It was last Spring when desperation got the better of me! I finally bit the bullet and started "online dating". But with a vengeance - I joined about seven or eight dating sites in the space of a week! And after a month I found I was going online every day. It became an addiction very quickly. I wasn't even eating - I became glued to my screen for hours on end, sometimes until two or three in the morning. I was sending out dozens of emails to girls daily. Each week I'd easily send well over a hundred emails, sometimes more.

The trouble was, hardly any of the girls I was writing to would ever reply. occasionally I'd get an email back. But often the correspondence would fizzle out after two or three emails. Couldn't figure out where I was going wrong. Got advice from a couple of mates. A female friend of mine looked over my profiles and made some suggestions (talk about your interests a bit more, say what you can offer in a relationship, make yourself stand out from the crowd, add more humour). In fact, she even took some pretty cool digital photos of me which we uploaded on some of the sites. I even paid a "professional profile writer" sixty pounds to check and improve my profile. I really wanted to start getting women to respond to me. And I tried everything I could think of.

It got to around August. I still hadn't met anyone offline. It was now five months since I started "online" dating. I'd got nowhere. I'd spent time and money and probably wrote over 2,000 emails in that time. I had become so addicted that over the weeks and months I withdrew from my friends and went out less and less. By the Summer I wasn't getting out the house. I'd go to work, then rush home to get onto the internet. And I'd stay on my pc all night until I was so tired I was "forced" to go to bed. But in August I'd struck up what seemed to be an ongoing correspondence with a girl who gradually seemed more and more interested. My membership on some of the sites was shortly coming to an end and, just as it was doing so, this girl was writing to me more and more. She looked attractive in her photos, and she wrote great emails back. Some of them got a bit flirty and I really began to finally get a sense of optimism. Could it be that, after five months of continual and hectic emailing to everyone who was online dating on the planet, my luck would finally turn good?

After three weeks and around fifteen or so emails with this girl, I suggested we meet. She agreed. She offered me her number. I called her. we chatted. Oh yes we chatted alright - I think we were on the phone for a good six hours on our first phone call. I was truly taken aback by the experience. She said she felt really fantastic about me and couldn't wait to meet. We arranged to meet in two days, on the Thursday. The day after we spoke on the phone (the day before the day we'd arranged to meet) we swopped loads of texts, mostly quite flirty ones. Thursday arrived. The big day. After almost six months of online dating I was finally going to meet a girl for real. I was so excited by it all, much more so because of how much we'd both built this whole thing up.

We finally met. It was instant attraction I thought (although she was "larger" than she'd said in her profile and looked in her photos (who said the camera never lies? Some clever angles and she'd managed to somehow lose around four dress sizes!). Yes it bugged me, but I wasn't going to let it be an issue. And she was actually quite pretty. We had a drink, then another, and then another. By drink number four we were quite intimately entwined ... well we were snogging full on. Then, a couple more drinks further down the line we were doing more than snogging. This was great. No, this was amazing. She was amazing and she thought I was amazing. It seemed too good to be true. But it was happening. for real. She told me that she had to go away the next day for work and had to be up really early, but said she wanted to meet the day after, on saturday, and that she wanted to spend the weekend with me, sleep with me, and just spend time together. Well I was certainly up for that. We snogged loads before parting company at the station! I texted her a bit later. It was just to say what a great evening it had been and how fab and sexy I thought she was and that I couldn't wait until saturday. Didn't get a reply, but then I thought that's ok, she might be on the tube or something. texted again a bit later to say goodnight.

By next morning still no text from her. Hmmm.... odd I thought. Sent another text to say I hope she was ok and to say good morning. I went to work. Lunchtime, nothing. Mid afternoon, nothing. 4pm, nothing. 5pm, nothing. 5.30pm, nothing. 5.45pm, nothing. 5.50pm, nothing, 5.51pm, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. This was getting silly. I was staring at my mobile waiting for a text. But nothing. At 6.00pm I phoned. Yeap, you guessed it... straight to voicemail. Left a message. Sent another text and phoned again later that night. Hear nothing.