Dating Dos And Don'ts: After Helping To Fix 100 Blind Dates, Ursula Hirschkorn Discovered Just How To Avoid A Match Made In Hell

Like a latter-day day Cilla Black, every week for a year I wrote the dating column for the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine, and thanks to this unprecedented access into the hearts and minds of today’s singles, I learnt the deepest secrets of Britain’s lonely hearts.

While we all know what it is like to be young, free and single, most of the men and women who went on the dates were over 40, and trailing broken hearts and broken marriages behind them. With almost half of all marriages ending in divorce and the average age at which couples split being 44 for men and 41 for women, this is a typical picture of the dating scene in the UK.

The accepted wisdom is that it is women who are searching for a relationship, while men want to sow their wild oats, and so it may be when you are in your 20s. But when you reach battle-scarred middle age, it’s all change and it’s the men who are in search of love, while the women are off having a wild old time.

In contrast, men who have come out of long-term relationships want nothing more than to dive back into one. One man applied just nine months after his wife died in a desperate attempt to regain what he had lost.

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