Relationships Talk

JUST once I’d like to get through an online date without picturing what I’ll eat when I get home.

Pete was a Hinge find and he seemed my type on paper.

Tinderella met Pete on Hinge a web developer she had mates in common with and they shared same taste in movies and music

Yes a web developer (nobody’s perfect) . . . but we had mates in common and the same taste in movies and music.

But I should have known we weren’t a match when he gave me a rollicking for ignoring a message from him.

We first got chatting in April but then I got busy at work and, well, I ghosted him.

A month and a half later, he sends a reminder hi.

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Tinderella needed wake-up sex, weekend sex, just-back-from-work sex . . . not a bi-annual holiday shag Hence Pete.

Fresh from having my underseat storage inspected by moped mogul Daniel in Spain, I replied.

Yes! I thought. It’s time to get back into British men.

I need wake-up sex, weekend sex, just-back-from-work sex… not a bi-annual holiday shag. Hence Pete.

He really made me work for this date and I secretly loathed him for it before we even met.

I explained I’d taken a break from online dating apps and was sorry to go AWOL. He replied: “Oh, shame you didn’t warn me.

“Came across a bit rude to be honest.”

I apologised again and suggested we finally get that drink we mentioned. He fired back: “It would be good to see if we’ve got anything in common first.

“I don’t have time to meet every single person I match with on online dating services, so I prefer to check the above before meeting.

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A new study shows we decide if we fancy someone in the first 15 minutes of a date but Tinderella thinks it’s closer to 15 seconds after an encounter with web developer Pete

“I’d rather have a pleasant date with no chemistry, than an unpleasant one because you have nothing in common.”

I vaguely knew he was right. Sighing at what a practical bastard life often is, I messaged him.

“OK that makes sense. Fire over that questionnaire!” He messaged back: “They’re on my profile. I made a short list.” Urgh.

I find said questions about my life, career, hopes dreams and grit my teeth as I elaborate.

Two weeks later, we meet at the pub and it’s almost instantly a write-off. A new study shows we decide if we fancy someone in the first 15 minutes of a date.

I reckon it’s closer to 15 seconds – I decided Pete wasn’t my man the second he kissed me hello.

Tentative, awkward, lipless – it was like a peck at Christmas from the vicar.

My ovaries shrivelled, my womb switched over to Foyle’s War and my clitoris went to bed with a good book instead.

An hour later, I’m nursing a rum and Coke as he tells me about his job. “So they said I couldn’t work from home but basically I told Ian I was working from the Worthing office that week and then… ”

Mmmm, Pringles. Classic Pringles with a chicken baguette.

Maybe get a bit of avo in there. And lots of butter. Mmmm.

“ . . . so this whole week I’ve just been hanging out at my flat and none of them have a clue.”

I feel like I don’t have a clue either. How do women do this?

Dating can be complicated, but Tee Grizzley seems to have a handle on things. His texting game is on point. The rapper posted a clip on Instagram to show us how to finesse the aftermath of an “I love you” text when the object of our affection hits us back with a “what do you love about me” response. Faced with what might be an awkward situation in the early stages of dating, Grizzley flips the script.

Here’s where the pizza comes in. He uses the cool kids’ dietary staple to illustrate the situation. Essentially, pizza is tasty. Even if you don’t know everything about the pizza you’re about to eat, you still have the capability of loving it all the same. Check out the smooth texting:

We wouldn’t advise anyone to try this at home. Comparing people to pizza is slightly risky. Essentially, it could be saying that you don’t care about who they are so long as they’re a person. As if the person’s being cold, or lacking sauce or whatever else won’t deter you. The toppings are probably connected to the person’s personality since you already know what the person looks like. Hopefully, that’s the case if you’re sending “ily” texts. It’s low-key shallow. If you happen to be in this situation and follow this advice, please hit us with some receipts.

Now, for the musical slickness, Tee Grizzley gets froze in his music video for “Two Vaults,” a Lil Yachty-featured track. He is also featured on our Fire Emoji playlist on Spotify. For more than a lick, Grizzley’s full-blown mixtape Activated dropped last month. 

My friend is obsessed with dating models. Of course, because he’s dating mostly based on looks, these relationships rarely last. He says that he’s trying to move up in the business world and that being seen with a beautiful woman makes a difference in how he’s perceived. Wouldn’t businesspeople be more impressed if he could keep a relationship going, even if it were with a plainer woman?—Discerning Dude

The problem with dating largely based on looks is that you tend to end up with the sort of woman who’s frequently hospitalized for several days: “I was thinking so hard I dislocated my shoulder.”

However, your friend isn’t wrong; arm candy appears to be the Prada handbag of male competition. Research by social psychologist Bo Winegard and his colleagues suggests that a man’s being accompanied by a modelicious woman functions as a “hard-to-fake” signal of his status, as beautiful women “have the luxury of discriminating among a plethora of suitors.”

In the Winegard team’s experiments, men paired with attractive women were consistently rated as higher in status than the very same men when they were paired with unattractive women. In one part of the study, some men were assigned an attractive female partner. The men were told that they’d be conducting a survey out on campus with her and that they “were to act as if they and their assigned partner were in a happy relationship.”

These men were forced to choose between a group of men and a group of women to survey (and thus flaunt their hot female partner to). Interestingly, almost 70 percent of these guys chose to flaunt to other men. This isn’t surprising, considering how, as the researchers note, men are “largely” the ones who determine one another’s status (within a group of men). Of course, a man’s being seen as high-status by other men is ultimately a path to mo’ better babes— so your friend may basically be getting a twofer by showing off to other dudes.

The reality is, once he’s more established, his priority may shift from needing a signal to wanting a partner. At that point, he may come to see the beauty in the sort of woman who has something on her mind—uh, besides a $200 double-process blond dye job and $600 in hair extensions.

I’m a straight guy in my 30s with pretty strong body odor. I saw your column about how more men are doing body hair trimming. I remember you saying not to remove all the hair, and I don’t want women to suspect I’m gay. However, I’m wondering whether shaving my pits would help with my BO.—Pepe Le Pew

When a woman you meet can’t stop thinking about you, ideally her thought isn’t, “Could there be a small dead animal making its home in his armpit?”

Underarm stink comes from a specialized sweat gland. Your body has two kinds of sweat glands, eccrine and apocrine. Eccrine glands are the air conditioners of the body, producing sweat that’s pretty much just salty water to cool us off. Apocrine glands, on the other hand, are scent glands, found mostly in the armpits and groin and around the nipples. And sorry, this is gross: Any smelliness emanating from the apocrine areas comes not from the sweat itself but from bacteria that move in to lunch on it.

So—intuitively—it seems like shaving that pit hair (removing it entirely versus just trimming it) would make a difference, giving the bacteria far less of a, um, dining area. Unfortunately, the studies on this are problematic—with too-small sample sizes (meaning too few participants to know whether the findings reflect reality or are simply due to chance). One of the studies was done not by independent researchers working out of a university lab but by researchers employed by a multinational company that sells razors and shaving products. This doesn’t necessarily mean their results are skeevy. However, a finding like “Let that armpit hair grow wild and free and wave in the wind like summer grain!” is probably not the stuff career advancement is made of at that company.

Also, as you suspect, shaved pits on a straight man may lead women to suspect he is gay or some body-obsessed narcissist. If you do decide to try pit-shaving, in summer heat, you might forgo tank tops and wear shirts with loose short sleeves. And when you’re about to get naked with a woman, explain that the shaving thing is merely about getting the hideodorousness under control.