Sharon Stone has shared some insight into her experiences with online dating as part of her search for a meaningful relationship.
The Hollywood star, who was previously blocked from the dating app Bumble, after it was assumed that her profile was an impostor, has been married and divorced twice: first to television producer Michael Greenburg from 1984 to 1990, and then to newspaper editor Phil Bronstein from 1998 to 2004.
In a new interview with The Times, the Basic Instinct actor spoke about looking for love online, rather than in “real life”.
At one first date from an app, she said she met “a heroin addict who’s clearly 20,000 heroin injections later than the picture he sent me” and left shortly after.
Stone also noted that she does not try to hide her identity on dating apps. “I go on as myself. It’s not like I can fake it,” she reasoned.
In 2019, after being blocked by Bumble, Stone expressed her upset about her exclusion on X, then known as Twitter, and her account was reinstated.
Elsewhere in the interview, Stone noted that she wanted to use dating apps as a way to connect with someone on an emotional level, rather than finding purely physical connections.
“I didn’t want to just go on Tinder and f*** somebody. Do you know what I mean?” she quipped.
“It’s so easy to f*** somebody. You don’t have to go on Tinder; you go to f***ing [coffee shop chain] Coffee Bean. It’s not hard.”
As Stone was one of the definitive sex symbols of the Nineties, many may assume that she’d find it easier than most to easily find a partner in a random scenario. Yet, according to her, it’s “not that hard for anyone”.
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(Getty Images)
Stone continued: “Men f*** flashlights; a warm can of beans. Let’s get into reality.
“You go to the supermarket if you just want to have sex, but if you want to have a connection…”
At the time of the interview, Stone was meant to attend an Emmys party shortly after, but decided to cancel due to her social anxiety.
“It’s just too f***ing much” she explained. “I have paralytic social anxiety. I have always had it. I’m fantastic in a crisis. If you’re bleeding to death, I’ve got you covered.
“What I don’t like is 17 people talking all at the same time. I just would like to go home. Enough with the chaos and the noise of nothing.”
Sharon Stone at the 2023 Red Sea Film Festival
(Getty Images for The Red Sea International Film Festival)
As well as having two relationships from the apps during the Covid lockdowns, Stone found that the downtime also provided her the space to channel her creativity into visual art. Now she exhibits her paintings at exhibitions across the world.
In December, she told The Independent how she began the process of being a regular painter.
“We were going through Covid and I was not working as an actress,” she said.
“I was shedding a lot of emotional things. It seemed like every painting was about an emotional experience; I was leaving it all on the canvas.”
You can read the full interview here.