FITNESS FIRST DATES

Forget after-work drinks or awkward coffees. In today’s Tinder-driven world, there’s a case to be made for sweating away your first-date facade. One swiped out journalist swaps bars for barbells in her quest for love

- Emily Pritchard

It’s a Thursday night and I’m 15 minutes into a first date when I find myself hunched over a sink, paper towels in hand, rinsing my hair, face and eyeball of sticky white fluid. It’s liquid chalk (though I know your mind will have gone elsewhere), and it turns out it’s an occupational hazard of going bouldering with a man you met on Bumble. In the two years since my last relationship ended and I emerged blinking into today’s swipe-right culture, I’ve engaged in blue-tick dramas, made small talk over more house wines than I care to count and met identikit men with identikit stories. I don’t blame the people, it’s the system that’s trapped me in a digital dating groundhog day. When the shop window to your personality is six painstakingly chosen pictures and a carefully crafted bio, it’s no wonder we’re all window dressing, and it means the offline version of someone you have the hots for is often a let-down. Factor in, too, a neverending carousel of people to swipe right on and who can blame us for filling awkward silences with repurposed anecdotes? So when I learnt that 83 per cent of people who regularly work out want a partner who is equally active, according to dating site Zoosk, and ticketing platform Eventbrite has logged a staggering 389 per cent increase in quirky dating events in Australia in the past five years, I decided I’d wasted my last Thursday evening Google Mapping my way to an off-the-radar bar, only to be left considering alerting the ACCC to the identity fraud enabled by dating profiles. No more. It’s time to swap a dimly lit bar for a strip-lit gym in the hope of spending real time with IRL versions of whoever I swipe positive on.