An offline romance

The way we were

1. Ask friends to set you up with someone: one of their friends, colleagues or relatives. Be open to meeting anyone and remember, if you don’t ask, you don’t get, so keep nagging. A friend of mine made her housemates scroll through their Facebook friends list until she saw someone she liked, they set her up, and now they’re happily married.

2. Volunteer at a charity event. This has the double impact of doing something good and putting you at the centre of lots of new people. As a volunteer, you’ll be a beacon for people in need of help and, if you do meet someone that you like, you’ll already know you’ve got the same values at heart.

3. Book a singles’ holiday. Less cringeworthy than it sounds, there are an increasing number of companies offering group trips designed for people on holiday by themselves. You’ll be safely whisked off to far-flung places and introduced to new, single people.

4. Hire a matchmaker. (The sort of thing you only know someone’s done when they get drunk at a dinner party and tell you about it.) You can do a Google search to find one in your area, but a recommendation is better. Ask your friends – someone will know of one. The best of them are eye-wateringly expensive – but they get results. As one woman put it, ‘I thought I’d dated all of London, then they set me up with 12 amazing guys and I married number 11.’

5. Organise a night out. Retro, I know, but when I asked my male friends how they met their partners, a high percentage replied, ‘in the pub’. Invite a couple of friends on a good, old-fashioned night out – with the challenge that you each have to talk to five new people.

Photographs: iStock