Online dating is the new normal, but getting to know a partner at work has many advantages.
There are many benefits to living near to a world-class teaching hospital — the time the paediatric team at St Mary's in west London saved my 17-month-old daughter's life certainly springs to mind.
Since then, my affection for National Health Service staff has been increased by eavesdropping. My journey to work goes through Paddington station, allowing me to overhear the St Mary's trainee and junior doctors discussing their love life.
I'm not planning to make my fortune writing a medical Mills & Boon any time soon, so here is what I have been able to glean from behind my FT: the training placements seem to dictate dating opportunities, and there is a fair bit of vetting by the peer group as these young people weigh up the suitability of potential partners they work and study alongside. Because it's a seven-year course, cursed with long hours and blessed with intense, life-and-death situations to face together, this medical mating ritual seems as sensible — and inevitable — as it always did. But the billing and cooing on the Bakerloo line bucks the trend.
Researchers have mapped the extraordinary rise of internet dating and its effects on other ways of meeting romantic partners — all have declined, including via family, school or work, as the lonely flock online in search of perfect strangers. Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University found, in a study a few years ago, that the internet provided a significant boost to the love lives of those who had "thin" opportunities — his term not for sizeist preferences but for a paucity of available partners offline — including gay people and older singletons. Meanwhile, the percentage of those who met "through or as co-workers" was being "crowded out" by the efficient sorting algorithms on dating sites.