What's the name of your dating blog?
What's the homepage of your dating blog?
http://www.deetdustdate.com
Is your blog associated with a larger site? What is it?
No
Why Did You Start Your Dating or Relationships Blog?
Shortly before I turned 30, my morning commute was bleakened by an article which cheerfully informed me that women over 30 have only 12% of their eggs left. And I was already halfway through that month.
All my efforts to find love so far had been a one-way trip to The Awkward Chat. I’d dated older men. Younger men. Online men. Friends. Bosses. Men from 12 different countries. A man from every major world religion. Yet I was still alone. Each date had followed a complex code of rules that I’d never learnt to decipher.
So I decided to go where those rules don’t apply.
I moved to Zambia.
What do you cover in your dating blog?
In 2010 I moved to Zambia with VSO: Volunteer Services Overseas. Or Valentine Services Overseas, as it is affectionately known as a nod to its remarkable track record of facilitating love. Our pre-departure training included extensive briefings about relationships and dating. Our arrival pack contained chocolate-scented condoms and femidoms the size of a sock. And I was assigned to replace another British volunteer, who’d fallen pregnant just weeks into starting her placement.
Now, isolated from the rules set by women’s magazines, pub bravado and porn, I’m learning what dating means for people in completely different circumstances from my London scene.
I’m learning about love in the time of HIV. About how women meet their mate where the male life expectancy is 38 years. About falling in love when you’re also in poverty, and about making love when you share a one-room house with three others. I’m learning that living on less than a dollar a day doesn’t make you less inclined to court: it just makes you more creative in how to impress a girl when dinner and a movie would cost a year’s salary.
I’m learning that turn-ons can be cultural: that women can spend years stretching their labia, or insert drying herbs to minimize lubrication, or take glory in the size of their behind. I’m discovering the tenderness of sex in a society where porn is illegal, and the cruelty of sex when women are deeply disenfranchised.
I’m learning how a girl catches the eye of a tribal chief, and what life is like to be one of a man’s six wives. And I’m learning about love when love is considered sadistic: life for a young gay person in a country where their crush could get them executed.
I’m learning about dating where I can’t get my bikini line waxed. Where I can’t afford razors. Or make up. Or shampoo. Where I don’t have my friends to give me advice. What bubbles to the top of my priorities when, away from peer pressure and social expectations and European dating convention, the only one shaping how I feel is me.
And I’m falling in love.
I post one or two times a week (average of three posts every fortnight).
Advice
- Be frank
- Be honest to your readers
- Don't be honest to your dates...
- Write as though you're confiding in your best friend
- Write as though your mother will never read it
- If your own writing doesn't make you laugh / sigh happily / think carefully about an issue / click your fingers with girl-power, then it won't do that for your readers either: delete it.
