Not long after Irishwoman Lulu Johnson moved to Berlin, she found herself in a situation familiar to many: mulling over how to phrase a polite brush-off after a dodgy first date with a Tinder match. Carefully, she tapped out a shut-down: “I had a lovely time, but don’t see another date on the horizon.” His response floored her: “OK, no problem. Any specific reason?”
Recounting the story now, Johnson lets out a loud chuckle – a sound familiar to listeners of her podcast, Dating, Laughter & Disasters. The night before, that Tinder date had shared with her that he’d spent 17 years of his life in prison, most recently for dismembering a man and stuffing him in a suitcase. Johnson’s eyebrows ping up into her fringe as she describes wondering what kind of “specific reason” he was expecting. “‘Yeah, you’re a bit short’? ‘I don’t like brown eyes’?”
“It’s a thing people say – don’t do online dating because you could meet an axe murderer,” she says. “And then I actually did meet one. Although, let’s be honest, you could meet an axe murderer anywhere. But it does show you the dangers of not just online dating but dating in general.”
Berlin is the city that just never stops giving crazy.
Not all the stories told by Johnson and her guests on Dating, Laughter & Disasters, which has just started a third season, are quite so dramatic, but there are lots of relatable shockers nonetheless. There’s the woman who was dumped because her shoes were too clean; the woman getting paid €50 to sit on cream buns; the woman whose therapist really did ghost her.
Someone talks about going out after work on a Tuesday, taking mushrooms and ending up in a threesome; someone else describes their dating spreadsheet (filed as “dick data”). “Berlin is the city that just never stops giving crazy,” says Johnson, who’s lived here since 2015. “The stories don’t end.”
While there’s plenty of pods about online dating, the unique selling point of Johnson’s lies in her ability to draw stories out of people and find the funny. Yet the project started in a far less riotous moment: back in 2019, Johnson was in a difficult place, attending therapy and struggling to understand a relationship that had ended badly.
“I realised I’d been in an emotionally abusive relationship. There was gaslighting, negation, all of these things that didn’t feel right in the moment.” she says. “I didn’t know any of these terms like love bombing, gaslighting … After going to therapy and reading a lot of books, I thought there should be more of this information available to people. I wanted people to learn from my mistakes, so they could manage their way around the dating scene.”
During a spell of Covid-era home office (Johnson’s day job is in tech), she drew on her experiences, good and bad, to write a book, Dating in Berlin, which she self-published in 2022. To get it out into the world, she rented a stall at the weekly flea markets on Boxhagener Platz and Maybachufer, hung a saucy sign and started a conversation about dating that continues to this day.
“I’d speak to so many women at the markets who’d say, ‘your book really helped me’,” Johnson says of the exchanges that prodded her into starting the podcast in 2023. “It was just so lovely to know there’s a community of us. Because for a long time, I thought I was the only one who couldn’t find a relationship in this city.”
The Berlin dating scene – as described by Johnson and her podcast guests – sounds like the most dysfunctional date ever: flakey, prone to ghosting, unfaithful, commitment-phobic. Thirty-five-year-old Johnson, who is newly single after the relationship she talked about at the end of season two ended amicably, is philosophical about it. “It’s a fun city, a party city and a sexually liberated city which caters to people who aren’t too bothered about settling down,” she says.
Of her own 20 or so good friends, she can think of one who’s in a committed relationship and one who’s just had a baby; the rest are single. “Berlin caters to the single life … We all have single friends, which makes it easier to be single yourself. But in a way, it’s so easy to stay single that people are less likely to try hard to keep a relationship going.”
Both the guests and the listeners of Dating, Laughter & Disasters are predominantly women; Johnson’s noticed that when men do come on the show, they are lacking in wild dating stories. “One guy I interviewed for the book was like, ‘I met a girl who’d just had Botox and she vomited in the park.’ I thought, that’s it? That’s all you have?” she says, with a laugh and a shrug.“Men don’t analyse things in the same way women do. I’ve grown up analysing the meaning of a full stop, you know?”
Johnson always ends her show by asking guests for a piece of dating advice. Her own top tips would be to “go into every situation with no expectations” and to try one of the many successful off-line dating events in Berlin. So will she be downloading the apps again, now that she’s back on the dating scene? “Jesus Christ, no. Absolutely not,” she exclaims, visibly shuddering. “I’ll never go back”. Her plan, when she’s ready, is to go to a bar and start talking. “It’s a nice thing to do anyway. You might make a connection or a new friend or a new follower.”
