There are two main things I think about when I think about Guardian Soulmates, the dating site that has today announced it is closing.
Firstly, it’s where I met my husband (and then, after a few dates, didn’t talk to him for eight months, before ‘meeting’ again on Twitter).
Secondly, ALWAYS being scared that I hadn’t clicked that box – the box that meant they couldn’t use your face in the adverts, meaning you’d therefore be splashed all over the Guardian website and paper (specifically, your dad’s favourite paper) as an internet dater. (Side note: my friend has just told me she was in one of those ads and I’m SCREAMING.)
The site announced its closure, after 15 years, this morning, prompting a stream of people tweeting about the partners they’d met and the terrible dates they’d had using the site.
In a statement, the site said: ‘We’ve come a long way and are very proud of all the thousands of people we’ve helped introduce, the good dates people have been on (ok, we know not all were good, but we tried), the weddings that took place and the families that have been created.’
There’s a real niche community of people who’ll be reminiscing today – those of us who lived, mostly in London, in a time in the mid 00s to mid 10s when online dating became mainstream, and apps either hadn’t begun, or were in their early years.
It was a time of Desktop Dating. Of having to actually sit down, log in and write messages. And of, also, having to pay to read them. It took a lot of scrutiny figuring out from the preview if, OK, this one was worth paying a monthly fee FFS (and swiftly writing in your diary a reminder to CANCEL THE SUBSCRIPTION).
Now that we're so attached, it can seem like there was never a time when screens weren’t constantly there, holding our whole lives, swipeable and easy, with constant connection. But I remember sitting in Crewe train station attempting to write a message to my now-husband, while zooming in and constantly accidentally clicking out of the box and losing signal and it basically being A RIGHT PAIN.
You’d get an email saying you’d had a message – meaning it was, with a log-in, at least three whole clicks before you even saw a message. Imagine. For good or bad, I don’t imagine many 2am-after-a-night-out hook-ups were swiftly organised using the site. For one thing, in the early days at least, you’d have had to pop home and boot up your computer.
You would also get a percentage score, something to help with the decision. My husband - who is much nicer, more sentimental and good at remembering things (like that one of my pictures apparently had me meeting Rafa Benitez at a book signing lol) than me – says we were 82% matched.
On the whole though, it did mean more time and more thought. ‘I think people were far more invested when it was desktop dating – messages weren’t so quick fire as you couldn’t just do it on the train or at your desk,’ a friend agrees. ‘You’d be far more likely sit down in the evening and reply.’ That also meant, of course, that it wasn’t quite as stressful when someone didn’t come back to your straight away.
Acknowledging that shift in the world, the Guardian Soulmates statement added: ‘The online dating world is a very different place to when we first launched online in July 2004. There are so many dating apps now, so many ways to meet people, which are often free and very quick.
‘Whilst Soulmates has always been a premium offering, focused on creating a safe and fun space for like-minded people to meet and hopefully find love, we find ourselves as very little fish in a very big pool.’
And that was the other thing about Soulmates – some did consider it premium. A place to find the marrying kind. Perhaps that was true for some but I’m personally not quite sure why – most of us were on paid and free sites and apps alike by the mid-10s. While my husband and I always say we’d probably never have connected IRL, I did also (probably by matter of age, geography) also come up on his Tinder between the two times we met (he says he closed the app rather than say yes or no).
But the idea that it was a space for ‘like-minded people’ prevailed. There was, from the experiences of me and my friends at least, a definite type of man who would only use the site.
‘It was definitely a place to find the super socialists,’ remembers one friend. ‘One guy I messaged was big into the CND and his main hobby was doorstepping and campaigning. He asked if I wanted to go doorstepping on our first date. Errrr…Nope.’
But I should say for fairness, that there also seemed to be a ‘type’ of woman too. One of my male friends adds: ‘My main memory is that everyone said they were, “equally at home doing Tough Mudder or curling up on the sofa and setting the world to rights with a bottle of wine.” Like, every single one said that. In the whole world.’
The statement, of course, focuses on all the good times, as we all do when it comes to relationships, in fairness, saying: ‘While we love Guardian Soulmates, it is the right time for us to bow out. We do so with a heavy heart, but with incredible memories and happiness for the relationships we have helped to create that will live on.’
Whether for good or bad, the memories of any dating sites definitely do live on… and if nothing else, that’s given me and my friends a few laughs on WhatsApp this afternoon.
READ MORE: Breaking Lockdown And Messy Rooms: These Are The Biggest Dating Turn-Offs Right Now
READ MORE: 25 Things You'll Only Know If You've Tried Online Dating