Taking the words of an HR guru out of context, our columnist ponders whether it’s ever OK to “headhunt” for love….

Four months ago, when news got out at work that I’d become single again, an older, married member of the team came striding over to my desk to cheer me up. “The world is yours, my friend,” he said, clapping a hand on my shoulder and casting a wistful eye across the office floor as hordes of glossy, expensively manicured fashionistas swept majestically by. “Welcome to the Promised Land.”

Well, if he was hoping to relive his bachelorhood vicariously through me, then I’m afraid I’ll have left him bitterly disappointed. Talk about a dry spell. On the evidence of the past four months, I appear to have taken a wrong turn on the way to the Promised Land and wound up in the Sahara desert.

It’s not that I haven’t been trying; I have. (Relax, HR. Not in the way your saucy little minds think.) And it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I’ve deleted my Tinder profile, either. This I was forced to do in order to back up a claim made to my housemates that Tinder represented “the death of love and the collapse into dust of all the heady, utopian promise of the sexual revolution”. To which they replied, only naturally, “Why are you still on it, then?” A man must be true to his word.

No, what’s merely happened is that I’ve discovered my type. Which, apparently, is “unavailable”. It’s worth pointing out that in this respect I’m not dissimilar to a certain James Bond. Remember the following exchange from Casino Royale?

Vesper Lynd: Am I going to have a problem with you, Bond?

James Bond: No, don’t worry. You’re not my type.

VL: Smart?

JB: Single.

That, sadly, is where the similarities end. Unlike the famous spy I have always attempted to adhere to the code of gentlemanly conduct, which dictates that on hearing the words “I’ve got a boyfriend”, the right thing to do is to politely stand down. And until recently, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. But if I had a dollar for every time those four little words have been uttered to me in the past few months, I’d be well on my way to being able to afford a pair of Junya socks. And all of these knockbacks have got me thinking: at what point does “doing the right thing” become a self-defeating philosophy? Does chivalry even have a place in modern dating? As luck would have it, I can call upon my own recent experiences for an answer.

One of the side-effects of dating a professional matchmaker (you should probably read that before you read on) is that their hard-nosed approach to relationships can end up rubbing off on you. You become more pragmatic. Less accommodating. You begin to see your romantic life as an extension of your professional life, and dating as a series of job interviews. In short, it’s easy to become a little bit cynical about the whole thing. The way this particular relationship ended didn’t help, of course. She jumped straight into another relationship – one that, given the timeframe, was almost certainly cultivated in the dying stages of our own.

As I’ve mentioned, I consider myself an adherent to the code of gentlemanly conduct, so naturally it bothered me to have been usurped in such a… well, ungentlemanly manner. How does one usually resolve these things, I thought? Pistols at dawn? Insta-slagging at dusk? After a while, though, I began to question my outrage. Was this cuckholder lurking in the wings actually to blame? Or was the relationship already effectively over, and like a passenger on the stricken Titanic, was my soon-to-be-ex just doing what any sensible woman would do in the situation and jumping onto the nearest lifeboat? Perversely, I even began to admire the guy after a while for having accelerated the demise of something that would almost certainly have died of natural causes anyway.

A friend of a friend refers to expressing an interest in women who are already in a relationship as “sexual investment”. Working from the assumption that most relationships will at some point end, he argues that if you like someone, the surest path to success is to put in the groundwork before that happens, and not after. It’s a high-risk strategy and it’s certainly not the behaviour of a respectable gent. But is it wrong? And more importantly, when you’re on a cold streak, can you afford not to be doing it? This was turning into a real ethical dilemma, so I did what I usually do when confronted with a problem and asked Google. Well, sort of.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to meet Mr Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of People Operations at the Mountain View tech firm. Mr Bock had just released his first book, Work Rules!, an insight into Google’s culture and hiring practices. And it was while discussing the challenges his team faces in attracting the best talent that he inadvertently came out with a phrase that has become my mantra in recent weeks. “The biggest problem,” he said, “is that most of the best people out there aren’t looking for anything. They’re already doing what they love, and they’re being rewarded for it. So the goal, from a recruiter’s perspective, is to get them on a bad day.”

“Get them on a bad day?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Maybe they were passed over for promotion. Maybe they didn’t get the bonus they were expecting. It’s not about forcing them to choose; it’s just about being there at the right time, and asking them: ‘So, how’s it going?’”

I doubt Mr Bock ever expected his sage recruitment advice to be reappropriated for the world of dating. To that, I can only offer him my sincerest apologies, and a pledge that I do not intend to use his words for ill means. It’s not my plan to break any hearts, nor to force anyone apart. Only to greet those four little words, “I’ve got a boyfriend”, with four of my own: “So, how’s it going?”

And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just reactivate my Tinder profile.