BY JAMES BRADFORD
Rural loneliness is real. Village life can make meeting someone harder, not easier, but the countryside already holds most of the answers, if we are willing to use them.
Allison Lee wrote recently in these pages about the comfort animals bring, and she is right. Anyone who has done the late check in a lambing shed, or leant on a gate while a pony works out whether you have a mint, knows that animals are proper company. But a collie, however devoted, will not ask how your day went. Plenty of people in the country are quietly short of someone who will.
It is an odd sort of loneliness, because from the outside it rarely looks like loneliness at all. You might know everyone in the parish by name. You might sit on the village hall committee, lift a finger to every passing pickup and keep three neighbours’ spare keys on a hook by the back door. And still go home every evening to an empty kitchen and a radio for conversation.
Why should the village, of all places, make this harder? The first reason is arithmetic. A village is a small pool, and by your late twenties most of it has been fished. The people you grew up with have married, moved to Bristol or turned out to be your second cousin. Newcomers arrive, but they tend to arrive in pairs.
The second is hours. Farming, horses and most country trades do not keep office time. You are up before it is light and finished after it is dark, and Saturday looks much like Tuesday. Cows have never heard of a bank holiday. By the time you are washed and fed, the energy for a night out has usually gone to bed without you.
The third is distance. The nearest town with anything open after nine might be half an hour away, taxis are a rumour, and someone always has to drive. A casual drink becomes a small expedition, and small expeditions are easy to put off.
The fourth, and the one we talk about least, is visibility. In a village, a first date is public property. Have one drink with someone at the local and by Sunday the flower rota has you engaged. Faced with that, many people simply decide not to risk it. Add the country habit of not making a fuss, and you get a lot of people who are lonely and would never dream of saying so. Ask a farmer how he is and you will hear about the weather and the price of feed.
None of this is hopeless, though. The countryside is full of places where people meet; the trick is to use them on purpose rather than by accident. If you are still young enough for your local Young Farmers’ Club, join, and turn up. Rallies, stock judging, dinner dances and the odd ill-advised tractor run bring together people who already understand your life, and you will find couples in every county who met at one.
Past that age, shows, hunts and point-to-points do much the same job, because there is something to talk about besides yourselves. Better still, volunteer. Stewards, car park marshals and whoever is running the tea tent meet far more people than the spectators do, and nobody finds it strange when you start a conversation.
Closer to home, the pub, the church and the village calendar reward regulars rather than occasional visitors. Going to the quiz every week, joining the bell ringers or helping set up the harvest supper makes you a familiar face, and familiar faces get introduced. One big night out a year does less than fifty ordinary ones.
Those introductions matter more than we admit. Friends remain the oldest dating service in the country, and still one of the best. The difficulty is that country reticence works both ways: if you never mention you would like to meet someone, your friends will assume you are perfectly happy as you are. Say it out loud, once, to the right people. Then let them get on with it. They will enjoy it more than you think.
Online dating belongs on the list too, as one tool among several rather than a replacement for any of the above. It does ease three of the problems I described. It widens the pool beyond the parish boundary, it fits around a working day that ends at nine at night, and it lets you get to know someone a little before the whole village knows them too. Some sites are built with farmers in mind, so you are not explaining to every match why you cannot do Saturday morning, and there is sensible advice around on meeting country singles safely. The approach is simple: take your time, meet somewhere public, and trust your instincts.
Loneliness in the country is not a personal failing. It is what happens when small numbers, long hours, long distances and a lot of watchful neighbours meet a culture that prefers not to talk about feelings. The answer is not to move to town. It is to treat meeting people as something worth a bit of effort, the same way we treat the garden, the hedges or the horse’s feet. And if it has tipped into something heavier than an empty kitchen, the Farming Community Network runs a confidential helpline that is open every day of the year.
So by all means keep the dog, the pony and the pigs. They genuinely help. But the next time someone asks if you are coming to the show, the quiz or the supper, say yes. The animals will still be there when you get home.
James Bradford is part of the team behind Country Dating UK, a dating site for farmers, horse people and country singles.