Dating
If you like First Dates, you'll love This is Dating
The tagline of This is Dating, a new podcast from across the pond, is ‘Come for the cringe, stay for…
Why can't men write about sex?
Not long ago I was a regular Tinder user. Having heard that gingers were romantically incompatible, I decided to mix…
The rise of vaccine virtue-signalling
I’ve bemoaned the ‘no Tories please’ line on dating profiles many a time. Closed-minded and over-used, it’s a banal way…
Dear Mary: How do I cope with cooking for food snobs?
Q. I have a delightful young goddaughter who, thanks to the virus, I have not seen since last year. Her…
I’ve started a dating site for lockdown sceptics
I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of…
How Covid has changed the dating game
Covid has changed the dating game
Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…
Would your son marry me? Inside Shanghai’s marriage market
Shanghai ‘How old are you, young lady?’ A small, curious crowd starts to surround me. ‘How tall are you? What…
Dear Mary: How can I face the friends who warned me that my girlfriend would dump me?
Q. Previously a long-term and content single man, earlier in the year I began a relationship with a wonderful girl,…
Dear Mary: My new boyfriend is too short. Can I make him wear shoe lifts?
Q. An acquaintance, whom I admire but don’t know well, sent me a ‘begging’ letter to donate to a charity…
Joan Collins: Want to know why all the Oscar films are boring? I’ll tell you
I’ve been meaning to write a Spectator diary since the summer but as a Gemini with Aries rising I find…
Dangerous liaisons
Lothario, Don Juan, philanderer, ‘naughty’, ‘plays away’ — all terms for men who have an overwhelming drive to seduce scores…
One night in the backwoods
The man I met in the moose-hunters' bar, and what happened between us
How the 'dating apocalypse' led me to vajazzle my armpits
Why I went looking for love in the armpits of strange men
Dear Mary: help me to engineer a date with this charming army officer
Q. I have a deep crush on an army officer I’ve met through work. He is decisive, practical and doesn’t…
The sad decline of the teenage snog
Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…
Erica Jong's middle-aged dread
Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only…
I wouldn't want to be a girl in the age of Tinder
Romance is being killed off by the brutal marketplace of dating apps such as Tinder
Dear Mary: What can I do about my neighbours’ downmarket recycling?
Q. Since recycling was introduced in our village, the wall at the end of our drive has become the depositing…
Dear Mary solves problems for Jim Broadbent, N.M. Gwynne, Jesse Norman and others
Once again Mary has invited some of her favourite figures in the public eye to submit personal queries for her…
Revealed: the marriage gap between Britain's rich and poor
Marriage has emerged as a serious – and perhaps surprising – social divide
A novel that will make you want to call social services
Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…
