Secret diary of an MDB* (*modern-day Bridget)

She shambled on to the scene 18 years ago, fag in one hand, vodka in the other, but Bridget Jones is still bang on about a few aspects of single life. I’m a single, thirty-something woman who leads a vaguely professional life by day, but I also get too pissed on weekdays, eat a packet of cigarettes every Friday night, often wake up confused about my own name and find smug marrieds universally tiresome (if I log in to Facebook to see one more wedding photo... and we’re not even into July). And my mother’s getting obsessive about finding me a Mark Darcy. These days they only have to be vaguely man-shaped. Too short? Too tall? Three heads? ‘Nonsense, darling, he was charming.’

About the lowest point in my recent dating career was thanks to a blond Austrian we’ll call Rolfe, because he looked a bit like that handsome young Nazi in The Sound of Music. Rolfe asked me out via Facebook after a dinner party and then sent witty text messages suggesting first, second, third and fourth dates. By number five I was practically engaged. In my head. Tum-tum-ti-tum, how do Austrians get married? And so on. But here’s the rub: we fell into bed together on date five, and Rolfe instantly developed a hearing defect and ignored my warnings when the crucial moment, erm, came. ‘I’m pretty sure I have incredibly virile sperm,’ he said gravely afterwards. ‘You should take one of those pills.’ He texted me approximately 100 times the following day, pressing the matter. I went to Boots and whispered that I needed the morning-after pill before texting him back. And then… nothing. Rolfe went dark. I caved in four days later, sending one of those this-is-an-unbelievably-casual-text-despite-taking-me-seven-hours-to-write messages. He replied that work was busy and ‘sadly’ it didn’t look like that was going to change any time soon. Tosser. Didn’t want strudel at my wedding anyway.

Rolfe was my Daniel Cleaver. But it was a brief-ish, three-week affair as opposed to Bridget’s rather more drawn-out on-off romance, which even boasted its own minibreak. And in this thrusting, panting age of technology, everyone hops back into the saddle much faster. Now you may be texting, Tweeting, Facebooking or Tinder-ing several potentials at once. In fact, I’ve had four Daniel Cleavers in the past year alone: the bipolar one who changed his Facebook status to ‘in a relationship’ after two dates; the father who took calls from his baby-mama in bed (coitus interruptissimus); the one who was into potentially life-threatening role-play involving knives (no cleavers); the one who gave me a ‘wart’ (although, in the end, this was an ingrown hair). It’s exhausting. By comparison, Bridget Jones, 32, 9st 5lb on a ‘good’ day, had it easy.

Author Helen Fielding, who first created Bridget in 1995, has even said as much in the run-up to the October publication of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, our heroine’s third outing and one of the most hotly anticipated books of the year. She has declared the modern dating scene ‘much worse now’ and, although details of the new book are as scant as a nun’s breakfast, we do know that Bridget grapples with Twitter, drunk texting, skinny jeans and, whoopsie, the bloody nightmare of CC-ing someone into an email when you were bitching about them. Helen’s right: finding a Mark Darcy is harder. Bridget mostly worried about knickers. Nearly two decades on, the waters look much choppier. Sure, pants are a concern, but so are the single girl’s bikini line, blow-dry, Shellac manicure, pedicure, eyebrows, earlobe cellulite and the odd nipple hair.

Methods of warfare have changed, too. Bridget once sat looking at her phone for two days willing Daniel Cleaver to ring. And it was a landline: how desperately quaint! Nowadays, romance is mostly conducted via an iPhone, Samsung or — if you’re a corporate stiff — possibly a BlackBerry. Consequently, modern- day Bridgets have begun to display some worryingly psychotic behaviour. I went out with a farmer during harvest season last year (he was very busy on his combine in Somerset) and kept my phone clamped in my sweaty palm at all times in case I missed a single message or call. Slept with it beside my pillow, too. Brain tumour? No matter — the little red light on my phone might flash. WhatsApp and BlackBerry Messenger can induce meltdowns if you see your Daniel has read a message and hasn’t replied within seconds. Facebook is another bastard. Spy a new photo of the man you’re seeing piggy-backing a hot blonde through Soho and you may want to stab him. Or her. Possibly both.

Theoretically, all this furious phone and internet activity should have made it easier for those on the lookout — unlike Bridget, who shagged her boss and then pined for him for months, because she couldn’t get over him by getting under anyone else. But faster, easier access to the market doesn’t mean you’ll just stumble across a good guy. I tried internet dating recently and was instantly depressed when my date suggested meeting outside Nike Town in Oxford Circus. Call me an old romantic, but what’s wrong with a sharing-plates restaurant where you can be done within the hour? Anyway, we went for a quick drink in Soho, after an awkward walk trying to make small talk while dodging teenage girls and Japanese tourists. Unfortunately, he was also wearing pointy shoes. Not a chance.

Of course, we might have had a riotous time, and Mr Winklepicker could have told all sorts of jokes to make me forget about the pointy shoes. But even in the bedroom we would have faced obstacles that Bridget didn’t have to contend with. Have you ever had that awkward moment in bed when a new-ish man says, ‘Tell me your fantasy,’ and you think, ‘An evening on the sofa with a curry and a grab bag of Maltesers,’ when really, he’s expecting you to say, ‘Being dressed like the Little Mermaid while you spank my tailfin.’ So Bridget and Daniel Cleaver had an anal moment — big deal. At least she wasn’t expected to behave as if auditioning for a role in something called Bravetart every weekday evening. A friend of mine called time on a man recently when, after two dates, he confessed that he had a belt fetish and was nicknamed ‘the Chelsea strangler’. Fifty Shades of Grey has a lot to answer for.

‘But haven’t we all relaxed a bit and stopped obsessing about being single?’ ventured another MDB recently. This friend is brilliantly clever, went to Oxford, works in theatre, can kill roughly 40 men with a single lash of her tongue and was almost certainly a Pankhurst sister in a previous life. She went on to tell me about a recent date she’d been on with ‘a pretty dull barrister’. And yet, she added guiltily, she thought she’d give him another go with a second date. ‘You never know, do you?’

And that’s the thing. We MDBs may be groomed to within an inch of our lives, permanently clutching our phones, on the brink of nervous exhaustion and the victims of scarring sexual experiences, but we’re still putting ourselves out there date after date. Because, in the face of romantic adversity, we remain cheerfully optimistic that Mark Darcy is just around the next corner. As do our ever-vigilant mothers.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy will be published by Jonathan Cape on 10 October