Love, Or Something Like It

In Love, Or Something Like It, our new Metro.co.uk series, we’re on a quest to find true love.

Covering everything from mating, dating and procreating to lust and loss, we’ll be looking at what love is and how to find it in the present day.

In the crowded members’ bar of an agricultural show I was ducking behind my drunk friend, fighting to explain to her why I needed to hide. Across the dance floor, beer in hand, stood a man with whom I had spent a tedious first date at a medieval castle.

I’d not expected to see him again – we lived at opposite ends of Wales – but with a small, sparse population and few young people, dating in the countryside is a small world.

Although I grew up in Carmarthenshire, Wales, my first foray into the rural dating world didn’t come about until I moved back at 23. I soon realised that it was a world apart from the scene at my agricultural college, or the Jilly Cooper romance anticipated by my city-bound friends.

Anna Bowen stands amongst a herd of cows
Phone signal is patchy, and dates outside of pubs and the tourist season can be very isolated (Picture: Anna Bowen)

The dating narratives of millennial memoirs and magazine columns centre around Uber rides and pop-up restaurants and cocktails on rooftop terraces, so much so that it can be easy to forget that singletons in rural areas are also swiping right and left, and being set up by their friends, in the hope of finding love (or something like it).

Despite the supposed bucolic idyll of country life, the dating scene can still be cruel, tedious, and exhausting in equal measures.

I know people who log on to Tinder to a message telling them they have exhausted all potential matches in their catchment area, regardless of the range of their searches. It’s not uncommon to date someone who has previously dated your friends.

You are more likely to receive a reference for someone before you meet – news travels fast and anyone with a bad reputation will bear a red flag – though even if a prospective match is unknown there are other issues.

Anna Bowen riding a horse
I don’t know any women who have retained their surname after marrying, although a few vets have kept theirs professionally (Picture: Anna Bowen)

Phone signal is patchy, and dates outside of pubs and the tourist season can be very isolated. I had a policy of telling my brother where I was going and with whom – without the protection of a crowd of people and 3G it seemed too risky to meet strangers without a plan.

Rural communities also love gossip, which means that years after a short-lived relationship you will still be linked to that person. I once turned up to a work meeting and was asked ‘Didn’t you date X three or four years ago? You were one of the ones we never met!’

We’d been on a handful of dates but it was enough to be remembered in a county where people deep dive into the minutiae of their social network.

Before meeting my boyfriend on Bumble I had mostly dated men who were friends of friends, usually met at parties.

His profile photo looked familiar, and I soon found out that we had met a few months earlier at a work event. It can be very easy in the countryside to become immersed in local life and industries; I wanted someone with an open mind and a broad outlook, my boyfriend has both. Finding out that he binged podcasts on a wide range of subjects, and that he didn’t subscribe to rigid gender stereotypes made him a keeper.

Anna Bowen poses in a tree
Pub suppers were spent avoiding eye contact with an acquaintance at the bar (Picture: Anna Bowen)

Still, we spent our first date at a local beach overlooked by someone I knew who was out cantering her pony through the waves.

That’s dating in the countryside in a nutshell: it brings its own unique challenges, and takes an acquired sense of humour, but at heart it’s the same messy, wavering quest for love as anywhere else.

In a smaller community with fewer young people it may be that scarcity makes people work harder at their relationships, but I’d like to think that the ethos of country life, which typically revolves around hard work and a certain amount of loyalty, ensures that the majority aren’t looking for a quick win.

And young people in the countryside are as busy as their counterparts in urban areas: jobs are still stressful; hours can be long, and often irregular or seasonal in farming and tourism industries; people pack out their evenings with PT sessions, socialising, side hustles, caring, and aimless scrolling through Instagram. Dating still has to fit around life, rather than being a substitute for it.

The logistics of maintaining a relationship in the country may have made me a little more realistic, and perhaps a little less romantic as a result. Though perhaps it’s harder to get jaded when you look out at the changing seasons marked by harvest and newborn lambs and the first cows turned out to grass, rather than herds of humans migrating through grey streets.

Rural life is marked by the endless cycle of nature, and whatever happens in love, subconsciously you know that the fallow of winter will always be followed by the new life of spring.

Last week in Love, Or Something Like It: Being a matchmaker has taught me what true love really is

Write for Love, Or Something Like It

Love, Or Something Like It is a brand new series for Metro.co.uk, published every Saturday. If you have a love story to share, email rosy.edwards@metro.co.uk

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