In Defence of Dating Apps: the Virtual World Can Be a Brilliant Tool for Travel and Life Itself

Rhonda argues that great travel tips, huge life lessons, and even life-changing experiences can come from online encounters.

Dating apps have been shat on from a great height recently, and to a degree rightly so, for their reams of poor-quality offerings (boys – we beg of you, stop posting photos of yourselves standing next to urinals), their large pool of catfish, their addictive algorithms…

As a woman, you get an absurd – in fact, unmanageable – amount of likes, and while part of that is down to lots of men indiscriminately swiping every woman in the hope of getting a match, some of it is the app giving you a constant stream of new men to scroll through in the hope that the next one might be the one, and in doing so keeping you hooked.

So why don’t I join the mass exodus from Bumble? I’m not addicted to it; most times, I barely look at it or I give it about three nanoseconds of my time, quickly inspecting my new likers to see if there’s anyone worth interacting with. But even when I swipe right, I barely find the time or energy to initiate a chat with a new match.

But the plain fact of the matter is, I find Bumble very useful as a tool for travelling, and beyond the dross, the urinals and the huge trout, the polys and the chancers, I’ve also made some lasting friendships through it.

A long time ago, pre apps, I was taking one of my sons to stay with a family in Berlin and meeting another son there two days later, meaning I had a Friday night free to myself in Berlin. What was I going to do? Sit in my hotel room watching German game shows? Hang out in my hotel bar? Go clubbing by myself? I just knew I couldn’t stay in.

I put out a call on Facebook and within minutes my friend Helen had handed me onto her friend Brendan, who has lived out there for many years. A novelist and tour guide, he couldn’t have been a better person to take me out on the town: he and his husband introduced me to highlights of the gay neighbourhood of Schöneberg and I had the perfect, quintessential Berlin evening.

Now, when I’m going somewhere by myself or sometimes with Tracey, I change my Bumble setting to Travel Mode and see who’s around in the destination I’m going to –men and women, of all ages. Sometimes I match with people and have a chat, often it leads nowhere. Most times, when I get to my destination, I find I’m really very happy simply to have time by myself and the freedom to wander at whim without worrying about another person.

But there’s always the chance and the lure that there’s a nugget of gold hidden away amongst all those dark-bearded males I’ve discovered I have a predilection for (dating apps are also good for showing you that you have a type that you never even knew about). 

When Tracey and I went to Florida last year, among my likers, one face stood out. There was just something about his cheeky-sexy grin that made me know I had to chat to him. D was (is) one of those nuggets. We had an immediate connection via long deep text messages, very quickly turning to voice and video messages from him so I could see he was A) real B) my type. 

Alas, our itinerary in Florida was tight. And try as I might, D and I simply couldn’t see our way to engineering a meeting while I was there. On the other hand, he did give me lots of tips about the places we were going to – trips that hugely enhanced our trip (nothing beats insider intel from a local).

Boarding our flight home, I felt I’d missed out big time on meeting someone special. But all hope was not lost. D was planning a solo Europe trip that summer, and we talked about linking up for part of it – perhaps to go hiking in Slovenia. That didn’t happen; he was travelling in a fairly ad hoc way, making it impossible to plan ahead. But when he called me one evening and said he’d be flying into London the next day to get a connection back to Tampa, and ask if I was free, I cleared my schedule and looked up train times for the next day. I knew it was now or never.

Our day in London together was one of the loveliest of my life. D is the very best kind of person: open, curious, intelligent, sexy, political. We hugged for a long when we met and then laughed and hugged again - perhaps laughing with relief that we actually liked each other. We spent 11 straight hours together, walking around a London he’d only briefly been to when he was four: I took him around Brick Lane and to Spitalfields Market for lunch, then we walked across Tower Bridge and along the Thames, stopping for a drink every so often. We talked the whole time and we laughed, a lot – to the point where I (slave to a menopausal bladder) nearly pissed myself several times.

Outside the Tate Modern, we noticed a man feverishly typing on a foldout table. It turned out he was a poet for hire, and for a sum of one’s own choice, he would write something on any topic you suggested. D asked him to write a poem about serendipity, and after a few minutes of pounding on the keys, the man handed us a piece about two people meeting and falling in love – and asking themselves if their encounter was something willed by the universe, or pure chance, the product of chaos. D, I already knew, believes there’s no such thing as random – no coincidences. 

Waiting for our poem, I realised this would be a day I’d never forget. It was D himself, who an hour later charmed me even more by buying a cheap metallic rose from a vendor on a bridge to take back to a toilet attendant who’d yelled at us after we jumped the entry barriers to avoid paying – he felt guilty, he said, for disrespecting her by lying and saying he hadn’t done it. I got the other rose.

But it was also that I was – by showing it to him – falling back in love with London, a city I’d once lived in for many years and in some senses started ‘unseeing’. Pointing out things to D and telling him stories and historic titbits, I realised what a truly spectacular city it is.

We finished up in a secret gin parlour in Covent Garden; I knew D was a gin fan. He was like a pig in shit there (almost literally – his tasting included a pungent truffle gin), and that made me very happy. It had been, for me, a nigh-on perfect day. Outside, in the street, with me about to leg it for my last train and him to head to the airport, he kissed me and I kissed him back and wished it had happened earlier in the day and we could have done it some more.

I almost certainly won’t ever see D again. I understood/sleuthed out, after he’d gone home and stayed mysteriously, uncharacteristically silent on social media about his London interlude, that he had a girlfriend back in Tampa, who he’d probably got together with not long before his trip but strangely omitted to mention. Bad D.

I was peeved but ultimately phlegmatic. He’s 15 years younger than me, he has a constraining job as a teacher and responsibilities as a single dad, he lives a nine-hour, £700 flight away from me. And he has that pesky girlfriend. It was never going to be anything more than a day – but what a day. A friend I told about it dismissed it as sounding like a Richard Curtis movie. But don’t we all need the odd Richard Curtis day in our lives?  I think it should be obligatory, in fact. I’d like one a year, please.

Meeting D also helped me define/refine what I do want from any relationships from now on. Because he was pretty much the right person in the wrong place and at the wrong time. Having never really gone on any dates in my life and mainly just fallen into relationships with people I already knew, looking at people on the app and then meeting D revealed to me a mental list of eight things I would want from a relationship. D scored 7/7.5, while many of my exes, to my horror, scored around the two or three mark.

And Dan’s not the only friend I’ve made from an app. I also had a gorgeous day out cycling through West Yorkshire with a sweet man who’d not long moved there from Mumbai. There wasn’t any chemistry, it turned out, but again, we laughed our heads off, exchanged lots of tales and have kept in touch even now he’s returned to India – and have agreed to meet up next time I’m out there. 

There are others I’ve never met and probably never will do, collected all around the world, but with whom I chat regularly. Interesting people I’d never ever have met in real life – a fireman in the wilds of southern Australia, for instance, who I matched with while there two and a half years ago. In Mumbai, I flirted with the idea of going out with someone who sings for Bollywood movies, until jetlag struck me down. I still regret that I didn’t – it could have been a blast and a really interesting take on the city.

I think it’s fair to say that the majority of meaningful friendships and relationships come from IRL, chance encounters – for me, over the last few years, work events and travelling, including a recent life-changing encounter on a plane. Nothing can beat an instantaneous, in-person connection – people you may have swiped left on in the virtual world may give you a frisson IRL. But there’s room in our lives for it all – even the briefest and most unlikely of encounters while travelling, and they can taste all the sweeter for their transience.