'My Date Wanted to Visit a Butcher Shop After a Jazz Gig'

This July, we’re heating things up with Sex-Rated: The VICE Guide to Sex in India. Come with us as we dive deep into Indian sexuality, as well as cherry-pick some of the best videos and stories about sex from VICE around the world. Read more here.

I am a 26-year single girl in the city. I have been in Delhi all my life. I work as an editor at one of the publishing houses. There was a time when I was serial dating. It got bizarre after a point. All I met were married people with children who wanted to just have a foursome or something… It’s so sad for a single person. You meet people and nothing comes out of it.

There are stock images that people put up on Tinder. There are pictures of Adityanath and yoga and tigers. I used to screenshot the photo and send them to my friends just for laughs. Then I started an Instagram page where I uploaded strange Tinder profiles during Christmas weekend last year (December 2017). I had reached a stage of dating fatigue, you know. I need my shits and giggles, screw finding true love. Or love.

My audience is not everyone. It’s people in their mid 20s, who are exhausted by the dating options they have. My audience is the kind of people who are looking for some kind of arrangement, if not necessarily love.

My worst dating experiences in the city? It’s a competition between one where the guy was obsessed with my boss and only talked about him, his kids and his Twitter account (that I update on his behalf, a fact he wasn’t aware of) and the other, which incidentally happened to be my first Tinder match/guy I went out with in 2014. The guy offered to take me to a butcher shop (MI at Lodhi Road) for dinner after we wrapped up a jazz gig at IIC. He said he didn’t have enough money to eat out. He wanted to pick raw kebabs and fry them at home. But after I said no, he mentioned he’s meeting his PR friend at Monkey Bar.

The boss-obsessed guy and I ended our date with a handshake. The butcher shop fella just left me after the gig since I refused to accompany him to the butcher shop. Both are decently popular figures on the Indian Internet/journalism scene. The latter is always messing with people on Twitter. The former is a journalist with a top daily.