“Hi I’m Jade… 5’10 with heels, keen netballer, fun maximiser, holiday fiend & all round catch. Looking for a partner in crime to explore the globe with. Must like laughing & adventure. A passion for vegetables, a bonus.”
That was me. Encapsulated in a dating app nutshell. The latest reincarnation of my profile that I had showcased on umpteen different apps & websites over the best part of a year & I was bored of it. The sales pitch, the awkward opening banter, the discovery, always in person, that six foot isn’t a universally recognised unit of measurement.
It had been fun at first but there comes a point, specifically when Happn informs you that you’ve swiped left 32,016 times that carpal injury becomes a legitimate hazard.
My husband wasn’t living within the M25.
As far as my maxed-out Tinder radiuses were concerned he wasn’t herding livestock in the Highlands or drilling for oil in the North Sea either.
Which begged the question, ‘where the hell was he?’
Somewhere out there was the man I was destined for. My other half. The great love story. The person who would complete me and finally make it all make sense.
Yet for some inexplicable reason, my prince was playing hard to get.
I was rapidly exhausting options on where to find him. I certainly wasn’t going to meet him at work. Not unless I possessed some previously undiscovered ability to turn gay men straight.
I worked in the fashion industry as a fit model, sometimes known as a fitting model (definitely not to be confused with fitness model) who acts as a human pin cushion for fashion designers and buyers to check the fit and visual appearance of their designs, effectively acting as a live mannequin.
Yes, somehow this is an actual job. One that essentially involves standing in a windowless cubbyhole while strangers aggressively pin trousers at your crotch for eight hours a day. Every day.
A job I had accidentally fallen into after university via a bizarre pipeline of promo work and a brief but catastrophic attempt at photographic modelling, cruelly sabotaged by my inability to blink both eyes in sync, and was now ten years deep with no clear exit strategy.
The money was absurdly good for the amount of actual work involved and, most importantly, it allowed me to continue with my actual full-time occupation.
