Finding love on Twitter

I talk quite a bit about using facebook to find romance (in How To Start Dating And Stop Waiting) but does the same apply to that other social media giant? Is it possible to find love… on twitter? Writer Helen Hunt thinks so. It snuck up on her when she wasn’t even looking.

“I should probably start by saying that I wasn’t actually looking for love on Twitter. I’d been divorced for nearly ten years, I had my own house and four cats. Yes, four. Yes, I know … And I genuinely thought that was it; that was all that life had to offer.

As a writer, I mainly saw Twitter as a place to talk to other writers and gossip with my friends. I had no idea that it would spark a train of events that would lead to me swapping my single lifestyle for the life I have now, living with my partner and his three sons. (And still four cats.)

Back in November of 2011 I started chatting on Twitter to crime novelist Mike Walters. As with so many connections I’ve made on Twitter, I can’t exactly remember how it started. I suspect we were both chatting to other people in the writing world, and somehow our Twitter social circles and our conversations overlapped.

We started out by talking about writing. He was intrigued by my short story writing because it’s a form he’s never tried, and I was interested in his crime writing as that’s the genre I like to read. Then, as time went on, we started talking about more personal things and we realised we had a lot in common. We have similar political views and outlooks on life, and we realised that at various points in our lives we’d lived in the same places as each other.

I found out he was a widower and single parent to three kids. He found out I was single with four cats, but, amazingly, this didn’t put him off. Slowly the public timeline chatting drifted into private DM chatting and that’s when we decided to meet up.

When I mentioned that I had never been to Manchester, which is where one of Mike’s books is set, he offered to give me the official ‘Trust No One’ guided tour. I have to say, I’m still waiting for my guided tour, but we did meet up and we’ve never looked back since.

We first met ‘in real life’ in February of 2012. We took things fairly slowly at first, because of the children, but we moved in together in September 2013 and are now planning to get married.

It seems odd to talk about being attracted to someone on Twitter when you only have their words to go on, but for me I think it was the perfect way to start a relationship. After all, the way someone thinks about life and the words they use to communicate are so much more important than anything else about them.

I realised there was something special about Mike really early on in our Twitter communication, and everything else since then has just been a journey to prove that I was right.”

The moral of this story? Keep your eyes open because you never know where Mr or Ms Right might be lurking.

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Helen writes short stories and features for the likes of Woman’s Weekly, My Weekly, The Weekly News, Best, Yours, The People’s Friend, Prima,  This England… to name but a few. She tweets under the handle @hmhunt, and you can find out more about Helen on her website www.helenmhunt.co.uk

How To Start Dating And Stop Waiting is available from amazon or order it via your favourite bookstore.

 

From Invisible To Irresistible

Last week we talked about Goals and how to identify what yours should be using the ‘Vision’ method.

When I do this exercise in workshops there are a handful of Goals that come up time and time again. I blogged about the number one Goal of all time a few months back, but there’s another popular goal that easily takes the number two slot.

Even in this day and age of social media and online dating it seems that more people than ever find themselves sitting at home on a Friday night, with nothing more than a packet of crisps and a cat to keep them company. For some people that might sound like absolute bliss, but I’ve met many others who were hoping for a little more. At the very least someone who would sit between them and the cat, share the crisps, or bring their own bag for the occasional swapsie.

If finding and starting ‘a new relationship‘ made it into your Goals List then you’re in luck! Over the next few weeks I’ve got not one, but two books coming out on the subject.

How To Start Dating And Stop Waiting, my long awaited third How To book, will be released in paperback, audio and as an ebook, on the 14th of February this year; Valentines Day. If you enjoyed How To Do Everything And Be Happy, if you’ve ever found any of my advice useful, if you’re fed up with being single and would like 2014 to be full of love, lust or romance… well, this might just be the book for you. Subscribe to this blog (top right hand corner of this website – it’s FREE), or LIKE the facebook page, and I’ll be sure to remind you know when it’s available.

In the meantime, do you remember how I met Kate? (You can find out here, or listen to the radio interview I gave to BBC Broadcaster Matthew Bannister below). When I tell people the story of how I met my wife they nearly always get the short version. The one paragraph version. But there was quite a bit more to it than signing up for a flirting course and sitting myself next to the prettiest girl in the room. I also underwent something of a self imposed image makeover. I did anything I could to turn myself into a ‘accidental relationship’ waiting to happen.

Now, I’m not about to start handing out fashion advice or makeup tips. That’s not my bag. What definitely is my bag however is a slew of ideas based on my own experience and/or scientific research, on how you can influence and improve how people perceive you. Think of it as a step-by-step personal re-branding exercise, all wrapped up in a mini-book.

From Invisible To Irresistible is the shorter, quirkier, but none-the-less completely gorgeous companion guide to How To Start Dating And Stop Waiting. Through a series of twelve anecdotes I highlight (and fix) those underlying problems, that make otherwise attractive, charming people invisible to those they’d like to date.

Chapters include:

• Changing Your Mind – How you can think yourself more attractive, and why a little back-to-front logic might work wonders.
• Changing Your Image – Why it might be a good idea to cut off your hair (or grow it back again), how to shed pounds without spending a fortune, and why hiring a professional image consultant could be a waste of money.
• Changing Your Environment – Why sitting at home in front of the TV isn’t a dating strategy, why some of your friends are holding you back, and why it’s vitally important to have the right sofa.

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How I met Kate

Finding a wife wasn’t quite the breeze I always assumed it would be. It required a little effort, some planning, and a somewhat unorthodox approach to problem solving. You can find out more in this short audio snippet taken from a BBC interview with Matthew Bannister. Click the big play button in the middle of the image (or here if you’re reading this in an email).

You can listen to the full length interview here.

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