I’ve signed up to a ‘country life’ dating app – and it’s everything I could hope for
It’s spring, and spring means love. The sun has emerged, bringing bluebells, cow parsley and wild garlic with it, and everything, including me (after a winter of hiding and becoming weirdly obsessed with boilers and grouting), has come to life. The tulips bloom like red hearts in the fields and I feel like falling in love. ’
For a while, I’d resigned myself to never meeting anyone romantically again. I’d settled for being Miss Havisham, dying sad and alone, probably to be eaten by my dog, Stringerbelle. I felt I had tried, and failed, at love. My attempts to get married had ended before they started.
My short-lived fling with Alex*, the woman I met in Somerset, evaporated. I’ve not given much thought to dating since. My old cottage, with its leaks, broken pipes and mould, has kept me busy.
My friends in London worry I’ve become a hermit. “You’ll never meet a man if you’re always in your cottage,” Martin worries. Although he’s wrong. Right now, my cottage is packed full of men. More than my flat in London could fit. There are two men on the roof reassembling the gutter, one in the bathroom saving the plumbing, a Brazilian Workaway living in my caravan, and a divorcé in the house.
Not to mention the army of topless farmers who’ve suddenly appeared with the sun, driving tractors at break-neck speed around the blind lanes. Still, I don’t suppose I’ll find a new partner by waiting for someone on a John Deere to rescue me.
Since I’m too old now for Young Farmers’ balls, there’s an obvious solution beckoning: Muddy Matches is an online site specifically aimed at “country life” dating. I sign up for it.
The first concern I have about Muddy Matches is how few people are on it. I can count my matches on my hands – 24 in a 10-mile radius, about one per cent of the potential dates I had on Tinder. Still, I decide not to see this as a negative but an advantage. Rather than enduring the endless Tinder merry-go-round of swiping and never chatting, or wasting time on Hinge matching me with City boys who don’t want to travel beyond the suburbs to meet, on Muddy Matches the numbers may be limited, but at least I’m being matched with people I’ve actually got something in common with.
In a way, Muddy Matches is like a village – with only a handful of suitable people to date, you just have to choose one and get on with it.
I set up my profile, saying I’m looking for someone hilarious, ideally with a puppy, and a bigger log pile than mine (men will later take this as a serious challenge).
It’s easy to tease the Muddy men I meet, who are as predictably clichéd as their City counterparts: wearing flat caps, posing with sheep dogs in fields, writing on their profiles “I like tractors”. At least it makes a change from City lads posting photographs of Ferraris and drugged-up tigers in Thailand. On a Muddy Match profile, you’re more likely to see a picture of a goat riding shotgun on a tractor or a line of cows’ backsides.
The men I chat to are beef farmers, tree surgeons, zookeepers, sports traders, estate managers, forestry workers, “land-based contractors” and various other country jobs I’ve never heard of. But then, I never really knew what the start-up entrepreneurs I dated in London did.
Still, I find I like the Muddy men better for their lack of pretence. They don’t seem superficial or showy. They post pictures of themselves in old jumpers and wellies, on mud-smeared tractors, working fields or sitting in the half-light of a barn tending sheep. They don’t boast about the cars they have or the jobs they do (except perhaps the farmers, who like to show off because they’re the rock stars of the country). They don’t talk about start-ups or stocks, rhapsodising instead about nights by the fire, or the lambs they’re bottle-feeding.
They write about looking for someone to build tree houses with, or to go on long, muddy dog walks, or their dreams of living self-sufficiently off-grid. These are exactly the kind of men I need, now that I spend half my life chopping wood.
I like the way they’re not fazed by crossing a few counties for a date, unlike men in cities who couldn’t be bothered to travel half an hour away. I like the way that they’re strong because of their work, rather than being gym-buff, too. One man jokes he needs to get fitter because “the last time my cows escaped, I was pretty worn out”.
I like how practical they are, as well – offering me advice on the price of timber and the building work I’m doing, excited to offer to help with my latest project, which is attempting to turn a little stone barn into my office.
They seem less precious than London men, whom I’ve seen listing their requirements for a girlfriend. On Muddy Matches, they’re looking for Felicity Kendal types, someone with a good sense of humour, who’s easy to get on with. I guess if you’re going to be trapped in the middle of nowhere with someone, you need more than looks.
I meet a couple of men, with varying results. I chat to an unbelievably good-looking tree surgeon, who shares my love of Fleetwood Mac and smokes too much weed, but who becomes impatient with how bad I am at answering his messages. I speak to a farmer twice my age who tells the most brilliant filthy jokes, but is so evasive that I start to suspect he might be married. I find a sweet man in Devon, who talks to me about his love of fishing with such joy that he convinces me to go and try it, which I do and then remember how boring it is.
I enjoy the novelty of meeting new people, but my heart isn’t in it. Really, I knew all along that what I’m looking for is right in front of me…
