Internet dating: how do you decide who pays on a first date?

'Personally I don't like to be paid for on a date; it makes me feel uncomfortable, like you are not parting on even ground.' Photograph: Getty

Ever since I started writing about dating in Manchester, there has been one topic on which everyone I bump into has an opinion or anecdote: the first date.

The general consensus is that this primary stage of courtship holds the potential to be a universally soul-destroying experience – and a far cry from the image of two impossibly attractive people falling in love over champagne and tapas that dating sites would have you believe. It can all too often be a few hours of awkward conversation while staring intently at the emergency exits of a local bar working out your exit strategy.

Vacuum cleaners: not a good first date accessory. (Alamy)

You only have to scroll down the comments section of my first blog to read some absolute belters of first date stories. My favourite was the guy who admitted turning up on a first date brandishing a hoover and a shredder he'd just purchased from Argos, the latter of which his date carried for him to and from the restaurant. There was no follow-up date for the guy, or for his hoover, or his poor, lonely, loveless shredder.

Many of my friends have also come forth with tales of dating woe; these include one friend who ended up in the back of a police car due to his date thinking she was being kidnapped by their taxi driver (she wasn't); or the friend whose date repeatedly stroked a mole on her face and referred to it as her "pet" throughout the whole day.

One of my good friends has just embarked on her maiden voyage of internet dating this month and has managed to rack up quite a repertoire of disappointment in just a few weeks.

Her first ever internet date was rudely interrupted by her immune system, which inconveniently announced she had caught a stomach bug. So rather than concentrating on stimulating conversation, all her efforts were channelled into clinging on to some dignity in her local pub in Marple.

Her second date, who she was really looking forward to meeting, proceeded to repeatedly remind her it was her round as soon as he'd finished his drink, asked her for money to go to the bar and then ended the date by staring deeply into her eyes and announcing their "children would be beautiful". Which, she felt – after knowing someone for a grand total of about four hours and having no money left to start a family due to excessive round buying – was slightly jumping a massive cannon of a gun.

The issue of who pays on a first date is a subject close to the heart of Manchester-based blogger Cubicgarden, who wrote a blog about how my first column had irked him. Which in turn irked me a bit right back. So I got in touch with him to see if we could meet up on a non-date and iron out the irks.

Cubicgarden turned out to be a brilliant chap. He's a human dating Wikipedia, taking great interest in – and blogging about – everything from the technology to the dynamics involved in meeting someone new. His top topic being Who Pays On A First Date? We debated the topic over breakfast at FYG in the Northern Quarter last week. Personally I don't like to be paid for on a date; it makes me feel uncomfortable, like you are not parting on an even ground.

He regaled a tale that qualified my feelings about this further. A lady friend of his on a first date offered to pay her share but graciously accepted being paid for on the insistence of her date. She was then asked to pay back the money by said date when she turned down seeing him again due to there being no spark. Wow.

Over breakfast he also flagged up a couple of dating-themed TV programmes that have popped up recently on Channel 4. Dates, a dramatised series of first-date scenarios, for the first 2 episodes seemed a little far fetched. A bit like the cast of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps had grown up, found themselves in that there London and were being taken advantage of by savvy southerners they had met off the interwebs. But it was still very good TV and worth watching. By episode three the gorgeous Mia had gone on a date with a doctor, managing to convince him to smuggle her into his hospital where she posed as a doctor and wreaked some medical-related datey havoc.

I was about to go on my first date with Mr Facestalk from my last article around the same time. He too is an A&E doctor and so I was expecting great things from this first date. According to Dates, and from memory at least one episode out of every series of Casualty, I was destined to end up in A&E scrubs, pouting while performing a tracheotomy with an empty biro.

The diagnosis of bum scabies is not a first date winner. (Getty)

We met up at Parlour in Chorlton, and immediately my pupils did that dilating thing that subtly gives away your synapses shouting "I fancy your face!!". I already knew his profile pictures were not raging lies due to my outing myself the week earlier for having a good flick through his Facebook pictures, but in the flesh he was even lovelier.

We hit it off immediately, and so without thinking I broke two of my first date rules and went for a quiet walk in secluded woodland, down the side of a deserted river with a man I'd just met off the internet. Luckily, doctors come with a CRB check so I figured this would be OK. Well, to be exact, it was a walk through Chorlton Waterpark over to Jackson's boat pub. He didn't murder me, nor me him. So far so good.

We were getting on brilliantly when the drunkest person in the pub stumbled over. He approached us because I am "a ginger", and so was he. And in his drunken state I appeared to be a big ginger homing beacon attracting him like a pissed moth.

On asking my date what he did for a living and my date replying that he was a doctor, the drunk then stood up, dropped his trousers, bared his backside and presented us with what was "one of the worst cases" of bum scabs my date had ever seen. I thought putting on my anorak on because it was raining had killed the romance a little, however bum scabies pretty much batted the romance out of the beer garden and over to the other side of Sale.

My date then dutifully diagnosed him and advised him to stay off the beer as that was likely to be causing the issue, to which the drunk gracefully told him to fuck off and waddled back over to the other side of the beer garden.

It was time to leave; there had been no biro tracheotomies or flirting with a defibrillator, but this was Chorlton and not telly so we kept it real, went back to his and ate a couple of kebabs in the back of his campervan while listening to some music. (Not a euphemism!).

As for who paid? We split it down the middle.

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Internet dating: does an innocent Facebook check make you a stalker?

'The first man in months I had been truly excited to meet and I’d blown it because technology had allowed me to get my stalk on' Photograph: Robin Beckham / BEEPstock / Alam/Alamy

In my last stint as a single female 13 years ago, I distinctly remember technology playing a fairly minor part in the dating process.

The technology involved was simple: one phone to swap numbers, text, call and play Snake on; one tape-to-tape or CD burner to make meaningful yet vomit-inducing playlists; and lastly, for a very short period of time as a 16 year old college student, we all acquired pagers.

The primary purpose of the pager was so our hormone-driven admirers could call some poor unsuspecting woman in a call centre and relay bilge such as "I think you're well fit. x Simon". Meanwhile your mum was simultaneously relaying a message to another poor woman in the same call centre, yelling "Where are you? If you are with Simon you are in BIG trouble lady."

Back then, if you wanted to stalk someone, you had to get off your backside and physically follow them around. Or just sit on their garden wall for a few hours – as one of my dear school friends did with Richard Madeley for a short while. It took real effort and just wasn't possible at the swipe of a fingertip.

However, the reality of modern dating involves not just the mobile, but mobile apps, dating websites, Facebook, Skype, meaningful yet vomit-inducing Spotify playlists and, with one particular person I met last year, an interesting reliance on Words With Friends to flirt. The ways to communicate, connect and follow what someone is up to are now legion.

Salsa dancing: a source of hot men? Photograph: Esme McAvoy

When I first wrote about my internet dating frustrations, struggling to meet someone I clicked with in Manchester, people began offering up some appreciated alternative solutions to try. There were a lot of people that suggested salsa dancing. Have I missed something here? Has salsa suddenly become the single man vacuum while I was off being married? Sucking them in and snaking them about on the Northern Quarter's Copacabanas dance floor? Unfortunately, lacking any sort of passion for the music, I'd just be a badly dancing salsa fraud attending for no other reason than to perv, and so figured I'd look into some of the other suggestions first.

Another idea (possibly my favourite), was to prowl around my local supermarket, judging a potential partner's shared moral values based on the contents of his shopping trolley. I've always viewed Hulme Asda as a vortex of sexual tension. When the students are around, you can hardly move in there for the pheromones floating down the aisles, as sexy eyes are made over the instant noodles. But to walk up to someone going about their daily life, and strike up a conversation because we both pay that bit more for some fair trade bananas … well, seemed just that: bananas. I just don't have that sort of confidence. Neil Strauss I am not.

So once again I turned back to technology. Someone had flagged up True View, a subscription-free dating app designed to match you to people based on a "true view" of who you are and what you get up to. The concept is a good one: you use a drop-down menu of Facebook-style updates to log things you are doing, and the little True View robots start to match people to you who are logging similar activities. So far, so good.

I set my preferences to men within a hundred-mile radius.

Ahh. Five men. Five whole men who were "eating their dinner", "watching TV" or "going for a jog". Nevertheless I was determined to give it a go. So also started logging when I was "eating my dinner", "being a ninja" (there was no option for climbing) and "working on a proposal". Fantastic, I was to the world of True View a hungry ninja with a desk job.

Even ninja skills didn't seem to be a turn-on.

One of the five men did get in touch. But, by his own admission, this was not because he was intrigued by my ninja skills, or even that he liked my profile picture, but because I was the only woman in a 50-mile radius on the app. He then informed me he likes long walks down the side of quiet canals, which is probably perfectly innocent, but happens to be in my top three things not to do with a man you just met off the internet (along with strolls down dark alleys and jaunts in secluded woodlands). He seems like a perfectly nice person, but other than basic human instincts such as eating, we seem to have very little common ground and the conversation fizzled out.

Overall, True View is an interesting idea, if you live in London you would probably have a far different experience with more people to chat to. But for now, there just aren't enough people on there north of the gap to make it a realistic option.

I turned back to the cynical comfort of my online dating profile, where I could see there was a message in my inbox. It was a lovely message. It was funny, it didn't accuse me of having a penis or contain anything sexually explicit like some I had received in the past. I replied, and over the course of a couple of days we had a bit of banter and found out we shared a similar passion for certain genres of music, sports and pastimes. He signed off one message using his full name.

As fellow internet daters can testify, the person on the end of the keyboard could be a far cry from their pictures or who they claim to be. This is a very obvious pitfall of meeting in this way. So when the opportunity presented itself to increase safety and check he was who he claimed to be, I took it. I typed his name into Facebook and up he popped.

Ooh, we have a mutual friend … Ooh, he has an open profile! As I had a quick look – predominantly to ensure there was no wife – I went back to writing my reply, referencing, to my horror after I pressed send, something I'd seen on his Facebook page.

Shit!

Shit! Shit! Shit!!!

This is where the cruelty of technology comes into play. With online dating, you can see when someone has logged on, you can see if your message has been read, so you fully know when you are not being responded to. BECAUSE YOU ARE QUITE EVIDENTLY A STALKER!

The next 24 hours were spent cringing, peering through my fingers at my dating profile, while my friend at work repeated in a less than convincing tone: "He might just not notice?!"

But he HAD logged on, and he HAD read the message, and HAD NOT replied. Of course he hadn't replied, because in my attempt to check he wasn't married or bonkers, I'd outed myself for seemingly acting a bit bonkers. The first man in months I had been truly excited to meet and I'd blown it because technology had allowed me to get my stalk on.

I'd had it with technology and dating, I was ready to try Salsa. I logged back onto my profile to cancel the auto renewal, If I was going to make a prat of myself on the dancefloor, I was going to need beer funds.

But to my surprise, my inbox had a message. And it was from him. I cringed, expecting it to be a question on how the hell I would know he had a "lovely looking camper van?!" But it wasn't. It didn't even mention it, there was no reference to my evident Facestalk faux pas. It was a message simply asking me if I'd like to "meet up for a drink … ?"

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