The great fortune of my life — and, some might say, the great misfortune of his — is that I met my husband when I was 17. As a result, the first — and, indeed, only — date I ever went on ended up with me getting married, having two children and merging our two VAT returns into one romantic box-file.

However, even though the sum total of my experience as a single woman on the “dating scene” comes down to one four-hour meal in Camden, it has not prevented me from being some manner of boorish back-seat driver on the subject.

“You just need to GET OUT THERE!” I would chivvy my single sisters. “Just go and CHAT TO SOME MEN. How bad can it be? Tsk, I’d love to be out there. The thrill of the chase. Phwoargh. It’s like some gladiatorial arena of sex, and let me tell you — if I wasn’t married, I’d be throwing down my trident and loosing, big-time.”

“Thrill of the chase?” my sister would say, incredulously. “The thrill of the chase? Who is ever thrilled when they’re being chased? Chasing involves being scared, and sweaty, and really wanting it all to stop. No one likes chasing. You are an idiot. A big, married idiot.”

Of course, as she is my sister, I paid absolutely no heed to what she was saying. But when, this week, someone famous said exactly the same thing, I started to think that she might have a point, after all.

David Mitchell — star of Peep Show — said in a newspaper interview that he has effectively given up on dating. “I don’t dislike being single enough to put up with the pain,” he said. “I could be trying much harder and people are up for introducing me to people,” he concluded, doubtfully . . . “ [but] just on the maths of fun, it’s not worth it.”

In many ways, it upsets the natural order of things to see David Mitchell say such a thing. As the very essence of thinking woman’s crumpet — in essence, a heterosexual Stephen Fry, but with the flashing eyes of a Gypsy violinist — one can presume that Mitchell would have been getting some good quality dating offers. Classy birds — ones with expensive knickers, first-edition George Orwells, and knowledge of niche Scottish distilleries. If a good-looking famous bloke finds looking for love too enervating — when he’s probably got women hurling themselves at him every time he pops to the corner shop for Yop — it does start to suggest that dating might rank as not a pleasure, but, rather, an unpleasant and risky undertaking, such as laser eye-correction. One that many might understandably just not bother with.

Still, both David Mitchell and my sister are quite cultured, mannerly, diffident people. They are not ones to hurl themselves into an enterprise, drinking rosé from a tooth-mug and shouting “Tits!” Of course they would find dating hard. But for some earthy, fleshy bozo such as myself, chatting people up in the 21st century is, surely, not that difficult?

Two days later, I attended my first party since 1998. Generally, I hate parties. I’d only gone because it had a Second World War theme, and I’d recently bought a moth-eaten £30 fox fur, complete with head, that I presumed I would be stoned for wearing anywhere else. My single sister came — all dolled up in veil, hat, gloves and lipstick. She looked beautiful.

“I’m going to show you how to pull,” I said, on the way there. “I’m going to talk to a man, warm him up, and then hand over to you. Just call it an early birthday present, treacle. Now sit back, and watch an expert at her work.”

I was convinced I was destined to leave there with a new brother-in-law. In the event, what I actually left with was a feeling of bewilderment and a defiled accessory.

“I cannot believe people use parties to find love!” I shouted on the way home, brother-in-law-less. Someone had stubbed out a cigarette on the fox fur’s tail. “The only kind of person you’re going to find at a party is ‘someone who’s good at parties’. Someone who likes bellowing: ‘Shall we go outside for a fag?’, and feels positively radiant when they’re sweaty. People who like parties are lunatics. You might as well try to find a life partner down a well.”

The problem was the sheer chaos: single people lumped in with the non-single people; deranged, antisocial misanthropists right next to those who liked S. J. Perelman. Slightly drunk, in heels, with a deadline of 2am, trying to find a suitable husband was like trying to pair socks in the sock drawer with your eyes closed. It was — and I will be frank — a sexual and administrative nightmare.

Still. It’s not as if other people hadn’t noticed that parties are horrible. Online dating is society’s way of bringing that much-needed “efficient data basing” element to love. Still keen to prove a point to my sister, I joined an online dating site. Then I e-mailed a friend, who is also on it.

“Oh God, get out now while you can!” she said, sounding almost panicky. “It will corrode your self-worth! First, you have to write a description of who you are, and what would make you happy — as if that’s not the kind of thing you’re really only capable of in your late seventies. And then — they have a ‘most popular’ chart! And if you don’t get on it, you will feel like an unmarriageable warthog!”

Sure enough, by Wednesday night, I was desperately top-loading my profile with borderline pornography and had changed my profile picture three times — but I was still miles short of the “Hot Girls” chart, and was disturbed by a man who’d sent me a detailed description of his favourite camera, a Nikon SLR with 12.3 megapixels.

On Thursday, I officially gave up on trying to prove how easy dating is, and admitted to my sister that she had been right all along: I am a lucky, deluded, married idiot.

“If Pete dies,” I said, as we sat down with the Dynasty boxed set, “I’m not going to bury him. I’m going to stuff him and cart him around with me until he rots. It would still be better than dating. There is no hope out there, is there?”

“I dunno. I thought I might, one day, be on a train that crashed,” my sister said, vaguely. “I hear people get talking in the wreckage.”

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