Angela Ahola has kissed a lot of frogs. One hundred to be exact. But luckily for any singletons out there, the Swedish psychologist also wrote about it, creating a guide for anyone navigating the perils of modern dating. Talk about putting yourself on the line for your craft. How many people can say they went on 100 dates in the name of helping the wider community? The help in question is Ahola's book, 100 Dates: The Psychologist Who Kissed 100 Frogs So You Don't Have To. If we're being honest, when it comes to the question of what came first: the book idea or the dates, Ahola was in the process of dating when the idea for her latest book came about. She didn't even know she was going to reach 100 dates until she was on about date number 76. But it was her own dating journey that inspired the psychologist to try and find the answer to one of life's biggest questions: "How do you find someone to love?" After her marriage of 14 years ended, Ahola suddenly found herself single and ready to mingle. Or, as they say in Sweden, skild och vild - divorced and wild. And she was open to anyone, setting the age range on her dating app to include anyone from 18 to 80, located across Sweden, and even into parts of Finland. She texted thousands of people, trialling different opening lines and strategies for kickstarting conversations. And then eventually trialling what works for a first date. And it was in this inspired period of her life, that not only did she learn more about herself - what she did and didn't want in a relationship - she also learnt that there were so many other people in the same position as her, blindly trying to work out how to get the most out of dating apps. "When I, myself ended up in a divorce and found myself dating again, I realised that it seems like this is a book that there is really a need for. So that's why I started writing," Ahola says. "The science of it all was more in the back of my mind. And yes, I took a few notes after the dates, but it was more that I just threw myself into the process and it was me fully - the private Angela who did all these dates and who was out meeting people and writing with people and downloading Tinder and having my bio and pictures and all of these things out there. "But the scientist never leaves me - it's always there." We often talk about the devil and/or angel on our shoulders. But for Ahola, it's the scientist on her shoulder. Whenever there was a moment where she was ghosted, catfished or even simply just let down by the fact that a relationship didn't work out the way that she wanted it to, that little scientist on her shoulder would remind her to look for the interesting observation or lesson from the experience. MUST READS: And amongst the emotional rollercoaster that is dating, Ahola started to see it all as a learning experience. "This is not a secret, but my husband, there was infidelity and it ended because of that. So I still had feelings of rejection and for a long time ... I was really traumatised," she says. "I felt for a long period, more or less, that I'm not lovable. I felt, unfortunately, like there was something wrong with me. So this dating journey also turned out - which I could not have anticipated - to be one of my life's most intensive periods of personal development. Because every meeting, every person I met, became a learning experience. "This is what I like, and now I'm happy. These traits make me uncomfortable. These words make me not very satisfied or happy in this situation. And this creates attraction. So everything was about healing myself, but at the same time I was learning who I was and well, it sounds like a cliche, but it was like 'OK, this is who you are." Ahola says it's a great way for any single person to approach dating - with that scientist on your shoulder for when the emotional side of things gets too much. But for those of us who were never any good at science in school, 100 Dates does the work for us. Don't expect a juicy tell-all about how 100 unsuspecting men found themselves on a date-turned-research experiment. This book uses Ahola's own experience, combined with scientific studies from across the world - many of which before now only existed in professional databases - to unpick what it means to have a successful dating life. It is all a numbers game, after all. Just not how you might think it is. There is no magical number of people you should date before finding the one. Even Ahola says that if she found someone worth pursuing long-term before her 100 marker, she would have stopped the search. The number, however, does come into play when it dictates how many times you should swipe before becoming disengaged. And that number is somewhere between five and nine. Not five to nine matches, but five to nine swipes, every time we sit down to go on a dating app. After that, we tend to become too superficial, only considering the photos. "When we're exposed to so many profiles, it's almost as if there is an infinite number of other people available, and we get ... the feeling that there are all these potential partners out there for me, which of course there aren't," Ahola says. "Because many people on dating apps are already in relationships, some people are just catfishes. So no, these people are not available in real life, but we kind of unconsciously believe that they are. "So we just swipe and swipe and swipe and we become more superficial and more shallow and more objectifying when we see so many profiles. And we tend to focus on the picture instead of trying to get a picture of this person's personality, which of course is kind of tricky." 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