How to: find love at UoM

Yearning for the tender touch of another? Heart aching for a kindred spirit? Or simply desperate for a shag? Finding love can be difficult these days, especially since we’ve all lost our pre-pandemic social skills and getting engaged to the person you dated for two months at 16 is no longer the done thing.

Rest assured, there are plenty of hot, intelligent people here at the University of Manchester – we are apparently the 11th most attractive university in the country. Though anyone who believes that we rank so low surely has not seen model-slash-fitness influencer Freddie Pearson roaming the AMBS corridors. 

So, it’s just a matter of ensnaring one of these sexy young things for yourself!

Here are 8 best ways to go about securing a peng ting for your bed:

1. Get yourself a library crush. Make awkward eye contact with the fit person who always sits opposite you in the library. Create rich scenarios involving them in your head, and get disappointed when they don’t turn up. You could even go so far as to exchange coy smiles after a few weeks. It will reach its natural end when one of you graduates and you never see each other again, each existing in your respective minds from then on as the one who got away. Even though the only words you ever actually exchanged were during that one time you both accidentally got up to go to the toilet at the same time, and you had to awkwardly thank them every time they held a door open for you all the way from Purple 4 to the Blue 2 toilets.
2. Post on Mancfessions. The anonymous confessions page is the perfect way to bravely confess your love to your first year flatmate who you regret not committing flatcest with, and whose nice, polite new partner you can’t help but hate. When they react badly in the comments you can pretend it was a prank, or that it can’t possibly be the same SJ from Milton Keynes who lived in Richmond Park Flat 23 Room 6 from 2019-2020 …
3. Wear the Bumble merch that their student ambassadors give out. This will signal that not only are you on the dating-app grind, but also that you are up for real-life dating. Also that you’re really cool.
4. Go to the supermarket in your Friday-best and stand by the biscuits looking enticing. Choose the shop depending on the type of partner you are looking to attract: Fallow Sainsburys for a posh London type paramour, or Rusholme Lidl for a ruthless, bargain-hunting lover. ‘Accidentally’ reach for the same pack of bourbons, brush hands, and the rest is pretty self explanatory.
5. Do something mysterious on the bus. Ever noticed that gorgeous pink-haired person reading Marx on the fancy, economically friendly 43? Or remember that handsome individual with a skin fade freestyling over Stormzy backing tracks at the back of the 142? Yeah, thought so. Stand out and look sexy. You might just have a Mancfessions post written about you by your enraptured audience by the time you get home …
6. Go to a student music night. Make eyes at the sexy guitarist/ drummer/ singer. They will one hundred percent be able to see you through the glare of the slightly mispositioned stage light and they will one hundred percent fall in love with you, the very keen dancer in the front row who knows none of the words to their songs. 
7. Go to AU (Athletic Union) nights. Buy a drink for someone in a first team. This might not be a good shag, or result in a relationship built on mutual respect, but they will at least be very fit. And it will be a decent flex for you to say you slept with a BNOC.
8. Go to house parties. Get off with as many friends-of-friends as you can. You want to really reduce your options for potential housemates – bonus points if you’ve been invited to the party specifically to get to know them as possible housemates, but end up going home with one of them.

And once you’ve found the love of your life, you can look forward to telling your kids about the terribly romantic way you met. That is, until they break it off after 3 weeks because they just need to, like, focus on themselves. Just before you see them with their tongue down someone else’s throat three days later at Quids In.