Dr Angela Ahola once went on a very underwhelming date with a magician. You’d think that someone who pulls rabbits out of hats would be an exciting dinner companion but, she shrugs, ‘It was nothing spectacular.’ In fact, when it comes to dating, the 48-year-old psychologist thinks that someone’s job doesn’t matter much. 

She knows what she’s talking about. Ahola has also been on dates with a miner, a schoolteacher, an ice-hockey player and a gravedigger. The last one was a tea date in a hotel lobby. ‘He was really, really nice.’ 

She hasn’t always been such a prolific dater. For years, the Stockholm native was one of Sweden’s top doctors of psychology: she gave lectures to the Swedish parliament, published brainy books about our ‘hidden motives’ as humans and helped train officers in the Swedish police academy. (She also played keys in a death metal band, but that is for another article.) 

Then, when she was 43, Ahola’s 14-year marriage ended after her husband had an affair. ‘I was heartbroken,’ she says over Zoom. ‘I felt I was at the bottom of the sea.’ It was the first time since her 20s that Ahola had been single, and the dating world looked rather different. Everything was online, and she had two daughters, aged eight and ten. 

So she made a plan: she would conduct a scientific dating experiment, with herself as the test subject. The idea: 100 dates with 100 strangers, recording her findings. If she fell in love before the 100th date, she would stop the experiment – commitment to science must only go so far. The result is her new (and excellently titled) book 100 Dates: The Psychologist Who Kissed 100 Frogs So You Don’t Have To. 

Going on 100 dates when you have a full-time job and children isn’t easy: it took Ahola just under two years. Some weeks she had no time for any; once she managed three in 24 hours. It all sounds exhausting. 

Although 25 per cent of her dates were with real-life introductions, the majority were found online. Ahola’s strategy: download several dating apps, set her age range to 18-100 to ‘maximise potential’, and say yes (‘swipe right’) to anyone she liked the look of. In the end, she swiped right to 17 per cent of people; one in seven of her dates led to second dates; the four most common names of suitors were Emil, Anton, Martin and Alex. 

So, what did she find? First, there are three types of online dater: those looking for a relationship, those looking for validation and a pen pal, and those looking for sex. Almost half (49 per cent) of men on Tinder say they use the app for one-night stands. Only 15 per cent of women agree.

Second, pictures matter. A good profile needs three: a portrait shot of your face, an activity shot of you doing something you like, and a shot of your body (clothed!). The first is because our faces reveal our attributes – emotional state, gender, age and so on; the second gives an idea of what you like doing; the third, says Ahola, is because ‘people need to look at the goods’. (Her book is amusingly blunt on this. One paragraph reads: ‘Attractive criminals are reported less often than their less attractive peers, and receive lighter sentencing as well.’) 

The point is, the better you look in your photographs, the more likely it is that someone is going to match with you and text you. And, as Ahola writes: ‘Once you start, you’ll be able to charm them with your personality, and get your foot in that dating door.’ As explained in Ahola’s book, men who get in touch do so promptly, 63 per cent of their messages get sent within five minutes of matching with someone; for women, it is just 18 per cent. Male messages are brief – an average of 12 characters. For women it is 122. 

Ahola’s first date was with a chef she found online. ‘I was so used to my exhusband, it was odd,’ she says. ‘And at the same time, kind of inspiring and interesting.’ They met a few more times, ‘laughed a lot’ and ended up as friends. ‘It was the best possible first date I could have had.’ Did they kiss? Ahola pauses for so long I think her Zoom screen has frozen. Finally she replies: ‘Yes.’ How did it feel? ‘Awkward, exciting’ – and, because she’d been so used to her ex-husband, ‘like I was committing a crime’. 

There were other kisses – Ahola reckons she kissed between 20 and 30 men on her 100 dates. She slept with a few, too, although she clarifies, ‘only the nice ones’. She mentions an expression in Swedish: skild och vild. It means ‘divorced and wild’. 

There were differences between city slickers and country bumpkins. Men in Stockholm wore suits in pictures and tended to be ‘fast swipers’ – through match after match, for something better. Country men had pictures with buckets of berries, snow scooters and the log cabin they’d built. They tended to choose matches more carefully. 

Age made little difference. One date was coffee with a 19-year-old. It wasn’t weird. ‘It’s still two human beings meeting each other. I could have gone on a date with a 70-year-old and felt completely natural.’ 

There were less successful dates: the one who stood her up (he later admitted he was nervous) or the man who used fake pictures and looked nothing like his profile (‘I stayed for about ten minutes. I felt a little bit fooled’). 

After 80-odd encounters Ahola’s attitude changed. ‘I started to feel like, “Oh, maybe I’m not going to meet anyone before 100.’’’ And when she finally hit the century mark, she felt relieved. ‘I thought, well, I’ve dated and I’ve experienced a lot of things and I’m just happy being single now,’ she says. ‘And also, it’s not the easiest thing to find true love in this world or, I guess, in any world.’ 

Almost a year later, Ahola boarded a flight to Denmark and asked the man across the aisle to help her lift her bag. After landing they chatted, lingering by the gates. When I speak to Ahola, she and David are about to celebrate their ten-month anniversary. ‘We are celebrating every month!’ 

Were it not for those 100 dates, Ahola wouldn’t have had the confidence for the relationship she is in. ‘For a long time after my divorce, I thought maybe nobody could like me, really, in a deep sense,’ she says. But that changed the more she dated. ‘I was entering dates with a positive self-image. Like, “I deserve to meet a good person, to have fun, to have a good life.’’’ 

With that confidence, Ahola is certain that dating improves with age: ‘We’re not as naive as we used to be in our 20s. We’re pickier. We see the red flags faster and that’s a really good thing.’ Sure, it makes the ‘pool of potential partners much smaller’, but it also makes it a better, much higher calibre pool. 

‘I think there are only two options: to stay single or to have a really great relationship,’ she says, impassioned. ‘We’re not going to accept anything less than something that makes us happy.'