Courting: Tractor Dates, Macra Babies and Swiping Right in Rural Ireland – Liadán Hynes
Our grandparents ‘courted,’ our parents ‘stepped out’, but what are the Irish people of today’s world doing to find love?
In her upcoming book, Courting: Tractor Dates, Macra Babies and Swiping Right in Rural Ireland, Liadán Hynes investigates the 21st-century dating landscape in rural Ireland.
The freelance journalist looks at how we meet people, what dating looks like in Ireland, and how online dating has impacted the countryside.
In compiling the book, Liadán spoke to people from every corner of Ireland, asking them if the place they chose to live impacted how they could meet someone.
Do the traditional ways of meeting a partner – matchmakers, dances, the pub – still provide the most opportunities, or have they been replaced as we all disappear behind a phone screen?
And if so, is this a good thing? Is it easier now or harder to find a match?
Dating book
The true life experiences of over twenty contributors, including people living on farms and on islands, in towns and villages, those who grew up in rural Ireland, some who never left, some who did and then returned, and those who moved there for the first time as an adult.
Courting: Tractor Dates, Macra Babies and Swiping Right in Rural Ireland is divided into four parts, the land, blow-ins, finding your tribe, and coming home.
The contributors candidly describe swiping for love, re-locating for it, hooking up and settling down, all while inheriting a 24/7 farm job, coming out, returning to the home place, or joining the pandemic exodus.
Courting: Tractor Dates, Macra Babies and Swiping Right in Rural Ireland tells a variety of “honest and touching” stories of trying to meet ‘the one’ in a rural setting.
Here, publishers say, the ingredients for successful dating – choice, proximity, free time, sometimes alcohol, and anonymity – are not always guaranteed.
Revealing the importance of community, diversity, and, above all, hope and resilience, Courting: Tractor Dates, Macra Babies and Swiping Right in Rural Ireland is “an insightful and unique window into dating in rural Ireland today”.
Published by New Island, Courting: Tractor Dates, Macra Babies and Swiping Right in Rural Ireland will be available nationwide and online from October 3rd, 2022.
Liadán Hynes
Liadán Hynes is a journalist who writes for several publications and lives in Dublin with her young daughter.
She hosts How to Fall Apart: A Podcast About Picking up Pieces, which examines how people coped or did not cope during difficult times in life.
Her first book, the bestselling How to Fall Apart, was published by Hachette in 2020.
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