How do you like your eggs in the morning? Who cares! This article is all about tea, baby. All T. No shade.
I like mine in a big mug, and full to the top, can’t stand it when people make you a cuppa and it’s only half full. They’re real half-empty type people.
Also – the colour. It’s hard to describe the perfect beige, but basically, it’s needs to not look like dark sewer water, and not like some weird pale discharge. Coffee black, sure. But tea needs the right amount of milk. Too much and the drink becomes pointless – there’s not really any benefit to overly milky tea. But too little and it somehow leaves your mouth drier than it was before you consumed the liquid. Which is just weird.
It should come as no surprise then, that people who can make a great cup of tea are far more attractive than those who can’t. And that’s according to science.
A study by dating site Plenty of Fish discovered that, for a fifth of all people everywhere ever (2,500 participants), excellent tea-making capabilities are a major turn-on, while a bad cuppa can cost you big time.
37 per cent of people surveyed said weak tea from a prospective partner is a no-no, while overly sugary tea would put off 17 per cent of people, and overly strong tea is a turn-off for 13 per cent.
Another 10 per cent of people said a milk substitute would throw a spanner in the works of a potential relationship.
Surprisingly, only nine per cent were bothered by what is arguably the biggest debate surrounding the tea making method – milk first or second.
I’m with George Orwell on this – milk second all the way.
As he says in his essay, A Nice Cup of Tea:
One should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
Whichever way you like it, it seems the most important point – to 69 per cent of people at least – is to make sure you memorise how your partner takes their tea, as Metro states. It’s just easier that way isn’t it.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.