"Before the pandemic, I went on a date with a guy who looked so fun in his pictures. But I got there and he was the tiniest little nerd I ever met. It took five seconds and I knew, no."
Hocking said the lockdown restrictions meant she had to embark on virtual dates with people she matched with on dating apps – which meant she could quickly weed out the ones she wasn't interested in without wasting entire nights on dates that didn't have a future. After hitting it off over the phone with one match, they moved to video calls.
"We moved to Zoom. We did Houseparty dates. It went really well and we had 10 dates," she said, adding things turned sexual by the fourth call. They then organised a real life date at the guy's apartment – and things didn't go as well as they did in the virtual world.
"We met in real life and it was really good but we just got blind (drunk)," she said. "And the next day I thought I liked him. In my head I thought this is the best story ever, we met in isolation. It was so romantic! We could say we were stuck in isolation and now we're married. But sadly, no."
What ended the fairytale?
"I was a bit of a monster on a couple of dates. I just wasn't the best-behaved person and then he said to me, 'No, I'm not feeling it. I don't want to talk to you again'," she explained.
"It was the night we had a lot of gin and I might have said a few ugly truths he didn't like. I basically went white girl wasted and said, 'I'm not in this for sex! And if you're in this for sex, you can get lost!' He didn't like that.
"So when he sent me a big message at 6.30 the next morning saying, 'This is why I never want to see you again', I just wrote 'fair call'."
