts and re-draft those with any mention of the person, tweet meaningless drivel until past tweets are pushed off the end of the twittersphere, or remove social media pictures in case they resurface as reminders? Some previous relationships have ended quickly and/or badly but, as they say, when life gives you lemons add some salt and down a bottle of tequila. Ok maybe they don't say that, but it's the lemon option that requires the least skill in the kitchen.
While longterm or recently passed relationships might be off the blog agenda for me, there's no reason why new ones should be, and when I was asked if I wanted to take part in the Just Singles 3 Dates 3 Months Challenge I thought it sounded like a good chance to have a bit of fun, do something with my lemons (and hopefully write some interesting posts!). The challenge is to use unusual ways of securing 3 dates over 3 months (with one of them being JustSingles.com) and to blog about each date-finding method. I've never had an online dating profile before but with over 2 million members across dozens of niched sites, it should hopefully be a doddle!

The ideas for the second and third challenges came to me easily but I had a bit of trouble with the first until my friend told me about a local company that had just launched a 'Green Scheme' and were having difficulty getting people to sign up. I decided to offer them my services for the afternoon, going door to door with their survey questions and trying to drum them up a bit of interest (all with an ulterior motive of my own of course). I'd basically be trying to chat people up in their own homes, and what could be easier than that..!?

Off I trudged on a rainy afternoon last week, armed with a green folder full of information (most of which I forgot almost straight away) and my phone so that I could live tweet my experience on the #3dates3mths hashtag. I had a list of questions to ask each person- some were very useful to know before you on go on a date- what to do you do for a living? Do you own a car? And (most importantly) are you married? Other answers I really could've done without, things like- how many wheelie bins does your house use? What do you recycle? And are your cavity walls insulated?

I had high hopes that meeting a nice sexy guy would be easy, but after I encountered married woman after married woman my confidence became a little dashed. About half way through the afternoon I was invited in by a very nice man called Jerry, who had the house to himself and owned a lovely fluffy ginger cat. Jerry was eighty three. We talked for a while but it was quite clear that Jerry was neither interested in the Green Scheme nor a date with me.

It was about half an hour before home time that a door was opened by a lovely looking tanned guy in a wifebeater, who shot me a bright smile after I asked if I could ask him a few questions in his porch. Josh turned out to be very nice (unmarried, renting, doesn't recycle batteries) and, while I didn't pluck up the courage at that moment to ask him on a date, he did agree to me texting him which I took as practically a yes to the date anyway. I went home feeling pretty chuffed with myself that I was well on the way to completing a successful challenge and decided that two days later would be a suitable time to send the first text. Unfortunately, it all went a bit downhill from there.

After a pretty general "Hi how are you, remember me?" type text came a reply calling me 'Kirsty crazy face', which was... well at least there are worse things to be called. After my Australian Dream Boy (his words) and I had chatted for a bit, I saw an opportunity to secure the date's date. Unluckily I was busy on both of the days suggested and this news was met with a weirdly angry rant- phrases like "Look whatever I don't really buy that", "if not then no problems I won't cry" and "I'll stop wasting my time" came through with a sentiment that's quite hard to capture in a blog post. I responded with a disgruntled message explaining why I was busy and, to be honest not too bothered about seeing him again by this point, I left it at that.

Our final communication came the next day in the form of an unexpectedly over-cheery message asking if I'd found myself a 'new Australian Love Bunny' yet and ending in "Let's not fight in front of the kids again :)". I was pretty baffled- one minute a cold outburst, next minute chirpy over-friendliness and god know where the kids came from! Honestly I couldn't be bothered to reply; I'm not one to bow to men's hormonal tantrums, especially from those I've only known for 5 minutes, so instead I decided to just put this one down to experience.

Unfortunately as you can tell Challenge One was a bit of a failure for me, but I've got much higher hopes for Challenge Two which involves pubs and costumes no less! And at least I've learnt one thing- men who don't recycle batteries just aren't worth my time.

This is a sponsored post in association with JustSingles