Disillusioned by the developments of the dating game, a young woman tries the personal ad way of finding Mr Right. Velislava Hillman ‘hooks up’ with her – as new trends dictate – to understand how to be successful in online love.

“There is no Mr Right,” says Pavli Medvedova, a 27-year-old social media specialist from Slovakia.

To Pavli, who has been living in Malta for the past six years, dating, as it happened until a few years ago, is over. “Today it’s all about hooking up; something very casual and unattached. You know how it is… single girls hit the town over the weekend, you meet a couple of cute guys… But the next day, they never call, or they’re just not interested in dating.” And then, the next weekend comes and the pattern repeats itself.

I’m not saying I want to marry the guy. I just want someone who is interested in getting to know me

“No one wants to date anymore. Dating is over,” Pavli laments. “And it’s not just for guys; women, too, don’t feel like dating anymore.” Women enjoy the empowerment of carrying no emotional baggage to a date. Apparently they leave with none, too.

Welcome to the “hook-up culture”, as the Atlantic put it in an article in one of last year’s issues. Women and men in their early and late 20s have gone into a different social rhythm, where they reap what they sow and keep it all to themselves, without any interest to share it with the opposite sex.

Pavli should, therefore, be thriving on her emotional adventures... “Not really. I don’t want that. That’s not who I am. I’m not saying I want to marry the guy. I just want someone who is interested in getting to know me.”

For Pavli, almost three years have passed since she had any serious prospects from anyone in particular. “Men just want to have fun and can’t be bothered. That’s why I thought I should try out a different alternative.”

Being a specialist in social media, Pavli decided to launch a personal social campaign to find Mr Left. “Because Mr Right does not exist,” Pavli insists.

The campaign teaser – an attractive, fun photo of Pavli hugging a huge teddy bear soft toy – was launched on Facebook on December 17. “Within hours, the news spread all over Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr,” Pavli says. “Literally seconds after I posted the teaser I was receiving all sorts of private messages on Facebook and everywhere, from friends but also from people I didn’t know. There was a guy who sent me a message introducing himself, together with images. He was from Berlin. I even had someone contacting me all the way from Canada!”

The personal advert spread like wildfire, so much so that two days after its launch on the social stratosphere, SlideShare, one of the 200 most visited websites in the world, posted Pavli’s Finding Mr Left campaign on its home page referring its viewers to what it described as the “Hot on Facebook” page.

So is Pavli famous? “Kind of, yes. This just shows you how powerful social networks are nowadays. You can do just about anything with it,” she muses.

But as for actually finding Mr Left, at the end of the day: “I’m not sure yet. People know about it. Random people on the street stop me because they recognise me as the girl who is looking for Mr Left. It’s funny. It works, but at the same time, you know that you won’t find The One easily just by going out to a club. I’m moreinclined to believe you have better chances of finding someone serious from a dating site than in a club,” Pavli reasons.

In what sense? “First because, online, you have a better chance of chatting with the guy for several days. At the bar, you have a couple of drinks, but how much can you actually talk and get to know each other? Everything happens so quickly and you have to make up your mind there and then. He won’t bother if you take too long, because there are many other single girls who won’t think twice.”

With her online presentation, campaigning to find Mr Left, Pavli realised that she could aim for something much bigger. “I want to encourage all those ambitious, smart and beautiful women, who also find it hard to meet Mr Left. So, I’m constantly inviting friends, and friends of my friends’ friends to join in this little venture of mine. I want to interview men coming from different countries and cultures to reveal the secret of what men really want and share this with the whole world,” Pavli enthuses.

It sounds very ambitious, but what is there to lose especially when the biological clock is ticking. The number of visitors on Pavli’s personal online social pages grows exponentially every day. Let’s just hope that a Mr Left will show up at the right time...

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