Newly single James Silver discovers how ruthlessly determined women have changed all the rules ...
As first dates go, it had started almost perfectly. I had met Sara — a no-nonsense American redhead — in a central London bookshop. As we browsed the shelves, she began talking to me.
She was in her late 20s, bright and flirtatious. We chatted for a while and eventually swopped numbers.
I was going to play it cool and wait a couple of days before calling. But she got there first and asked me out.
Flattered, and impressed by her confidence, which had no doubt been honed in New York’s sharp-elbowed and occasionally vicious dating scene, we met up for a leisurely Sunday evening stroll in the park.
All went well at first and we seemed to hit it off. But a couple of hours into our date, over dinner, she told me without a hint of irony that unless she could envisage marriage by the end of the first date there was no point going on a second.
In retrospect, I should have hailed a taxi there and then but, cursed with good manners, I brushed over her frankly scary statement and stuck it out until the, now awkward, end.
My reward? An e-mail dispatched just hours later informing me that she was ‘sincerely sorry’ but didn’t think we were a ‘romantic match’. And there was I poised to pack up my worldly possessions and pitch up at her doorstep, saying: ‘Honey, I’m home! What’s for dinner?’
Sara is just one of several women whose paths have crossed mine since I gingerly dipped a toe in the dating shark-pool about six months ago after five years in relationships.
What I’ve found in this fearsome new world has truly shocked me. There have been two seismic changes in particular.
First, a new ruthlessness pervades dating in Britain. This means people are cut-throat and brazen about what they want, whether it’s marriage or no-strings Sex And The City-style sex. If they don’t see it immediately in a date, they are gone.
The new dating milieu is best summed-up by the experience of a friend who met a guy for date. She wasn’t sure whether she even fancied him and the conversation didn’t exactly flow.
Then, ten minutes in he got to his feet and announced, ‘Sorry, but this isn’t for me’, leaving her spluttering in her drink and nearly falling off her bar-stool. Even the barman looked shocked.
Brutal and very rude, certainly, but in the new dating environment this is considered perfectly acceptable because at least he didn’t lead her on.
Second is the seemingly irresistible rise of internet dating. Until a couple of years ago, online romance was a freak show peopled by drooling creeps, social misfits with teddy-bear collections still living with their mothers at 43 and those let out on day-release.
Anyway, in just five years that has changed entirely. While no doubt you would still be able to root out a host of oddballs on every dating site, now many attractive, functional single men and women, who hold down good jobs and don’t live with their mums, are at it, too. And, most significantly, they talk about it openly, compare notes and laugh about their (many) dating disasters.
So how did I find myself single again at 35? Well, I’ve been in relationships for most of the past five years and broke up with my last girlfriend because we both suddenly couldn’t see a future together.
There followed the inevitable few months of pungent self-pity, as I skulked around in slippers and underpants, eating ice-cream and boring my friends.
That was accompanied by the usual bout of post-relationship soul-searching. Was I doomed to die alone in the bath with Radio 4 burbling in the background?
Then, I tentatively started thinking about the possibility of finding love again. My first thought was for an ex-girlfriend — a gorgeous and brilliant student who was working on her Masters when we went out two years ago.
Inexplicably, I decided at the time that she wasn’t for me and split up with her after a wonderful holiday in Barcelona. There were plenty of other women out there, I had reasoned. After all, at 33 I was still young, I reasoned. Well, youngish.
However, I suddenly became convinced I’d made a terrible mistake. It was time to eat humble pie. With a bit of luck she was still single. So I fired off a breezy e-mail suggesting we meet for coffee some time.
Of course, a day later, I received a terse reply informing me that she recently became engaged and is currently planning a ‘spectacular’ late-summer wedding. I pictured marquees and ice-sculptures. Clearly, my invitation must have got lost in the post.
With many of my closest friends settled down, and ex- girlfriends clearly not the solution, I realised I would have to look further afield if I was to find a new girlfriend. And so I started dating again.
It is now six months into my new single lifestyle, and I’m still adapting to the new rules.
So far, quite frankly, it’s been a bit of a bloodbath. I’ve managed to be ‘dumped’ via e-mail by one attractive woman, after much flirtation and two worryingly chaste dates.
I’ve spent the night with another girl who casually informed me the next morning that she had a boyfriend she’d been with for several years (and there was I thinking it was men who were supposed to do that sort of thing).
I was memorably given a brush-off via text message in which I was told ‘I’m sure we’ll see each other around at some point’, and also spent a toe-curling meal at an expensive restaurant with a girl who, to put it mildly, had a problem with perspiration.
It began with sweat dripping off her nose and bubbling on her forehead. By the time the main course arrived she looked as if she’d been caught up in a monsoon. Never a good look. Particularly over food.
I began in the toughest dating environment of all — New York, where I was working briefly as a journalist. It was here that I was introduced to the new dating rules which appear to have migrated wholesale to London.
With some notable exceptions, Brits will by and large grin and bear a bad date and even muster a polite ‘We must do this again some time’ at the end of even the most excruciating of evenings, when in reality we’d rather stick kebab skewers in our ears than spend another hour in that person’s company.
New Yorkers observe no such niceties. One American friend told me how her date casually informed her that he had arranged three dates in two-hour ‘sittings’ for that very evening. She didn’t stay to hear him attempt to explain why he considered that to be acceptable.
Internet dating was already booming in New York by then. With the city’s long-hours-and- get-ahead career culture, searching for love on the internet seemed as logical as booking a holiday or ordering a DVD online.
When I overheard two girls pulling apart their internet dates over brunch, I wondered whether it would ever take off in Britain. When I returned home, I found it had — and that the stigma was vanishing.
Though it doesn’t really appeal to me, I know a lot of people who have tried it. One female friend became an addict for a while, sometimes lining up two or three dates a week, conveyer belt- style.
A couple of people I know have met girlfriends online — and one friend of a friend has met his wife-to-be — so I put aside my reservations. As long as my expectations were rock-bottom, I reasoned, what was there to lose?
I learned one lesson very quickly — witty and well-written e-mails do not necessarily translate into scintillating company. Indeed, it’s quite possible to be hilarious when pecking away at the keyboard, while having the personality of an artichoke in reality.
‘Maxine’ was my first internet date. She had a nice turn of phrase, but turned out to be a gibbering let-down over a café latte in Starbucks (her choice, not mine, I hasten to add).
I arrived, scanning the coffee shop for women sitting on their own. There were several, but none looked much like
‘Maxine’, whose picture I had seen online where she had looked sexy and sultry.
I decided that even though I was late, she hadn’t turned up yet. So I bought a coffee and settled down to read the paper.
Fifteen minutes later, there was still no sign of her, I had plainly been stood-up by my cyber-date (a new low?).
As I got up to leave, however, I realised she’d been sitting with her back to me, no doubt thinking the same thing. But no wonder I didn’t spot her because she looked nothing like her soft-focus photo. I also suspect she had lied about her age, when she claimed to be 33, in the flesh she looked closer to 40.
Quite possibly, she thought I was a disappointment, too. Nevertheless, we talked animatedly for half an hour, and both said the obligatory ‘we must do this again some time’ before parting company. It goes without saying that we never saw each other again.
My second and third dates were perfectly nice but were also far less attractive in person than in their online pictures. One was far heavier than in her photo. The other one wore a frightening half-inch layer of make-up.
There was no way I would have even given them a second glance if I’d met them in a bar or at a party.
With the fourth, I broke another cardinal rule: never, ever meet up with someone who refuses to let you see their picture first. It’s a fair bet that they look like Big Daddy with a headache. Of course, I should have been suspicious, but when ‘Lucy’ told me she was ‘largish’, I was prepared to be charitable. Yes, I thought, she will be carrying a few excess pounds, but we could all use a little more time in the gym, and she was disarmingly funny and chatty over e-mail and on the phone.
However, reality came back to bite me with a vengeance at the bar where we had arranged to meet. As a reporter, I had once covered the annual and eye-popping Big Beautiful Women Of Texas pageant. ‘Lucy’, it turned out, would not have looked out of place in the front row. She was my final stab at online dating. Since then I have met a number of single women via a more conventional route, through friends. However, in my first few months even this didn’t guarantee success.
I met ‘Caroline’, who intriguingly kept asking for details about my sex life with my ‘ex’, yet was standoffish when it came to flirting with me. (Yes, I know, she clearly didn’t fancy me.) Then there was the woman who turned out to have a boyfriend. ‘Kate’ was the friend of a friend and we hit it off pretty much instantly.
The following morning, I casually inquired about what she was doing at the weekend. ‘Seeing my boyfriend’, was her unexpected response. ‘Don’t worry’, she said, noting the surprise which had registered in my eyes. ‘We have an open relationship. We both see other people.’
Odd that she hadn’t mentioned that the night before. Though, in truth, it certainly wouldn’t have stopped me.
The past few months have taught me that you have to toughen up a bit when it comes to dating. An over-sensitive soul who opens up at the first hint of warmth from a member of the opposite sex is quite likely to get pretty badly bruised.
But that doesn’t mean to say you have to become too hard-nosed about it all. At least I’ve not turned into my friend, who went for a first date with someone he had met on the internet, only to find that the woman waiting for him was nothing like the pouting beauty in the picture she’d sent him.
Not fancying her, he reluctantly bought her a drink, made a half-hearted stab at small-talk before mumbling something about needing to visit the toilet urgently.
But with a quick glance over his shoulder to check she wasn’t watching, he sidestepped the Gents and slipped out of the bar. He wasn’t even apologetic, claiming he did nothing wrong, because when it comes to dating, why waste her time or yours?
One thing everyone seems to believe is that it’s far easier for single men in their 30s to find a partner, than it is for women of a similar age.
However, with recent statistics revealing that single women in the UK are now outnumbered by their male counterparts, how accurate is the media stereotype that London and other big cities are overflowing with Chardonnay-swilling singletons hurtling angrily towards their 40s?
Anecdotally, I know a handful of women in their late 30s who have all but given up on finding a soulmate. But that kind of despondency is not confined to them.
Take a recent Friday night I spent in a central London pub. There were four single, mid-30s men around the table. Among them was a good-looking and reasonably successful guy who was bemoaning
the fact that he hadn’t been with a woman for more than a year and was beginning to wonder whether he would ever again find a girlfriend. ‘I’m not even very picky any more,’ he lied at one point, draining his beer glass. That’s funny, I thought, coming from the man who thinks it’s OK to flee dates on the pretext of going to the toilet.
The newly single should bear one thing in mind — when it comes to dating, always retain your sense of humour. That way if you’re hurt, you won’t stay hurt for long.
Getting used to the brush-offs and knock-backs has become part of it all, even if on occasions, I’ve had to remind myself that I’ve rejected my fair share, too.
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