Last year I relied upon the distraction of my love life to avoid pondering the amount of work I hadn’t handed in. So when I found out that Sunday Life was going out the window in Easter Term, I panicked. This year, I’m determined to not let this affect the amount of attention I receive from the opposite sex. By attention I don’t mean attempting to find a suitable candidate to fall in love with me over the next few weeks; all I want is some excitement in my life. And by excitement I mean fleeting eye contact while I’m unsuccessfully dodging tourists down King’s Parade. Let’s not be too unrealistic.

My tip for my fellow Tinderers (tinderees?) is to match with everyone you know and totally ignore the rest of the stack

My mum seems to have more ambitious plans for my Easter Term love life though. The other day, she was telling me to get out of my room and wander around town. I initially thought she was prioritising my need for some fresh air and exercise until she also suggested I put some effort into how I look while on this walk. This soon turned into her explaining her great plans for me to bump into a fellow Cambridge student on the street and fall in love instantly. I think she may have spent way too much time on Crushbridge herself and now believes that this is the only way to find yourself a boyfriend in this city… Maybe it is but I’m not going to peg all of my hopes on someone expressing their admiration for my star patterned dungarees on the internet – hint hint – so I’m also taking the added precaution of attending every social opportunity thrown at me. Or, in the case of me attending a swap I wasn’t invited to on C-Sunday, not thrown at me. I still spend a slightly more than necessary amount of time walking around the city centre though.

I like to see myself as the only source of entertainment in my friendship group so I’m constantly looking for interesting discussion points from my day to talk about at dinner. Unfortunately for my friends, these mainly involve detailed descriptions of my current love prospects and my chances of ever actually talking to them. But where to find these crushes? Using my slightly superior knowledge of Maths than the general public and endless experience gained from scrolling through Crushbridge, I came up with the genius idea of only studying in the CMS library for the foreseeable future. This would allow me to be admired by the optimal gender ratio – for a straight female at least.

Unfortunately, it seems that the rest of the student population also managed to grasp the concept of ratios in school, and I’m apparently not the only one to have noticed that girls in the CMS seem to be receiving an unfair proportion of Crushbridges. When I turned up to the Betty and Gordon Moore Library (no surprise that no one bothers using its proper name) I ended up surrounded by some of the most attractive girls I’d ever seen and I could only last two hours before I had to head somewhere I could guarantee I’d be the most admired in the room – my bed.

So real life interactions don’t seem to be working for me and I’m back to the trusted internet. Luckily some genius human being has invented an app for you to judge other people in the local vicinity purely by a maximum of six photos and a few lines of attempts at original banter. Yep – you’ve guessed it – I joined the world of Tinder and it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. I may not have found the love of my life quite yet but my dinner conversations with friends are now way more interesting (if you enjoy talking about my love life which, let’s face it, everyone does). My tip for my fellow Tinderers (tinderees?) is to match with everyone you know and totally ignore the rest of the stack. That way, every day suddenly becomes filled with lingering eye contact that you can analyse for hours. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not attracted to them, or you can’t bear their personality; just guessing what the other person is thinking when they see you is entertaining enough. Maybe I’m just easily amused, but it’s led to all sorts of interesting situations.

I could go to the lengths of actually attending all my lectures in order to get noticed; revising somewhere edgy and aesthetic where other people can see how put together I am; finding some friends who’ve finished their exams so I can go on townie nights out and writing even more Crushbridges than I already do. However, I’m prepared to argue that my friends and I would have very uneventful lives if I wasn’t single. Though, if anyone wants to try and prove me wrong I could be on board. Hit me up.