It is a truth universally acknowledged that an economically independent professional woman in her thirties must be in search of a soul-mate and will ask herself “Why are all the men round here so rubbish?” When this happens, the logical thing to do is to crack open another bottle of chardonnay, unwrap a big bar of Dairy Milk, and curl up with a good DVD. Some women may vow there and then to do ‘something’ about it and Jennifer Cox was one of those. Rather than signing up for a class in car maintenance, taking up SCUBA diving or signing up for online dating, she decided that if London wasn’t big enough to provide a soul mate, she’d take on the world. She’d already observed that foreign men always seemed more interested in women than the ones she found at home who seemed to find it a challenge to tie their own shoelaces and use a knife and fork. Thus was born the idea behind “Around the World in 80 Dates” (ATWIED) or as it was cruelly dubbed by some wishful-thinking would-be daters, “Around the World in 80 Lays”. In a flash Cox has pinged off emails to friends and contacts around the world and set up a network of potential dates across Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia.

dating, Jennifer Cox

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