A 49-year-old London café owner who spent years stuck in bad relationships and dead-end app dates hired a flirting coach and hypnotherapist, and married the man she met just weeks into the program.
Elizabeth Laing ran a café in Greenwich, south-east London, where she watched couples come and go, some getting married, divorced, and remarried, while she stayed single. She cycled through what she described as failed romances, bad boyfriends, and the kind of half-relationships that never go anywhere. Then she tried something most people would find terrifying: she put down her phone, walked into public spaces, and started talking to strangers.
Laing hired a flirting coach and a hypnotherapist, gave herself a three-month deadline to find a husband, and committed to speaking to and flirting with one new man every single day. Within weeks, a 50-year-old Australian named Owen walked up to her in a pub and introduced himself. They have now been together six years and married for two, the Daily Mail reported.
The coaching started with a group workshop at the National Gallery in London. Laing was told to approach three complete strangers, make eye contact, and ask them a question. She described the experience bluntly:
"I wanted to die. I was terrified. She said you have to walk around and make eye contact with people and then ask them a question."
The coach also taught participants to smile with their mouths open. Laing said the technique backfired at first.
"It made me look like I was snarling. I was getting really funny looks."
One-on-one sessions followed. The coach sent Laing into a Tesco supermarket and told her to approach men in three different aisles. She walked up to a man in the carrot aisle and asked what he was making with his carrots. He answered and wandered off. Not exactly a love connection, but Laing said the exercise did its job.
"But it got easier every time."
She began smiling at strangers on trains, chatting with men in everyday settings, and visiting pubs and bars alone. Men started following her off trains to ask for her number. Laing framed the math simply: every other woman was at home swiping through an app, so the real-world competition was thin.
"It was fun and flirty. And I was cleaning up because every other woman was at home on a dating app."
The flirting exercises were only half the work. Alongside the coaching, Laing underwent hypnotherapy to figure out why she kept choosing the wrong men. She said the sessions traced her attraction to chaotic relationships back to patterns from her childhood.
"There was a lot of chaos in my life so I just felt safe within it because it was familiar. I was so used to chasing someone just to like me, I was just repeating patterns from my childhood."
Laing said she had been unable to speak to anyone she found attractive before the program. Her heart would race, and she would freeze. The combination of practical flirting drills and deeper therapeutic work broke the cycle, or at least that is her account of it.
"I could never speak to anyone attractive. My heart would just go and I wouldn't know what to say. I was also addicted to chaotic relationships."
The day Laing met her future husband, she had actually forgotten to complete her daily goal of approaching a new man. She walked into a pub, and Owen approached her instead.
"A man walked up to me and said 'Today you've met a cheeky Australian.' Instantly, I was like, 'That's the one.'"
They met within three months of Laing starting the program. Two years later, Owen proposed. The couple married and settled in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, about 35 miles southeast of London. At the time of publication, they had been together six years and married for two. Owen was 50.
Laing described the process of finding him with characteristic directness:
"It was like my husband was at the bottom of a big pile and I just had to pick through all the other men to find him."
After meeting Owen, Laing sold her Greenwich café. She trained in rapid transformational therapy under Marisa Peer, a well-known hypnotherapist, and launched her own coaching business called Your Power Within Therapy. The business combines hypnotherapy with the same kind of real-world flirting coaching that changed her own life. She shares advice on Instagram under the handle @lizzielianglovemindset.
Laing said she understands what her clients are going through because she lived it herself, the half-hearted text exchanges, the ghosting, the emotional dead ends that dating apps produce by design.
"I've lived this, I know what they're going through, the crumbs and the ghosting and the pain, it's something I can fully understand."
Her pitch against the apps is practical, not moralistic. She argues that the entire process, swiping, messaging, getting ready for a date, wasting an evening, is harder and less efficient than simply talking to someone in a shop.
"People are so desperate for real life connection. I feel like people who have grown up on the apps don't even realise you can put their heads up and see people in front of their face."
"And it's so much easier! Dating apps are a process, swiping, messaging, getting ready for a date, wasting your evening. Talking to someone you bump into in a shop is easy."
Laing said even casual conversations with friends about her approach have changed their behavior.
"Even just friends of mine have changed after I speak with them about this."
There is something deeply old-fashioned about Laing's story, and that is exactly the point. The billion-dollar dating app industry promised to make finding a partner easier. For a lot of people, it made the search lonelier, more transactional, and less human. Sometimes the simplest fix is the oldest one: put the phone down, walk outside, and say hello.
