real life

These girls need your advice. Urgently.

Note: These are not the girls who wrote to Mamamia. But for the purpose of this article, just imagine they are.

Dear Mamamia readers,

Today we are asking for your help.

We don’t want your $1 a day, we’re not telling you to sign yourself up for a lifetime of donations, we’re not even asking you to put your clothes in the overflowing charity bin outside Coles.

Today we want you to donate your dating advice to a worthy cause…

Here at Mamamia we are always excited when we see our email inbox for submissions overflowing with great ideas for new stories.

 

But reading those submissions can be a bumpy broken down truck ride of emotions.

First, you’ll be laughing so hard you spray tea out of your nose as one writer tells you about going clothes shopping with her smelly, grunting teenage son and her feeble attempts to convince him to ‘wear a little colour’.

Second, you’ll be swallowing back tears as you read a woman’s story about her sister’s battle with cancer – which doesn’t have the happy ending you were desperately hoping it would.

And then sometimes, well, just sometimes, we get sent something like this:

Dear Mamamia

My girlfriends and I are in crisis! It appears that we have all simultaneously lost our ‘touch’ when it comes to dating.  We are therefore absolutely no use to each other in providing any form of constructive dating advice. I don’t know how or why this has happened – but it is diabolical!

The issue with my girlfriends has not so much been meeting guys, or even securing a second date: the downfall seems to be occurring after about the fifth date when some of the mystery appears to have warned off and it becomes evident that they are also interested. Therefore, the issue is more about HOLDING the attention rather than simply gaining the attention!

Soooooo we were therefore wondering if Mamamia could help us… Gen xx

Oh Gen. We know how you feel, we really do but we’re not eHarmony or Grindr for straight women (although admittedly, that might be kind of fun for a day at least).

And we love a good set-up as much as anyone but really? We can help you to tell your stories of woeful love and share them with the world. Oh yes. We can run a post where you reclaim your single-ness, wear it as a badge of pride and tell all the judgmental types to bugger off. Oh yes, that too.

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But we’re not a go-to guide for dating tips… Or are we?

Just last week we ran a post from Emma, who has just moved to Sydney and is feeling a bit lonely and isolated. We were overwhelmed by the response from women all over Australia offering to take Emma out to coffee, or writing in to tell Emma about great mother’s groups in her area and making suggestions about how she could meet new people.

That experience showed us – once again – that the power of the Mamamia community is huge. And today we’re asking you to use that power – for the good of Gen and her girlfriends.

MM-ers: Today you have a new task and that is to help these women to emerge from the dark and scary world of dating doom and destruction.

We want you to help them move beyond a lifetime of dating fails and to graduate with a high distinction average and first class honours from Relationships 101.

Or at the very least, we want you to send us the names and photos – and, quite honestly we won’t say no to phone numbers – of every eligible bachelor you know.

Whatchya got?

And if you need a little inspiration for your task, we thought this gallery of bachelors might be helpful: