Date Diaries: The Tinder Virgin Whose First Date Turned Out To Be A Married Woman

Date of the week is an online Grazia franchise chronicling the anonymous adventures of those involved in the ever complicated and increasingly unbelievable world of modern dating. To submit your story, fill out the form below.

This week, Stephanie, a 24-year-old lesbian call centre agent from Liverpool, goes on her first Tinder date.*

Thirty seconds into my first Tinder date, I knew I’d made a mistake. Not because she was as over-eager as I feared she was when we were arranging said date, but because she confessed she was married.

We’d been talking on Tinder for a few days when we’d arranged to meet for a coffee, but apparently the fact she had a husband at home never felt pertinent to tell me. ‘I met him on holiday in Ghana,’ she told me. She’d gone there for six weeks and fell so in love they were married before she returned home to Liverpool.

‘Oh, so it’s one of those were you got a bit carried away and now you’re getting divorced?,’ I asked, naively hopeful. She very seriously explained, ‘No! I knew when I met him that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, he's the love of my life.’

I was taken aback, here I was on my first date in months and I’d already struck out with a woman who was already married. ‘What did she want?’ I wondered, ‘am I being roped into a threesome?’. If you know Tinder, you know that’s the obvious assumption – but she had no pictures or mention of her husband on her profile.

It turned out that as she was bisexual, she felt she could ‘never be satisfied by a man’ regardless of how in love she was. In fact, even her husband agreed. So they had an open relationship. Literally thirty seconds in, and I’m already deep into a conversation about polyamory. I hadn’t even sipped my coffee yet and I already wanted to drown myself in it.

The thing is, I’m all for free love but I’m also all for upfront honesty. Could she not have told me this before we met up and given me time to process? Do I really have to sit and ponder whether I could be the third in an open marriage with a woman I’ve just met? Little did I know, those questions were the least of my worries.

With our conversation turning to why she needed a woman in her life as well as a man, she quickly delved into talking about sex. Again, I’m all for free love – but let me finish my first gulp before we’re discussing vaginas, you know?

Telling me of her own sexual experiences, she began incessantly asking questions about mine. Then came confessions about her deepest and darkest fantasies, combined with vivid descriptions of why she loves making love to women. I sat, stunned and awkward, trying to process how best to respond to her in the middle of Costa Coffee at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon.

‘If you don’t want anything sexual with me, we can just be friends,’ she said, obviously taking my silence as rejection. She wasn’t hurt though, in fact, she had other ideas for us. ‘We can go hunting together,’ she winked at me. Hunting. Really. Of course, she didn’t mean literal hunting, she meant picking up women. Man or woman, anyone who refers to picking up women as ‘hunting’ is not my cup of tea – of coffee, in this instance.

I wanted to get the date over with, so I gulped down my coffee as quick as possible and tried to avoid any more personal questions. Soon - but not soon enough – enough time had passed for me to make the ‘I guess we should get going’ chatter. But just when I thought I had escaped the weirdness, she had one last request of me.

At first, it seemed normal. She got up to zip her coat and asked me for help because she had a cast on her arm. It was a very long coat, one I would need to crouch down to zip up. For some God forsaken reason, I got down on my knees in front of her to zip it up. When I looked up at her, she was smiling, and something about the way she was looking at me told me – she didn’t need help at all, this was a power move. It seems she wanted to see how submissive I was, turns out very.

She hugged me goodbye and left the date, as I stood confused at my own behaviour and very much needing another coffee to shake off the weird feeling I now had. I wasn’t expecting much from the date at all, but it definitely wasn’t that.

Suffice to say, I never spoke to her again. Even without the sex talk and weird power moves, I wasn’t quite ready to become the other woman in an open marriage. At least now though I’ll never be nervous about going on a Tinder date again – if I can survive that I can survive anything. Maybe I’ll just clarify their single status before meeting up next time.

*names have been changed

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