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.
