Tricky Times

A lot of my friends have had quite an interesting social life in the past few years, thanks to these dating sites. Some of them are married now or living with someone they’ve met there and some even have kids already. Others have made good friends who have then introduced them to even better friends.

That’s the problem when you’re done with your education and just working now, life becomes a routine and there aren’t that many opportunities to meet new people. At my office I never meet new people except the occasional new courier. And even though some of them are cute, the ‘conversations’ don’t really allow any margins for a beautiful friendship to develop. ‘Sign here, please’ – ‘There? OK...thank you.’ You see it’s very hard to squeeze in an invitation to a concert or a dinner party.
And where I come from, men aren’t exactly famous for chatting up women sober, in broad daylight. So, Look4Soulmate.com is a great invention, I think.

The problem of course is all the pervs, the married men looking for excitement and those who only want casual sex and preferably something kinky. These men stake out every single (literally) woman who places an ad on these sites and waste our time with endless messages. Some of these guys are straight forward and can easily be dismissed right away. Others try to hide their agenda at first and it takes a few messages to uncover them, like the one I told you about last time. It’s terribly time consuming; first you have to read through the pile of messages you get, delete those you have no intention of replying to, answer the others and try to lure out the ones who are just wasting your time and so slowly, narrow down the options. Seriously, if you want to find one decent bloke there you need to spend about 2-3 hours a night sifting through the pile. I have plenty of other things to do with my time so I try to be blunt, I hate if people are wasting my time.

Therefore, I can’t help but respect Mr Apron, who’s become somewhat a celebrity on Look4Soulmate.com. At least he’s not pretending to be anything other than he is. He simply writes to every woman who signs up and asks if he can come round and do housework like hoovering and dusting, wearing nothing but an apron, while you and preferably a few of your girl friends watch. Of course it would have been best if I could have saved that minute it took to read and delete his message and not to have received a message from him at all but at least he’s honest, he gets credit for that.

I have three friends who also have ads on this website and we often talk about the men who are writing us and compare notes. Some of us have received messages from the same guys and when we compare them we usually see that they copy/paste them and what appeared to be an interesting, fulfilling conversation at first - turned out to be a standardised monologue about their inner self and meaningless praise towards whoever was reading. So, obviously you have to be quite aware and on your toes when meeting men online.

I learnt a great trick too. I signed up for another account as well and placed another ad under the name Ms Naughty. I described her as a petite brunette with short hair, in her late twenties, looking for some company when her young son was at his dad’s. ‘She’ ticked the ‘Casual Sex’ box and implied in ‘her’ ad that she’s willing to try anything at least once.

Then I check out her Inbox regularly to see the nicks of the guys who write to ‘her’. If I come across messages from the same nicks in my Inbox, I instantly delete them, without reading. That’s usually about one third of all the messages I get...

It's a Jungle Out There

Even though I’m not strategically looking for a knight in shining armour to spend the rest of my life with, I don’t mind browsing and think it’s only natural to be out there, in case something good comes along. Who knows what might happen?

Since I’m mostly done with clubbing and such methods of scouting around the scene, which have never been successful anyways, I’ve decided to try Internet dating. After all, I actually know a few women who have found the love of their life (or hitherto) there.
They also ran into a lot of opportunists and weirdoes so when I decided to place an ad on one of those dating sites couple of days ago, I thought it best to be accurate and concise to scare them off:

‘I’ve no interest in casual sex and can’t be bothered with any bullshit. Am a postgraduate and have a good job that I like. I have great sense of humour, am smart, kind, caring and spontaneous. Don’t smoke and have no children.’

There, I think that covers all the fundamentals; I’m not searching for just sex (only have to reach for the phone to take care of that), I have a rather high IQ and wouldn’t have much in common with men without brains and ambition. So I thought this ad was quite good and said everything that needed to be said in the beginning.

After half an hour my ad had been viewed 122 times and I had 9 messages waiting. Most of those guys had had an ad in there for over two years, which I didn’t think was a good sign. Very few of the ads said anything useful, typically just ‘I’m a good looking guy interested in meeting a woman who’s beautiful inside and out.’ Such an ad doesn’t really raise an interest and since most of the messages were ‘Hi!’ or ‘Hi, wanna chat?’

I started to seriously doubt these guys’ communication skills. Somebody should explain to them that although ‘Hi!’ might work as an opening line in a bar – where people can actually see one another and make all sorts of judgements based on appearances – you need a little more effective approach to catch someone’s attention in the cyber world. So I decided to completely ignore those amateurs.

The messages kept piling up and as nightfall drew closer, the more explicit and crude messages I received. Despite what I’d said in my ad I was still offered cyber sex, one guy wanted to come over straight away to warm my bed, two guys gave detailed descriptions of what they wanted to do with me and one man said he and his wife needed a ‘bit of a change’. What happened to going on mini-breaks? I soon got frustrated with all this nonsense so I started scavenging through the ads myself.
I found a few quite interesting bits, amongst them an ad from a man and a woman in the north who were coming to town soon and wanted to spend a night in a hotel room with a young woman. NB, they‘re married...but not to each other.

Anyway, the following day I received a message from a man who sounded really nice. He‘s interested in literature, theatre, concerts and well, sounds just very intellectual and interesting. I instantly started visualising a sexy, romantic philosopher. We hit it off right away, the messages went back and forth and he just sounded better and better; witty, well educated and had an apt for life. Too good to be true, actually.

He hadn’t said much about his situation so I started wondering if he had a stroll of children or three marriages behind him. So I asked straight out about his domestic circumstances. There was no hesitation, the next message started off: ‘I’m a happily married man, father of two...’

Oh really? AND YOU DON’T SEE ANY CONTRADICTION IN BEING ‘HAPPILY MARRIED’ AND HAVING AN AD ON LOOK4SOULMATE.COM????

Vanity Flare

Yes, middle-aged men are a bit vain. A few years ago, I started seeing a newly divorced man, 13 years my senior.

While I thought we were just having a bit of fun and not planning far ahead, him being so recently divorced and all that, he was apparently already searching for wife #2. So, affter three months, he said he‘d met another woman whom he thought had more potential. Needless to say she was closer to him in age, divorced parent of two, like him. I took this all very lightly at first, trying not to seem too disappointed that our fling was over, but after a while I realised I missed him. I couldn‘t lie to myself; I really liked him.

So, after about a month, I decided to swallow my pride and went knocking on his door, almost recreating that famous scene from Notting Hill. Although I didn’t give him an expensive original painting, I did bring him a little gift and bravely admitted that I had strong feelings for him, almost begging him on my knees to give us a real chance.

He wasn’t as abrupt as Hugh Grant had been to Julia Roberts but embraced me, kissed me and cuddled and said, with tears in his eyes, that he was terribly flattered, I was a wonderful woman and he was very fond of me. But no, he couldn’t see how we could make a relationship work. Besides, he had been seeing that other woman and things were going well there. I of course needed to hear that he liked her and not me (the brutal truth is always the best medicine) but he said that ‘wasn’t really the issue’. Then I needed to know whether he liked her simply more than me and received the ambiguous answer ‘It’s not a question of that, I just think I stand a better chance with her.’ I was very annoyed. Wishy-washy gestures are intolerable when you’re trying to straighten out your, and someone else’s, feelings.

So I asked him directly whether the age difference was a factor. He said yes, that he didn’t want to be gossiped about, didn’t want his friends and collegues to think he was going through midlife crisis and laugh at him behind his back. He’d also have to consider the feelings of his two teenage sons. Obviously he didn’t realise that, to children and teenagers, anyone above the age of 25 has one foot in the grave anyways. They’d probably not see me as girly as he did when they’d finally be introduced to me, IF it would ever come to that.

I had always heard that older men dreamt of few things more than parading around with a young, pretty woman by their arm so I was struggling with disbelief. I finally asked him: ‘Would you be ashamed of me?’ and he sighed apologetically, ‘Yes.’ No wishy-washy there. Fantastic. After everything he had said about me being so mature and lovely and gorgeous and intelligent and clever and well-read and fun and talented and blahblahblah...I’d be an embarrassment to him! Vanity obviously weighed more than his so-called feelings for me. Appearances were so important to him that instead of following his heart and jump in the deep end, it was safer to settle with a more accordingly woman who would better suit the mould that his ex-wife had left. Are we talking about a text book example?

Still, my astonishment had a bit more to do with discovering that this man, whom I had been so drawn to partially because of his IQ...was in fact handicapped by vanity! I slammed the door behind me, hard.

Catch twenty-something

Maybe it’s just as well that I’m not searching for a soul mate anyway. In my case the quest would be quite hopeless; I might as well give up.
I’m in my early thirties, childless, well educated, not bad looking, can take care of myself and just don’t seem to suit any of the single men I come across.

If they’re around my age, they are usually eager to have kids – maybe not right now but sometime in the future. So when I tell them that I don’t want to have children they either get lost or give me a pat on the head, saying ‘Well, you say that now’ and wink at me. That’s when I let myself disappear. It’s like talking to the wall trying to explain to them that the odds of me changing my mind are just as high as the odds of them changing theirs. It’s no rocket science, is it?

The older men, however, who have had one or two serious relationships already, been married even and had kids, are not so keen on adding more mouths to feed and have started to enjoy the less hectic daily routine that comes when the children grow older – and only live with you part-time.  Therefore they should suit me better, shouldn’t they?

But no, they are of course older and therefore think they know better than me whether I’ll change my mind about wanting to have babies or not. And because they are so much older and ‘wiser’ they never listen to my speech about the odds. So frustratingly patronising!

And even though I manage to make them consider the possibility that a woman can go without having children and still be successful and happy (name dropping Oprah Winfrey and Mother Theresa) they then can’t believe that a young, beautiful woman could possibly like them for a lengthy period. Apparently, it’s evident that I’d lose interest in a few years, they’d get older and greyer and I’d get tired of them. Yup, that’s how much self-confidence most single, middle-aged men have. And then they cannot fathom why I get offended by this reasoning of theirs! Well, thank you ever so much for considering me a brainless little bimbo!

Yes, after listening to all their praise and compliments about how intelligent and smart, clever and witty I am...deep down they just think I’m only attracted to looks and will be chasing young studs later on. They assume I’ll prefer a young, pretty-faced rogue by my side rather than an intelligent, interesting, good-natured man. Which makes me think that these men are really not as intelligent as I thought they were and the problem is solved; I make myself scarce.

The irony is of course that if I had been unfortunate enough to get accidentally impregnated long time ago, I’d have a much better chance of finding a partner now! As a single mother I’d at least have a chance at those divorced men who already have kids and don’t want any more and find some kind of assurance in having a relationship with a woman who has definitely gotten the mother instinct out of her system. Maybe they’d also think there’d be less chance of me dumping them, for safety reasons or something, not wanting to become a struggling, single mother again. What do I know?

All I know is that I’m simply in a no-win situation!

Freak Like Me

It‘s my own fault. I implied as much in my last column so here it goes: Yes, I think I can manage without having children. Ever. And be happy.

Why am I considered such a freak? I know that the mother instinct is, well, an instinct but haven‘t we oppressed most of our natural instincts anyways? Except the sex drive, thankfully. Why is it almost a sin to throw motherhood out of the window too?

I‘ve notice that we women, who dare to insinuate that we don‘t really want to have kids, either receive deadly looks or patronising oh-you-don‘t-know-what-you‘re-talking-about smiles. Still I‘ve never heard or seen anyone go bonkers when men declare that they don‘t want babies. They seem to either have it in them or not, bless ‘em! Women, however, are supposed to love kids, want to have about a million of them, love baby clothes, baby furniture, baby this and baby that. If we don‘t, we better lay low and shut entirely up about this ‘defect’ of ours.

Of course I haven’t ruled out anything and everyone has the right to change their minds. But at this point in my life I don’t plan on having any babies, ever. I’ve always liked kids though. I was always babysitting when I was young, was an Aupair and have worked at both primary and secondary schools. I always assumed I’d have kids later in life, I even remember feeling an urge for having a baby when I was around twenty. But slowly, the urge faded out, the plans changed and there were so many things that I wanted to do that I started worrying about where to squeeze in the having-a-baby part! Until one day I realised that I had no obligation to have a baby! It was a great discovery – I simply didn’t have to have kids if I didn’t want to. And after some time of serious contemplation, I found that I simply didn’t want to.

I felt such a relief after making that discovery, but didn’t dare saying anything out loud at first. Soon, however, I discovered that I was far from being alone feeling this way. I ran into other young women who, in a whispered voice, told me they felt the same and we formed sort of a secret alliance. Now we sit and give each other secret signals when some of the girls start talking about pregnancy, birth, breast feeding, sleeping routines, pot training, playschools, chicken pox, paediatricians, pacifiers etc.

We understand that this is an important part of their lives so we give them a little time for these distasteful discussions and then we start diverting the conversation towards something more interesting. If that doesn’t work we start yawning or suddenly remember that we have to go somewhere. The worst is when this happens at dinner parties. Some mothers simply don’t seem to understand that graphic descriptions of the changes in the female body during pregnancies, or action packed commentary about births can cause loss of appetite for the rest of us.

Call me a wimp, but pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding is something I find rather a revolting discussion topic over dinner. And even though I could do with shedding a few pounds, there’s no joy in starving while watching your friends chew on a juicy steak and tell you about this woman who gave birth to such a gigantic baby that she tore all the way back to her... 

Bitter Much?

Got into yet another discussion about love and relationships today, with two of my work mates. One of whom has been with his wife for 11 years, married 7, and the other beaming with happiness after having moved in with his girlfriend of 9 months. Those guys obviously thought I’m just a bitter cow when I said: ‘I’m perfectly happy on my own and don’t really need a relationship.’ Let them think what they want.

But I mean it. I feel completely content with the way things are and have often declared that the thought of becoming a ‘spinster’ isn’t that horrible. I can see in other people’s eyes though that they think I’ve given up somehow - and vowed to stay single for the rest of my life. I think those are the people who started, as kids or teenagers, to visualize themselves spending their lives with someone special in the future, expecting to be the half of a pair for the rest of their lives, as if it was inevitable. And then they did.

I was actually just like them in the beginning, as a teenager, but then started weighing the pros and the cons. I wanted to be independent and take care of myself financially, so that I could travel and be free to pack my things and take off to Timbuktu if I wanted to, whenever I wanted to. And I envisioned doing so many things that an ordinary family life would make difficult, if not impossible.

But the main reason why I’m still single is that if I ever were to form a serious relationship with a man, I‘d want it to happen for the right reasons. Not just because I met someone whom I could accept as a husband and struggle with through decades of marriage, but because after spending time with that man I‘d find it difficult to spend the rest of my life without him. And I‘m not talking about love at first sight, a soul mate or any of that rubbish. I don‘t believe in those things. Just someone I‘d get so well on with and enjoyed so much being with that I’d think it would make me more happy to go through life with him rather than without. Someone that I could share the journey of life and we’d help each other to blossom as human beings. And, of course, I‘d want him to choose me, not just because he was looking for a partner but because he stumbled upon me and would want to share his life with me and not just some good woman who‘d make a ‘convenient’ wife.

If it happens, it happens. If it doesn‘t happen this way, then it just won’t happen at all. And the thought of spending my life without a partner does not seem terrifying to me at all.

I‘m quite sure you can find fulfilment and have a happy life some other way. I‘ve heard of such people, I‘m sure they exist.

Cute Enough

‘Tell me, dear, why is it that such a bright, young woman like yourself is still single?  I mean, you‘ve got the brains and the looks and everything!’

Ah, well, that‘s a good question, actually, and I promise to get back to you on that as soon as I‘ve found out. In the meantime, why don‘t you try and ask the many gentlemen who have, rather selflessly, attributed to that condition of mine? I can provide you with their phone numbers, e-mail addresses, MSN or Skype nicks, no bother at all.

The reason why I’m single is just as much a mystery to me as it is to all of those oh-so concerned people who don’t seem to fathom that ‘ordinary’ people can still be single after thirty. Women seem to wonder more about this than men, I have to say. Or they’re more prone to say something out loud, interrogating me to try to find out where I stand in society, and why.

‘So, how long since you divorced?’ – ‘I’ve never been married actually.’ – ‘Oh, well...lived with someone, then?’ – ‘Never lived with anyone either, I’m afraid.’ –‘Really? So...you’ve just always been...single?’ – ‘Yup, always single.’ –‘What? Such a cute girl?’

Yeah, I’m single despite being cute. Amazing. Must have an awful personality then, thank you very much! You just managed to turn a simple compliment into quite the opposite. That tends to happen when people try to use my looks to comfort me in my apparently pathetic situation. As if it has anything to do with looks anyway? Perhaps everybody except me knows that all the ugly people are single and all the pretty people are not. If so, I must get a prescription for those glasses I’ve been meaning to get for so long.

But I’d go as far as stating that looks have absolutely nothing to do with people being drawn to one another. Which is a paradox, of course, because there has to be something that attracts - and at first glance it’s usually related to appearances. But what one person might find attractive, someone else finds rather ordinary or even repulsive. The great non-mystery - that most people discover when they’ve reached the minimum maturity to be considered adults - is that the personality, vibes and various, invisible little character traits have much more effect when it comes to attraction than any fake tan, hairdo, make-up or plastic surgery.

Yes, there seems to be some cosmic rumour that certain physical traits are more sought after than others and might even ensure popularity with the other sex, or whichever sex you’re trying to attract. However, at the end of the day it’s just an inexplicable, mysterious personal taste that is the defining factor.

Let’s face it, if it were only down to looks, wouldn’t Hollywood relationships last longer?