Cork singleton takes swipe at date culture

IF someone had told me ten years ago that I would write a book about my love life, I would have never believed them.

Me? A writer? You must be joking!

However, here I am, a published author, having written my first book, called Dating In Berlin, Tales Of Modern Love And Relationships.

The book was borne out of my frustration with the modern dating scene.

Quite often, after entertaining my friends with yet another dating story, I would get told that I should write a book. Most people might take that as a passing comment, but not me, I took it quite literally.

Before I left Cork for Germany in 2015, my dating life was pretty standard for the pre-Tinder era. When life was a bit more simple.

At the time, after only a couple of dates with someone, you were basically in a relationship and you expected it to last. So I naturally came to Berlin with the same mindset.

I moved out to this wild concrete jungle to seek new adventures. I already had Australia and South East Asia under my belt, now it was time to check out Berlin.

An auntie of mine emigrated here in the early 1980s, and 26 years later, I followed her.

Before moving, I was warned by my native Berliner cousin that ‘You won’t find a boyfriend here, it’s a singles city – people don’t find love as easily as they find a good time’.

I would soon come to learn that she was right!

All I got was a toxic dating culture full of cheap thrills, lies and painful experiences. After around 100 dates and a few ‘situationships’ into my Berlin dating career, I was feeling uninspired, flat and defeated.

While I’d picked up some funny and interesting stories along the way, I felt further away than ever from finding a decent man.

At last, about three years ago I met this guy and we dated for a couple of months. He was so kind and charming, I finally thought it was going somewhere. Then he cheated.

Rather than crying about it, I came home and put my pain to paper. I wrote the first chapter of my book that night, and realised the process of writing was really cathartic and made me feel so much better.

I decided to write under the pseudonym Lulu Johnson, to protect my real identity.

Once that first chapter was written, the floodgates opened to all of the other experiences that I had had in Berlin.

As the book started coming together, I realised I was onto something. I was finally writing the book everyone had told me to write.

At the same time, I was getting out all my pain and frustration, and using humour to heal my wounds.

As the stories kept coming, so too did the chapters. With every man I was meeting came a new life lesson. Lessons that I realised I wanted to share with other people who might be going through similar experiences.

It occurred to me that if I have felt this way, so many other people have too. Speaking about it could make someone feel less alone in this dating culture where we have all become disposable to one another.

My stories vary from the weird to the downright wild. From dating compulsive liars to sitting on a Tinder date with a literal axe murderer.

Written as a satirical fairy tale, I move chronologically through my dating stories. From Steve, AKA ‘Prince Charm Your Pants Off’, where I suffered emotional abuse, to the ‘Vegan Butcher’ who told me on our one and only date, that he had, and I quote, “chopped a man’s head off”.

The reader also meets the ‘Prince of Snakes’ the cheat, without whom this book may have never happened.

The stories, however, are not all mine. I wanted to have a broader perspective from the dating scene in Berlin, so I interviewed friends and acquaintances to get more varied dating stories. And they weren’t hard to find.

These shorter stories are used as interludes in the fairytale, for the reader to come up for air and to enjoy a little giggle or cringeworthy moment.

After almost two years of writing, I decided I needed to stop, or else I would never get the book out. The dating stories are endless, so who knows, there might be a second book one day!

After speaking with some friends, I realised the best route for me was self- publishing, so that is what I did. The book has been on Amazon since October, and in my first month alone I sold more than 100 copies.

Living in Berlin isn’t a requirement to be able to relate to the stories. The dating landscape has evolved globally from finding ‘The One’ to now finding ‘The One for Tonight’.

We are living in a society of abundance. We have unlimited choice at our fingertips, which has created a disposable dating culture, thus making it harder than ever to find someone who is willing to go the distance.

Gone are the days of strolling into a pub, chatting to a stranger, and seeing where life takes you. Now there’s the temptation to see if the next best thing is only a swipe away.

My hope for this book is to help and comfort people with my stories. I want to make the reader more aware of the signs of toxic relationships and all that is intertwined with dating. To also learn to not compromise your own self-worth and self-confidence because of someone else’s mistreatment.

Life is all about learning, and it’s important to grow from pain, as well as to try and enjoy life as best we can without being too hard on ourselves for past mistakes.

Dating In Berlin, Tales Of Modern Love And Relationships, by Lulu Johnson, is available on Amazon. For more, see https://www.datinginberlinbook.com/