I’m sitting in a bar, waiting to be chatted up. I am, after all, visibly single according to a small, rubbery turquoise ring on my finger. The bar fills, it gets late, I get another drink, nothing happens, then finally, an hour and a half into my stake-out, by which point I’ve become tipsy and have been trying to make it as obvious as possible, flapping my hand around like an air hostess, a tallish man with dark hair comes to speak to me. He’s been sitting with his friends and appeared to have clocked me earlier in the evening. Now he wants to know if I’ve been stood up. “Not quite,” I say as he hovers. Still, the ring seems to work, even if he’s not wearing one himself.
Every now and again one of these gimmicky dating ideas comes along and this one is the Pear ring (£20 for three in small, medium and large sizes). Ten years ago it was “single bracelets”, which you wore for the same reason you’d wear this ring, to “identify” yourself as single and make it clear you’d be game to be approached IRL. Pear rings, described as “the opposite of an engagement ring”, are designed to delete the need for dating apps, something which 10 years ago the (also rubber and loudly-coloured) bracelets couldn’t use as a tag-line.
But by 2022, when 366 million people were using dating apps and those of us on them are getting waterboarded daily by madly modern behaviour like cat-fishing, ghosting and breadcrumbing that can only exist online, no wonder there’s a call for a more retro approach to meeting people. If everyone single wore a ring indicating their relationship status, it would delete the need for apps, the theory goes, as well as any awkward conversations in bars or on the bus while we try to meet someone the old-fashioned way. Pear describe their uprising as the “world’s biggest social experiment”, but while they claim that they’ve already had two sell-out dispatches (of an unknown number) globally, and are now 94 per cent sold out, until they’re still more known I can’t quite see how they’ll work. The company admits that they’re “subtle” but for the first whole week
The creators admit they’re “subtle” but for the first week I’m wearing one, no-one notices whatsoever
It’s only when it’s a Thursday night and I’m sitting alone in a bar wearing it that this tall, dark-haired man notices it, or me, or both. By then he’s less than a metre away and the eyesore of a ring is on the hand I’m using to hold my glass of wine. “I like your rings,” he says, “what’s that one? I’ve never seen one like that before.” He’s looking at my right hand, where there’s an antique Wedgewood ring of my mother’s. I’m confused. “I thought you’d come over because of this one,” I tell him, pointing to the turquoise one on the other hand. His brow scrunches. “What’s that?” he asks. Could he really be chatting me up IRL without a prompt, I wonder?
The idea that people can’t — or won’t, or at least don’t feel comfortable — asking someone if they’re single in person anymore is part and parcel of the dating apps success.
“Especially with the younger generation who grew up on the apps, but also for middle-aged daters who have had to get used to more techy, texting-dating, we’ve become obviously out of practice with speaking in real time without premeditating our responses,” says Martine Davis, founder of Page Introductions, a matchmaking service designed to take things back to basics. It’s the same reason speed-dating and singles nights have come back into fashion, she adds. “The way daters use the apps has become less reliable in so many ways from fake profiles to stretching the truth with personal information and people have got so fed up they want to get back to basics by getting out and getting on with it. A visual clue like a ring is a cute idea, but I’m not sure people are observant enough to spot one,” she admits. “In cities people rush around with their eyes on their phones, minds elsewhere and avoid eye contact at all costs. We’d have to be very aware of what something like a single ring meant in order to decipher what it could mean if we caught a glance that it existed at all.”
What it does do, I guess, is make the wearer feel more single because you keep catching a glimpse of it yourself. It’s a reminder that maybe you could be looking out a bit more and down at your phone less and if that then prompted eye contact with someone and a conversation about dating, then maybe it could actually work, I think. The colour then makes more sense, because it’s an ugly thing. The LGBT version is rainbow-striped but the hetero singles turquoise rubber version is about as far away from sexy as you can get. But maybe that makes it more obvious? I do get a couple of “That’s an…. interesting ring”-type comments (although neither lead to a date).
After a week, I don’t feel any more empowered or noticeable to anyone, and it also seems a bit... hard
It’s just that after a week, I don’t feel any more empowered or noticeable to anyone, and it also seems a bit... hard. If we just opened with “are you single?” would we not get there along a far less meandering route? I tried this in a bar (with the ring on — not that he noticed) and the guy said, “Sort of… I’m in an open relationship” so I walked away. Job done. Messy. “Open” relationships are not for me but if we’re to use this as an example it looks like the ring is at least making me more flirtatious.
“Most people would love to know if that attractive stranger who’s caught their eye is definitely single before approaching so the idea of wearing a physical symbol of your availability and sexuality on paper sounds appealing,” says dating expert Hayley Quinn. “But it’s important to remember that while a ring might let you know who’s open to a conversation, it’s far from a given that there will be mutual interest. Ring or no ring, people will still have to go through the process of filtering who they want to go on to date. But even with the complexities involved, meeting people spontaneously in real life is a wonderful thing to explore if you’re single. If using a Pear ring helps you feel more able to do that, then it may be worth wearing just for that reason,” she explains.
I decide to try the ring in different locations after the initial bar experiment, sporting in on the bus, on a train, in the supermarket and essentially everywhere else I go for three weeks. Does it get me more dates? Unfortunately, not. It’s only when I hang it round a chain on my neck that anyone seems to clock it’s there, but the two times that happens (one male, one female) both ask only, “What’s that?” rather than, “Should we go out for a drink?” When I explain it’s a single ring, they both ask, “Why?”
Women, particularly, can’t get used to the idea. Fed up of guessing what people think of it, I decide to ask various people in bars and female opinion is beyond confused. “What’s the point though?” they say, after I echo the Pear ring philosophy. According to Quinn, women take much comfort in being able to decline unwanted come-ons by saying they’re already in a relationship, so maybe that’s part of it. When it comes to men, none can imagine wearing one, but eight out of 10 I ask admit they’ve been made to feel that IRL chat-ups are unwanted and “too much”. “You don’t want to be one of those creeps accused of harassing someone or whatever,” one 31-year-old man tells me.
What a shame that some men have ruined it for other men, I thought (knowing they had), but still believing there’s a way back to the IRL connection that everyone craves. If we could all just be a bit nicer to each other, maybe we wouldn’t need to buy rings or bracelets and “out” ourselves as single. There’s also the fact that these are plastic and with three different sizes sent to every person (and presumably the two that don’t fit are thrown away), it’s not exactly an eco-way to find a date. Anything that rebrands being single as more positive, I’ll try, and when all your friends are getting engaged it’s nice to feel that you can also wear your relationship status on your hand.
Yet maybe we could all just modernise the most basic chat-up line in the book (“are you single?”) and see where that gets us, I had to conclude after three weeks of pretty diabolic results from the ring. There’s nothing like losing something — in this case IRL interaction — to remember how much you missed it, right?
