If you've been set up on one too many disastrous blind dates or have let all your Bumble matches time out one too many times, you may be asking yourself the question: why am I still single?
Dating in 2023 is tough, so to help singletons navigate the murky waters of swiping on Tinder and sliding into DMs on Instagram, professional matchmaker Feargal Harrington and Irish Daily Mail features editor and columnist Lisa Brady have created an Irish dating podcast intriguingly called Is This Why You're Single?
"People are just so fed up of the online dating exhaustion," says Feargal. "They're just sick of dealing with people who are maybe a little bit dishonest about who they are, what they are, what they're looking for."
Reflecting on the pitfalls and hurdles that many online daters are facing, Feargal says that distance is a huge issue, and while some singletons are setting their radius for matches on dating apps up to 50 kilometres away, others won't go beyond their local shop.
"There's a lot of things that people are doing that if they tweaked slightly they would get an awful lot more success."
As a single woman in her 40s, Lisa says that jumping back into the world of dating was a scary concept as online dating wasn't at all popular when she was single in her 20s and early 30s.
"It's like a pick 'n' mix out there, there are so many options, you just stick your hand in and you don't know what you're going to get," she laughs.
"It's like a different world, there's a whole new lexicon, there are kinds of rules and etiquette - and everyone loses their manners, I don't care what you say."
Although there may be a lot of accounts to swipe through, Lisa believes that there is ultimately "a very small pool of people" to choose from when it comes to finding potential matches.
Feargal argues that this isn't necessarily the case, although he does admit that age and location do come into play as there are "twice as many women living in urban areas than men" meaning that Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Galway, Belfast have twice as many females.
Additionally, he explains that there are more single women than men in the 20-30 age bracket but the situation flips for those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.
The matchmaker also notes that there is a "lack of organisation on men's part" when it comes to dating, and there are many 'Peter Pans' out there who are "commitment-phobic" and looking for much younger matches.
While some women are looking for slightly younger men, he says that the biggest issue in the singles he meets is a demand for a college education. He believes that too many women are equating intelligence with a degree and are missing out on great matches because of it.
As a mother herself, Lisa personally believes that it's better for people with children to date people with children: "That's just my experience, I think there's a mutual understanding."
"It's limiting yourself," notes Feargal. "There are amazing guys out there that probably would be the best fathers ever and there are people who had kids that should have never had kids."
While the two disagree on this point, they are both adamant that children should be brought up "from the get-go".
Listen back to the full interview above to hear more about online dating profiles, catfishing, chemistry, and sex on the first date.
