Category Archives: Relationships
Relationship Advice: Here's How to Choose the Best Date Location
The location of your date can make all the difference. | criene/Getty Images
What are some of the best spots to fall in love? If you’ve been searching for the best place to take your date, you’re in luck. The folks over at Hinge, a dating app, released a list of the best date spots across the country to fall in love this autumn.
The Cheat Sheet spoke with experts at Hinge to learn more about the list and the best places to go.
The Cheat Sheet: What are some things that make a location a good place to go on a date?
Hinge: The best date spots are the ones that really allow your personality to shine. Since most people are battling nerves on a first date, make sure to choose a spot that is enticing for both parties. Additionally, an activity can be a nice icebreaker. It provides something to bond over as well as a more organic way to chat about something.
The Cheat Sheet: What are some things that make a location undesirable for a date?
Hinge: We’ve surveyed our members and found the best first dates are activities, as opposed to just grabbing drinks at a bar. While it’s common for people to choose a bar for a first date, the experience can be monotonous and underwhelming. Hinge wants to change that. By treating your date to an exciting experience, like the suggestions from the “Great Date” program, you’re more likely to have an engaging and overall positive experience, that is also likely to turn into a second date.
The Cheat Sheet: How can you and your partner both agree on where to go? Who should decide?
Hinge: You should decide together! When choosing a date, the best thing you can do is find a common interest you share and use that as inspiration. Shared love of the great outdoors? Try going for a hike or renting bikes for the afternoon. If you find you both love art, take a trip to a local gallery or museum. Finding that commonality will create the perfect environment for a great first date.
The Cheat Sheet: Could you share some tips for a successful first date?
Hinge: Most first dates happen at a bar nearby, but the best dates are unique. With our Great Dates program, we’re encouraging our employees and our community to seek out different and interesting date spots so they can spark a more meaningful connection.
Furthermore, if you had a great first date, don’t wait to let them know that you’d like to see them again. Dating shouldn’t be about playing games, it’s about being vulnerable and authentic. Be yourself by staying true to your personality, you’re more likely to make a meaningful connection with someone who understands and enjoys you for you!
The Cheat Sheet: How does the Hinge app work?
Hinge: At Hinge, we believe the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. So, it makes sense to take a more thoughtful approach. Hinge provides an alternative to “swipe culture” by creating smart matches and natural conversations among people who are on the same page. That’s why 75% of our first dates turn into second dates, and why we’re the No. 1 mobile-first dating app mentioned in The New York Times wedding section. Hinge is where the next generation is going when they’re over dating games and ready to find meaningful connections.
Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!
Sofia Richie and Scott Disick's romance is the 'real deal' and 'they're in love' says her best pal Vas J Morgan
SOFIA Richie and Scott Disick’s romance is the “real deal” and “they’re in love”, according to her best pal Vas J Morgan.
Celebs Go Dating star Vas revealed he leaned on loved-up best pal Sofia, who is the daughter of Lionel Richie, for advice before signing up to the E4 dating show.
Vas J Morgan has praised his pal Sofia Richie for her romance with Scott Disick as he revealed he got advise from her before doing Celebs Go Dating
In an exclusive chat with the Sun Online, Vas said: “When I came into this situation, actually Sofia was the first person I asked for advice. She’s so good at being in a relationship and so good at sharing her life.
“She gave me the best advice. She said, ‘Do you know what, be yourself.’
“‘Don’t be who they want you to be. Be yourself because if they don’t love you for you, they don’t deserve you.’
“And that’s how she takes herself into her own relationships.
Splash News
Scott, 35, and Sofia, 20, got together in 2017
Splash News
The loved-up pair are the real deal, says her best pal Vas
Vas told Sofia he had never been on dates before, and she told him to be himself on the show
“So she’s just being herself, she’s young and having fun, but she’s in love. I wish her and Scott all the best because she is in love.”
The former Towie star who has since launched his celeb-favourite restaurant Chrome in Essex, spoke to Sofia for dating advice.
The blogger has also launched his magazine Tings London – which had Sofia as the first cover star.
He said of his pal: “She’s so young, and she’s a loyal, beautiful person. I rang her and said I’m doing this show, Celebs Go Dating, and I’ve never been on dates.”
Speaking about his ideal love match, Vas said: “I’m looking for someone who is funny, who gets my energy and gets my banter.”
Scott Disick has shared a cheeky snap of Sofia Richie’s bump while on holiday in Greece
TOUGH ORDER
Lucy Mecklenburgh banned from shopping at ASOS after ‘missing order’ row
‘IN THE BIN’
Strictly’s Seann Walsh’s girlfriend hints she’s dumped him over Katya kiss
STRICTLY BUSINESS?
Strictly’s Seann and Katya spotted having flirty lunch hours before kiss
curse me quick!
Strictly curse strikes again as Seann and married pro Katya snog in street
Blame it on the boozy
Strictly’s Seann & Katya grovel to partners after ‘drunken mistake’
strictly sheepish
Seann & Katya seen for first time since pics emerged of boozy kiss
Sofia,2 and 35-year-old Scott‘ first got together in 2017 are back on track after they split up briefly last June.
They went on a romantic trip to Greece just a few weeks after they reconciled in July.
Sofia dumped Scott following claims he was getting cosy with other women at Kanye West’s album launch.
Soon after, The Sun Online revealed how Scott was “begging Sofia to forgive him.“
Scott has three children with ex Kourtney Kardashian, Mason, eight, Penelope, six, and three-year-old Reign.
Splash News
Scott shot to fame on Keeping Up with the Kardashians – he has three kids with ex Kourtney Kardashian
Splash News
Scott and Kourtney co-parent their children
Scott Disick films girlfriend Sofia Richie dancing in just white knickers and a Christmas jumper
Got a story? email digishowbiz@the-sun.co.uk or call us direct on 02077824220.
We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.
Her Instagram account Bye Felipe exposes online-dating creeps; now she's turned it into a book
If you’ve been online dating for more than a hot second, you’ve probably encountered a range of joys and horrors. On the positive side, dating apps have introduced me to some pretty great men. On the depressing side, I’ve also matched with men who have said inappropriate things to me, sometimes before we ever met. At worst, I’ve – briefly, thankfully – feared for my safety.
Such is the burden of being a woman, looking for connection online. Alexandra Tweten knows this well. Her popular Instagram account, Bye Felipe, outs creeps for their bad online-dating behaviors. For the unfamiliar, she posts screenshots submitted by women who have been harassed by men on dating apps. Propositioning for sex, lashing out when they’re turned down, sending pictures of the male anatomy (or requests for racy photos) and calling women a slew of names are all-too-common online-dating scenarios. Since Bye Felipe’s creation four years ago, Tweten has amassed nearly a half-million followers.
A journalism major, Tweten never planned to be a “Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante” with a popular social media account, as she was originally hailed in 2014. Now, she’s back to her writing roots, exploring online dating and lending her best wisdom in a new “Bye Felipe” book, which is an ode to understanding and taking it all in stride.
I asked her why she originally started Bye Felipe, how she got the idea for a book and how online-daters can maintain a positive attitude through all the ups and downs.
Q: Where did you originally get the idea for Bye Felipe?
A: It was October 2014, and I was in a Facebook group for women in L.A. One woman posted a screenshot of a message she had received on OkCupid. She didn’t respond, and 12 hours later, she’d gotten a second message, (an insulting expletive).
I thought it was funny, and I’d gotten messages that felt similar before. There was one guy who’d messaged me for months and months, over and over, on OkCupid. When I finally turned him down, he said, “Why would you even respond?” You learn that you can’t not respond; they freak out. But if you do respond, they also yell at you. You can’t win.
So, we had an inside joke in the Facebook group that when something like that happens, we’d say, “Bye Felipe” – which is a play on “Bye, Felicia.” I started the Instagram as a joke just for me and my friends to make fun of these guys. Two weeks later, Olga Khazan at the Atlantic found it and asked to interview me. After her article came out, it blew up from there.
Q: Tell me about some of your personal online-dating horror stories. How did it compare to other women’s?
A: When I first started online dating, I received a handful of hostile messages. And the first thing I thought was, Is he a stalker? Is he going to come after me? You just don’t know. It can be scary putting yourself out there on the internet. I got a lot of thank-you messages from women who don’t feel so alone in that experience now. I felt the same way when I saw the messages that other women were receiving.
Q: Do you think “toxic masculinity” plays into the Bye Felipe phenomenon?
A: Yes. It’s definitely related. But we probably need a nicer name for it. Men hear the phrase “toxic masculinity” and think, “Wait, we’re not allowed to be men anymore?” That’s not what we’re saying when we talk about toxic masculinity. It’s really about redefining the social norms of what it means to be traditionally masculine.
Currently, “real men” aren’t generally allowed to step outside of a very rigid set of gender roles that basically say they should be strong, dominant and unemotional. Anger, violence and aggression are some of the only approved emotions men are allowed to have. They can’t be sensitive, sad or show any softer emotions. We expect men to be sexually aggressive, too, and this is a big reason that women experience so many hostile messages online. It’s ingrained in our society.
At the end of the day, a lot of the guys perpetuating these behaviors just have personal issues, too. Online dating is hard for everyone; however, the stakes are just a lot higher for women. Women experience it differently. It’s often a safety issue.
Q: Have you ever found success in online dating, personally?
A: Yes, I’ve met a lot of really great guys online dating; I was in a relationship with someone I met on OkCupid for 2 ½ years. I’ve met a lot of wonderful guys who turned out to be friends. I also have lots of couple friends who met online and are now married or engaged.
The point of Bye Felipe has never been to encourage women not to do online dating. The real message is that our society and culture are really broken; the evidence is that we have all these examples of men acting completely entitled, objectifying women and becoming aggressive. It’s not only in online dating, it’s everywhere: on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, gaming apps, message boards – it even happens in real life on the street or in the bar.
I think that online dating can absolutely be successful. We spend so much of our time online, so why shouldn’t we use it for dating? The fact that this behavior is coming up so often (online) is because it’s so easy to document.
Q: Let’s talk about your book. How did you approach creating a book from an Instagram account?
A: I got the idea for the book pretty shortly after the Instagram took off. It took me two years to finish the proposal, and then another year to write and publish it. Whenever I got submissions, I’d put them in folders in my inbox: mansplainers, fat-shamers, “nice guys” and so on. And then I analyzed them to see if they had anything in common to figure out what the best ways of combating them would be.
I wanted to create a handbook for how to handle any situation when you’re online dating as a woman. It ended up being an anthology of the best – or worst, I guess – Bye Felipe submissions, a guide to the best ways to respond to trolls, a collection of funny stories from my own dating experiences and then partly dating advice.
I also tried to answer the question “Why do guys do that?” It’s basically the book I wish I would have had when I first started dating, especially online.
Q: What did you want your big takeaway for women to be when they finished reading?
A: Don’t take online dating too seriously. Have fun, and let it go. You’re probably going to meet a bunch of jerks out there, but have a sense of humor about it. Make fun of them.
The No. 1 key to not letting harassment get to you is having self-confidence – which is really the most radical act of resistance.
Men are from cyberspace: this week in tech, 20 years ago
A few months ago, I mentioned that it was “unfortunately” too early to write about the release of beloved role-playing game Fallout 2. Well, Fallout 2 was released this week 20 years ago, and I am definitively not going to write about it — because I already spent half my summer immersed in the series while researching the never-released Fallout Online. Fortunately, Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton has you covered with an entertaining analysis of Fallout 2’s first, frustrating level.
Instead, this week’s stories cover cyber romance, Y2K, and one of the year’s worst new TV shows.
HBO premiered a documentary last month called Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age that explored the worst aspects of online dating — you can catch a fairly grim conversation with director Nancy Jo Sales on the Recode Decode podcast. But “cyber dating” wasn’t always an inescapable hellworld! In late September of 1998, Fast Company urged readers to “stop [their] snickering” and seriously consider some advice from the authors of Men Are From Cyberspace: The Single Woman’s Guide to Flirting, Dating, and Finding Love On-Line.
The interview includes eminently reasonable tips like “don’t lie on your dating profile” and “don’t keep dating someone you only click with online,” as well as the perennial warnings about safety that basically haven’t changed in 20 years. For a master-level course on digital love, however, one might turn to the 1998 book The Joy of Cybersex — whose author did an achingly optimistic interview with Wired just two days later.
Some readers might have wondered whether online dating would even exist for long — the year 2000 was approaching, but because of a design shortcut taken decades ago, computers might decide it was 1900 instead. On October 1st, Congress passed the “Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act,” part of an extensive government preparation effort.
The law offered legal protections for companies who shared information about Y2K issues, although CNET laid out criticism from multiple directions. Some people believed companies might still end up mired in lawsuits, and others thought it would stop consumers from filing legitimate grievances. Y2K did end up producing multiple lawsuits, but The Washington Post claimed that lawyers were actually upset about how few major complaints they were getting — which might count as a happy ending for this week’s news.
The fifth season of hit series ER premiered in September of 1998. Could another medical drama really distinguish itself from the most popular show on television? One network considered this question and decided the solution was “set it in outer space.”
According to reviewers of the time, that was the clear pitch behind short-lived UPN science fiction series Mercy Point, which premiered in early October. These reviews were, to put it mildly, not kind. The Los Angeles Times poked fun at the improbably attractive cast of far-future doctors and called the series “derivative on every level.” The Chicago Reader said it “couldn’t even be bothered to make up plots.” Variety mentions that HMOs — some of the most loathed organizations of the ‘90s — still exist in 23rd-century space medicine. The series seems to have mostly disappeared, but you can watch the intro sequence (and a couple of episodes) on YouTube.
In early October of 1998, 44-year-old Rick Rozar fell to his death while adjusting a rooftop satellite. As the Los Angeles Times wrote, Rozar was a philanthropist who devoted years to helping abused and neglected children — and one of the fathers of today’s massive data-mining industry. The former private investigator had founded computerized records company CDB Infotek, which condensed public records into digital dossiers, in 1978. Databases like Rozar’s boomed during the 1990s, giving rise to modern, expansive “people search” services like Spokeo and Whitepages.
The Economist published an extensive obituary covering Rozar’s sometimes controversial legacy. “What Mr. Rozar did was to recognize that the computer, and its cleverest offspring the internet, could be used to venture into individual privacy much further, more efficiently, and more quickly than had previously been possible,” it says. CDB Infotek itself was sold to credit reporting agency Equifax and later the data aggregator ChoicePoint — where Rozar’s diligent work provided businesses with a “wealth of information” to mine.
Horoscopes are a ubiquitous fixture of the internet today, and as The New York Times explained back in 1998, the field owes a lot to online astrology queen Susan Miller — a “personal computer devotee” who created the incredibly successful Astrology Zone website. ‘’I was afraid to tell techno-heads that I was into [astrology]. But they were into it,” said Miller in her Times profile, speculating that the internet created an easy, private option for people who would be too embarrassed to seek their horoscope offline.
Astrology Zone is still online today, complete with its long-running newsletter and some newer mobile apps. And fittingly, the Times profiled Miller again a few months ago — among other details, it turns out she’s bullish on cryptocurrency.
