dating – Because You Can

Be Your Own Valentine

The perfect Valentine gift for yourself or a friend – my seven secrets to a successful single life:

You don’t have to get married – I used to think that coupledom was the only valid life choice. It isn’t.
You don’t need a wingperson – I used to wait for friends to accompany me to drinks, dinner or a concert, before I realised I could do it all by myself, and love it.
You can date whomever you want (and it doesn’t need to be forever) – coming out of a socially condoned marriage opened my life to dating younger men and men from very different cultures. All of these experiences have enriched my life, and continue to do so.
You don’t have to have children – even though it seems as though everyone is doing it, you can opt out. It is a choice not a given.
You can go on holiday on your own – you can do exactly what you want, when you want, without having to compromise. Win!
Single life isn’t perfect (but neither is coupledom) – it’s a rollercoaster but I know which ride I’d rather be on…
The greatest relationship you’ll ever have is with yourself – it’s a cliche for a reason. If we don’t put ourselves first, no one else will.

Now available on Amazon for only £1.99 (ebook) and £4.99 (paperback):

I’ve been wondering for a while now, about how to encapsulate the particular state a late forty- or fifty-something single woman finds herself in with regards to relationships. Every time I go on a group hike, there is the inevitable conversation with a woman around my age, who is confident, intelligent, attractive, adventurous – I’d even go as far as to say ‘sparkling’ – and before we’ve even discovered each other’s names I know what she’s going to say.

She’s going to tell me that she’s tried dating men her own age (the rare ones that don’t want to date younger women), but they can’t quite keep up with her in terms of get-up-and-go or sex drive. They don’t want to get out and do things as much as she does and she ends up leaving them behind to join hiking groups at weekends.

She’s going to say that she has her eye on someone a bit older, but then discovers that they’re dating someone twenty years younger than them, because they can. She’s going to say that she gets quite a lot of interest from younger men, but she wants someone to share a present and a future with and they don’t offer much in that way, because they’re just after the ‘mature’ experience. And they’re largely immature.

Then she’s going to share a recent experience where she’s been chatting to a guy her age online and it’s been going really well, but then he mysteriously disappears, reappears, then disappears again. In search of answers, she’ll tell me that men have called her ‘scary’ or ‘out of their league’ and I’ll nod in agreement. I too am a scary woman.

We then walk along together, chuckling in solidarity as we watch the guys our age and older chatting up the young women, sometimes the hike leader, and the young men chatting with anyone but us (for more than a few minutes). Interest from them comes in secret, by private message, maybe after the hike – but it can never happen in broad daylight. They can’t be seen to be into us. The horror!

Not that hiking is about finding people to date, but that is an inevitable sidebar of a group that is mixed and into the same things. (I laughed yesterday when one thirty- or forty-something guy was talking about not wanting to be part of outdoor groups where fifty- or sixty-somethings hung out. I didn’t bother telling him my age.)

I recently went to an event where a late-forties guy friend turned up with his girlfriend of twenty-seven. Another older guy friend discovered the news and had that look on his face when he reported back to our group – the one I’ve seen before when the same topic comes up among men. The “I didn’t realise we could do that” face. You can almost hear their brains working out how they could trade in their old model for a new one. I remember one of my ex-husband’s friends starting to date a girl in her twenties when he was nearly forty and it was like he’d scored a try for Scotland when his friends found out. I didn’t realise back then what a ‘coup’ it was. I also didn’t realise back then that I could play those guys at their own game.

Older men say to me that they want to date younger women because they still want children, but I don’t believe that to be true. I believe that they don’t want to date someone who is their equal in terms of ‘social power’ so they look for someone who is below their perceived standing. I’ve made my peace with that. I don’t want to date someone who is scared by my social power either. It’s really unattractive.

I seem to have recently acquired a crop of younger guys who can only message me when they’re drunk or high. Some are in relationships, some not, some are struggling to come to terms with being attracted to an older woman. In it comes, the text or WhatsApp message in the morning, sent at 2am. Sometimes they’ve been up all night and I get the ‘hey babe’ at 10am. We never meet up, and nothing ever happens.

For some reason the message frequency ramps up around early spring and autumn – I’m told it’s something to do with testosterone levels. I quite enjoy seeing what the morning brings when I switch my phone on, and I can’t seem to bring myself to block their numbers either. There’s a fascinating increase in messaging when I’m on holiday. Suddenly when I’m thousands of miles away on my own, I’m incredibly attractive. The minute I arrive home the silence descends. It’s a thing.

One guy who has appeared and disappeared from my life for over a decade, always seems to get in touch when I’m on holiday. We’re not connected on social media, but he seems to have a sixth sense for when I’m away. He’s suddenly telling me that he thinks he fucked up by letting me get away, that there might be a relationship there. He is four years younger than me but obsessed with the age gap. Like every younger man, he wants to know the age of the youngest guy I’ve ever slept with. I still don’t know why that matters (give me wine and I’ll tell you the number).

What was fascinating, before his predictable disappearance on my return, was his reaction to my saying that I have a lover. He kept coming back to the topic over and over, but not saying the word. He referred to my ‘friend’, my ‘boyfriend’, my ‘fuck buddy’, my ‘friend with benefits’ and over and over I corrected him. “He’s my ‘lover'”, I said. Why could he not comprehend it or type the words? Was it because it sounded a bit ’60s or ’70s?

‘Lover’ accurately describes the state of being with someone you care for deeply – not in an official relationship, not seeing them every day or even every week, but they are in your life and you acknowledge and love their space in it. My lover is thirty-two and Muslim and we know it can never be a thing, but I’d rather be with him – a man who is straightforward, kind, sexy and not scared of me in the slightest – than with a man whose idea of flirting is relentless ‘teasing’ (aka bantz).

Perhaps what I’m doing – maintaining my adventurous independence but with a love interest on the side – is a female version of the ‘I didn’t realise we could do that’ face. As more and more women my age opt out of marriage and into independent lover-dom, I feel like we’re the ones scoring the tries. The more I talk about it with other women, the more I think that we’re scary to more conventional men because we’ve discovered the big secret – we have a choice, and it doesn’t need to include them. Sure, it would be nice if it did, but if it doesn’t, our worlds don’t end.

In fact, they open up.

New Year, New You

There seems to have been something in the air.

I’m actually compiling a list of every woman I’ve spoken to who’s had a romantically disappointing New Year. Like me, they’ve walked into 2017 with a resigned yet resolute air about them. The resounding cry of, “not you as well!” has made us laugh and know we’re not alone … yet we all know that we might be better off being alone. At least for a while.

For most of us, New Year has given us a snapshot into the reality of our situations and the clarity is terrifying. Christmas affords an opportunity to bedeck our lives in tinsel, fairy lights and the blurry focus of too-much prosecco, but New Year hurtles towards us, brutally throwing the decorations aside, revealing what lies beneath: the harsh truth of our situations.

I think that’s what people find so terrifying about New Year. Whether we choose to blot it out with booze, go to bed early, or plan to be in the air when it’s happening, it is because none of us find it easy to face New Year head on. If we don’t have a hand to hold or lips to kiss at midnight, it is as though life has just taken a selfie of us at our most exposed.

Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.

For some, like me, the ‘midnight selfie’ was just what was needed to allow us to make a clear decision. On New Year’s Day I had an epiphany. I realised that what I’d thought (and hoped) was a relationship really wasn’t. He was in town with a friend on New Year’s Eve, while I was with friends at a party (and actually went to bed at 11.30pm having peaked too soon).

Suddenly the fact that he’d chosen to be apart on this one night of the year gave me the clarity I needed. It’s been so obvious. I’ve been a victim of wishful thinking, but I’m being nice to myself about it. Everyone is allowed to get away with that every now and again, right?

Other women I’ve spoken to have reported the men in their lives going AWOL on New Year’s Eve. Making plans and promises, then not turning up. Or turning up and creating an argument over nothing that then leads to them running away. Is this a thing? I’ve asked myself. Is there something about New Year that cements a commitment to someone if you share it? Do these guys run away from it because they’re scared of it, the terrifying clarity of the midnight selfie?

When I was married I had the opposite experience. New Year’s Eve (or Hogmanay, as we would be in Scotland for it) would suddenly provide me with a partner I didn’t recognise. One that would embarrass me in front of his friends by non-stop snogging. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the attention, I just wish it could’ve been spread out across the rest of the year. I think the lawnmower got more attention than me on the other 364 days…

Anyway, now I’m entering my fiftieth year, and I’m honestly relieved not to have to factor in another person to the plans. I had been worrying how my ‘flying solo’ plans would be affected so I’m now back on track, at least.

The decorations are down and my flat looks clean and clear.

So does 2017.

Great Expectations

Recently, a guy I dated once remonstrated with me for not following up our one date with a text requesting another date. Why had I not texted him? Was I waiting for the guy to text first? He suggested that that wasn’t very feminist of me.

Sigh.

I manage my expectations, I told him. I dial them down so low I expect nothing. I expect you to not text, to not call, to not follow up. I expect you to enjoy one of the best dates you and I will probably ever experience and yet not want to follow that up. In fact, when one of those happens, that’s my go-to place. If the date is extra-good, I know there’ll be silence after. Sometimes things can go too well and it freaks them out.

But his response – a few months later, it has to be said – intrigued me. This guy was actually annoyed at me for not expecting anything. I think he wanted me to be longing for him, so the delight in keeping me at arms length would be sweeter. I realised what power there is in zero expectation. Of anything. Of anybody. And now I’ve started to apply it to everything in life.

I think I’ve already been applying it, actually, when I think about my attitude to weather. If there’s an important outdoor event at the weekend, I seem to be the only person checking the actual forecast to see what it’s really going to do. Everyone around me seems to prefer choosing hope over reason. They tell me, until the last minute, that they hope the forecast will be wrong, and suddenly all will be sunshine and frolicking. When I say, ‘the BBC says it’s going to rain at 3pm but it should be done by 4’, I get horrified looks. But why not just face the truth and deal with it? Why be constantly disappointed in life?

I think losing parents early in life can remove any misty-eyed optimism about the future. It’s left me with a tendency to look reality in the face and name problems. I was once put in a work situation where friends told me I would find a ‘dysfunctional family’ but I only discovered what was tantamount to domestic abuse. They didn’t want to hear it. Similarly, when told I would experience ‘rough and tumble’, I witnessed bullying.

I don’t like euphemisms, I like clarity.

I think this may sound as though I’ve lost all hope in life. I haven’t. I still have hope and expectation for myself and I’m the only person I’ll ever expect anything of. I expect me to make something of my life without expecting anyone else to help. If they do, then that’s a bonus, but I will not allow myself to expect it. I expect me to bring joy into my life, and I do, by striking out on my own in the world and not leaning on anyone else. People might bring joy into my life, but I’m not waiting for it any more. I’ve spent far too much time waiting.

I’m going to Venice on my own in a couple of weeks after waiting for years to return there, with an as-yet undiscovered man. I realised what I was doing and immediately booked my own trip. What the hell was I waiting for? Some ridiculous rose-tinted moment that was never going to happen, that’s what.You can waste a lifetime waiting for the right moment, I’ve found. And even then you can find yourself there with the wrong person.

It’s actually incredibly liberating to be solely reliant on yourself for everything. I’ve thought a lot over the years about how not having a safety net – no parents, no wealthy relatives, no ‘loved ones’ to catch you immediately if you fall – can be a very scary situation to find yourself in. When I have to write down the name of an ‘in case of emergency’ person on a medical form it sends me into a tailspin. Who is that person? Sometimes I feel like writing, ‘It’s me, actually’.

It’s me.

A Woman Scorned

Last month, Beyoncé broke the internet after she released her visual album, Lemonade. It has been deemed the ‘most elaborate diss in hip-hop history‘, given that much of the content is given to Jay Z’s alleged cheating with ‘Becky with the good hair’.

I personally love a good ‘woman scorned’ outburst – I don’t subscribe to the dignified silence, I prefer a huge wodge of revenge served with a side salad of cold blood. Even better if you can deliver the requisite revenge like a deadly artistic assassin, making you look so glaringly bright that the guy in question can’t bear to set eyes on you again.

Well done, Bey.

What always strikes me about these situations is that the women scorned are always burning so much brighter than these guys in the first instance. They’re often more talented (Bey), intelligent (Hillary) and better-looking (everyone) than the guys who’ve cheated on them. I’ve seen women I consider to be magnificent left for someone with nothing more than a homely smile, and I’ve wondered if that’s the motivation. They can’t handle the magnificence, let alone control it, so they find someone infinitely more ‘manageable’.

Time and time again I’ve seen women going through this, and there are always friends exclaiming, ‘But she’s not a patch on you!’ And now I know that this is the whole point of it. The cheating is a way of re-establishing a form of control, and they will always opt for a ‘not-a-patch’ option. It happened to me a few years ago and I understood straight away. Steps had been taken to try and control me and they hadn’t worked. Cue an easier target.

I remember that scene in Sex and the City where Samantha posts leaflets all over the city, telling everyone that her ‘Richard’ is, in fact, a dick. When I enacted a digital version of that, I felt the same bewitching sense of control and freedom, as the ‘leaflets’ were similarly carried away on the wind.

I’m never going to be someone who sits back and silently suffers – I’m on Team Trierweiler. Valérie Trierweiler wrote a bestselling memoir of her betrayal by François Hollande (Thank You For This Moment), and it is described as:

300-odd pages of deliciously backhanded barbs, sentimental hand-wringing and vicious putdowns, seasoned with large dollops of self-justification.

The same article describes her as ‘magnificently unrepentant.‘ Amen to that, sister.

I don’t know why, but a strange silence descends when a woman pours out her scorn. Men call her a ‘vindictive harpy’, and in hushed tones, women tell her she should be more dignified. What if we don’t? What if we call them out on it like Bey? The world doesn’t end, does it? It just realises we know what’s going on and we’re not prepared to live with it.

The greatest service to womanhood Bey has done thus far is to make ‘calling a guy out on his shit’ into an art form.

There has never been a greater woman scorned…

So Lonely

I’ve just finished watching the BBC’s The Age of Loneliness on iPlayer – it’s a really poignant documentary featuring interviews with a range of people of all ages from 19 to 90, who are prepared to admit that they are lonely.

I sat there listening to the stories of 70 and 90-year-olds still yearning for the company of their spouses – one keeps his wife’s ashes in a bag on the chair next to him – and thinking about my own mother’s story. Her husband died when she was my age, and her life pretty much folded. By choice.

Her friends reached out to her, tried to involve her in social events, but she removed herself from them. She went so far as to move us all to a little bungalow on a hill above the town, and kept herself to herself for another twenty years. This is not, as you may have guessed, going to be a template for my next twenty years…

What struck me about the programme was how many people were conditioned to only consider a life alongside a wing-person. The thought of living without a ‘significant other’ was leading some of them to suicidal thoughts. They admitted to not liking their own company and not being able to even think of a future without a ‘pal’ (but by ‘pal’ they meant a relationship partner).

I’ve gone there. I’ve thought about that. I’ve been thinking it for a while and the words ‘my romantic life is over’ have been going around in my head for a few years. At first, in a horrifying way, and more recently in a much more accepting way.

And it’s ok. I don’t need a wingman (or a wingwoman for that matter). It’s quite a liberating moment in your life.

Last year I listened to the incredible Kim Cattrall talking in a positive way about her romantic life being ‘retired’ and almost cheered as she went on to tell BBC Woman’s Hour how this wasn’t a negative thing, and about all the people and things she had going on in her life. I’d already been working my way towards that position myself, but here was a woman, admittedly a decade older than me, but describing my current views on how to live life.

Contrasting with that, BBC Woman’s Hour broadcast a new-year programme, in which a lovely woman called Edwina phoned in and talked about the loneliness she felt after losing her husband. She burst into tears during the call and cried out the words, “I lost my husband!” and all of us listeners’ hearts broke for her. I was on the Overground with tears in my eyes.

But my next thought was less sympathetic. I found myself thinking it was a shame that Edwina had only lived life as her husband’s Siamese twin and had expected that to go on ad infinitum. There appears to be a generation of women that can’t cope when their husbands leave them or die before them (and statistically women outlive men). My mother was one of them.

Last night I went to see The Danish Girl alone. I’d been shopping all day, had my hair done, then took myself for a quick prosecco in a central London bar before realising I was due at the cinema within the hour. I posted on Facebook about the movie and immediately women of my age were responding saying they’d love to go, but they couldn’t find anyone to go with them. Going solo is now so normalised for me, I still find it surprising when people are so worried about doing it.

Consider this. It’s never a case that people are staring at you when you’re doing things on your own, thinking you’re weird – it’s you, staring at yourself thinking you’re weird. Once you stop looking at yourself in that way, the demons will take flight and you’ll be standing there laughing, wondering how you could’ve been so daft about it. People will talk to you, smile at you, admire you, even buy you a drink.

If you can get you to smile at yourself, admire yourself and buy yourself a drink, even better. I’m a Kim, not an Edwina. And I’m not moving to a remote hilltop to live like a hermit any time soon.

Dating Deal-Breakers

I was going to do another ‘year of blogging’ review of 2015 to mark the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, but then I thought, hell no. What people really want to read about, and what I really want to talk about, is dating.

The main thing I’ve learned this year is that if he appears to be too good to be true, then he usually is…

This is such a cliché it’s almost embarrassing to be writing about it. I’ve had two instances of it this year, both with men in their late thirties.

The first, a man so into me, he wanted to be with me all the time, to have long conversations while gazing at the sky, lying in the park. I knew it was too good to be true but I went for it anyway. He turned out to be a narcissist of the highest order, obsessed with the reflection of himself he saw in me. He kept mentioning babies, knowing that I’m childfree, but his need for a mini version of himself was manifest.

The second was someone I’m still trying to figure out. He played the ‘I’m not like other guys’ card, which of course means he’s exactly like other guys, only about ten times worse. He stunned me temporarily with his good looks and great conversation. He managed to wedge in feminism, tampon tax and abortion rights into the first hour of meeting him. Again ‘too good to be true!’ ran through my head.

And he was.

He didn’t seem to like that I didn’t get in touch after the first date and later the following week he told me off for waiting for him to do the asking. “Is that what feminists do?” he teased. We went on to have the obligatory WhatsApp flurry of messaging but the second date never materialised.

I can’t help thinking that I was targeted for take-down by a guy posing as a feminist. This is apparently a thing – these guys are called macktivists.I actually enjoyed the date I’d spent with him – and I’d deliberately managed my expectation so that I was happy with the one-off experience.

I think my radar was telling me that was how it should end but I allowed myself to be flattered when I eventually heard from him again. Flattered into agreeing to his arrangement to meet up a second time, which of course never materialised. He’d just wanted to be in control, I think.

What a sorry state of affairs.

I abhor game-playing of any kind and men are always surprised when I immediately text back or make a straightforward arrangement that I’m actually committed to. Everything is built behind smoke and mirrors in the dating world and although I’ve trained myself not to expect anything, I’m still taken by surprise by the shitty behaviour.

One of my biggest dating deal-breakers is ghosting. The minute I sense that a guy is deliberately not responding to texts or withholding any sign of interest, I’m off. Narcissist guy was a master of it, and even had the temerity to reappear from the shadows with some epic excuse for his silence which always involved some alleged misconception about our arrangements.

‘I’m not like other guys’ guy switched off his phone for the duration of the day we were supposed to meet for a second date and then blamed it on leaving his phone charger at work and having to buy a new one. I did actually laugh when I finally received an ‘explanatory’ text from him, giving ‘mansplaining’ a whole new meaning. B-bye.

Narcissist guy did something that is another huge dating deal-breaker for me. He turned up drunk to a date. I now think that this is a form of relationship sabotage. He knew I was cooking a meal for him (I never cook!) and he knew I was excited about seeing him. So what better way to put a woman in her place than to a) not mention the leaving do you’re going to after work, b) get totalled at it, and c) bring some godawful wine and lie about the ‘real’ bottle getting stolen while you were asleep on the Tube?

Some men like to be told off for this sort of behaviour so that they can rely on the whole ‘I’m just a bad boy’ schtick later on. I call it Naughty Boy Syndrome. It’s taken me years to realise that they want me to get annoyed with them so that I end, or at least back off from the relationship, meaning they don’t have to.

So I don’t get annoyed.

I just let them go.

Quietly.

And then blog about them. Ha ha…

Still, in autumn 2014 I dated a classic portfolio of deal-breaking that I’ve yet to blog about. I’ve been saving him for a rainy day.

My deal-breaker antennae were already twitching when he was clearly excited about getting notifications from Candy Crush on his phone. This was a man in his forties who’d made small talk into a way of life. Against my better judgment, I decided to press on.

Then came the comments on how, in his local train station, ‘Pakistanis’ were ‘good at squashing into trains’. I asked him how he knew they were Pakistani? Funnily enough, it had just been a wild guess on his part.

It goes on…

He met a lesbian friend of mine, and later asked me what a man had done to her to make her that way? And oh, he had a problem with feminists…

By this time my antennae had almost short-circuited, yet I still pressed on, determined to think I could look past his racism and homophobia.

And then came the denouement. He had a snoring problem which he’d attempted to fix with an operation but it hadn’t really worked. One night (the eleventh date!) I was desperate for some sleep so I moved silently into the lounge and blew up my inflatable bed.

When I woke up the next morning he was standing there, fully dressed and ready to go. Apparently I’d crossed a line by my actions.

I’d left him alone in bed and he hated waking up alone. Poor lambkin.

Funnily enough, I absolutely love it.

A Year of Blogging

It’s a year to the day that I started this blog, and nearly seventy posts later, I’ve learned quite a lot. One the main things I’ve learned is how much I enjoy writing, and that is something I never knew about myself a year ago. I started the blog because some good friends gave me the confidence to do it, and I’m very grateful to them for that.

So here are the Things I’ve Learned:

I write quickly

I write fast and post quickly. It’s part of my character to want to do things in the moment, not wait for a more perfect time. I often write first thing in the morning, having woken up with an idea I want to write about, or the news might prompt something, as it did when 4chan released those pictures of Jennifer Lawrence. It takes me about half an hour to get everything down and I often edit material after I’ve posted it. I usually have to abridge a post to 750 words for Huffington Post.

Personal is good

My blog is really honest and people seem to enjoy that. My most-viewed posts are the ones where I share something really personal from my life. I was surprised at the reaction to The Silence last year, in which I confessed to once having had depression. I think it’s something that should be talked about, not hidden away and that is part of the purpose of my blog.

People message me privately

Quite a lot of what I write about seems to resonate with people to the point where they have to tell me the same thing has happened, or is happening, to them. I don’t get a huge amount of public comments on the blog, but I do get a lot of direct messages from people telling me about their experiences. A surprising amount of men and women messaged me about Ping Pong, in which I talked about being child-free by choice.

I publish myself

I do try and make my posts timely and topical, tying in to current trends, ideas and news stories. By hashtagging my posts appropriately it can make a huge difference to the number of views. For instance, I republished my Epiphany ‘body image’ post on Huffington Post using the #everybodyisready tag, from the protest against Protein World adverts.

I work to a set of ‘brand values’ for Because I Can and my keywords are: clarity, honesty, openness, authenticity, myth-busting, revelation and debunking.

Dating is the hottest topic

My most-viewed post by far is Sixth Date Syndrome, and the myriad ways it is searched for on Google tell me that I’ve discovered a Thing that isn’t just happening to me. Every day (including today) people search for it, view it and hopefully learn that it’s not just them. I’ve also enjoyed debunking myths about female sexuality and the ‘cougar’ trope.

Men enjoy my posts

I have a posse of Secret Male Admirers for my blog. They come up to me at parties and tell me how much they like the insight into the female psyche. I am mainly writing for women like me but my main responders on Twitter and WordPress appear to be men. Surprisingly, women seem to have more of a problem with my feminist leanings than men.

People disagree with me but don’t say it

Recently a few people have revealed in person that they don’t agree with everything I write. I’d never expect them to as these posts are just my opinion, but they only tell me face-to-face, rather than on social media. I’m always surprised I don’t get more open disagreement in my comments, especially as they are inherently feminist.

I naturally ‘cluster’ things

I do this all the time at work and in life – see patterns of behaviour or trends and then cluster them together to make a Thing. This is what I’ve tapped into to write the blog. Noticing that women shove other women has been one of the more surprising moments in the past year, as has observing men leaping out of my way when I run.

I could actually write a book

I’m currently in the early stages of writing a novel based on my experiences. Writing the blog regularly has made me realise how I can write 1000 words really easily. I decided against a memoir because I wanted to shape my story and fictionalise some of the elements. I’m finding it quite difficult because my blog ‘voice’ is the one that comes most naturally to me.

A big thanks

To everyone who’s followed me, tweeted me, retweeted me and Facebook-shared me. It means a lot every time it happens.

To mark my anniversary, I’m going to be ‘live-blogging’ a solo walk around the entire coastline of the Isle of Wight next week, so stay tuned.

The top ten most-viewed posts on Because I Can (in descending order):

1. Sixth Date Syndrome

2. In Support of J-Law

3. The Silence

4. Things I’d Tell My Daughter

5. The One Where I’m Absolutely Not a Yummy Mummy

6. Toxic People

7. Bare-Faced Cheek

8. Ice-Breaker

9. In Praise of Younger Men

10. Epiphany

Against All Odds

This week I read the tragic news about food blogger Wilkes McDermid, who threw himself off the roof terrace of a London restaurant in a planned suicide. In his ‘goodbye’ blog post, he stated that he was simply ‘accelerating Darwinism’, as a 39-year-old Asian man, doomed to be alone forever. He’d conducted some informal research over a number of years that indicated women prefer Caucasian or black men over Asians, and if not, then they would almost certainly be tall and/or wealthy Asians. His blog is insistent in its reasoning and maintains that while McDermid couldn’t control his romantic life, he could control the length of it. He could, and he did, put an end to his suffering.

What an unbelievably tragic state of being. To take oneself out of the running, off the face of the earth because you believe you will never find love. At this time of year, as we approach Valentine’s Day, I’m sure there are so many people thinking similar thoughts, but of those who say they’ve given up on love, most don’t actually believe it in their heart of hearts. There is always a glimmer of hope, right?

What has struck me about this story is the science behind it. When I left my marriage four years ago, I had no idea that science had anything to do with partner-finding. Call me a romantic, but I’ve always laboured under the idea of being so struck by another person that any consideration of current life situation, age, job, looks – whatever –would go by the wayside. I’ve scoffed when people said, ‘maybe the time wasn’t right’ about a particular guy I’ve dated, and I’ve thought, ‘if the connection is right, who gives a fuck about the timing?!’

Isn’t that what’s glorious about love? The inconvenience of it? That it pushes every other consideration out of the way?

What I discovered was that suddenly, everything was all about the timing. Well-meaning friends told me I had to be ‘on the same page’ as someone, at the right life stage, to make a go of it. After my marriage, I’d had a ridiculously inconvenient year-long passionate love affair with someone ten years younger than me, but in the end, he’d thrown ‘timing’ back at me: a ten-year age gap is fine in your thirties and forties, he’d said, but not so good in your sixties and seventies. WTF? I thought we didn’t give a shit about that. Apparently ‘we’ did.

Since then, I have learned to accept certain unexpected facts about dating in my forties. Firstly, that men my age aren’t relieved to finally find a single, independent woman of their own age who doesn’t want children. They are frequently at the stage where they want the option of creating a Mini Me, if they haven’t already got one. They are even less relieved to find a woman who has a successful career and a brain, it seems – it is a challenge to their manhood. Woe betide me when they find out I’m a feminist – they smile and say, “I have a problem with feminists.” I say, “I have a problem with men who don’t believe a woman should have equal rights to men,” and we leave it there. Smiling.

No, men my age are still searching in the twenty-five to thirty-five age bracket, and I can’t really blame them, if they still want children. I’m always honest about my age online – forty-seven – and my profile only really attracts much older or younger men. And let me reassure you now, that in no way am I complaining about the latter.

Online, people are cast aside for simply not fitting a desired profile – not being the right age, height, weight, race, religion or not having the right job, location or marital status (eharmony wouldn’t let me join until I was properly divorced, not separated). This makes me think that online dating isn’t for me. Why would I want a partner who was judging me on a set of statistics? I want someone who will catch my eye on a train, a beach, in a bank or a checkout queue and want to get to know me. Just me, standing there, no statistics hanging on a board around my neck with a mugshot.

I don’t want the science of it, I want the randomness of it and I will always believe that is out there for me. And if he is shorter than I thought he would be, hasn’t got the ‘right’ job, is age- or religion-inappropriate I won’t give a shit about it. There will be a connection between both of us that no one else can see – they won’t be able to work out the science behind it because it will be beyond analysis and data. I feel so saddened by Wilkes McDermid’s death because he believed that this wasn’t out there for him.

I believe that if you are only looking for a socially approved relationship then you are working within a very narrow dating channel. You will only properly ‘see’ age-appropriate people with the right height/weight/job/hair colour ratio. If you look beyond a tick-box life, as I do, you will find that like-minded people see you. There are fewer of them, but the recognition of another soul with the same outlook is a moment to treasure. I’d rather wait for one single moment like that than tick any boxes, even if the odds are seemingly stacked against us.

—————-

RIP Wilkes McDermid – his final blog post and message:

https://wilkes888.wordpress.com/2015/02/08/final-message-thank-you-everyone/

https://wilkes888.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/my-final-blog-entry-love-you-all/

Because I Can: the story so far

Having been the lucky recipient of a ‘Freshly Pressed’ feature with my post ‘Bare-Faced Cheek’, I thought I’d round up the top ten posts from my archive for all my new WordPress followers. So far, most of my viewers have been outside the blogosphere, coming to this site from Twitter or Facebook, but now I feel part of a community of bloggers with similar interests and views.

I started the blog because I found that I had quite a lot to say about my situation, leaving a marriage at the age of 43 and spending the last four years being constantly surprised by the twists and turns of life outside conventional coupledom. Some of them have made me laugh or whoop with joy, some have made me cry and floored me with unexpected cruelty.

Anyway – here are the posts that tell my story so far – I hope you enjoy them:

1. Where it all began:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/07/20/consciously-uncoupling/

2. On being childfree-by-choice:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/07/25/ping-pong/

3. On body image and the ridiculousness of dieting:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/07/24/epiphany/

4. On suicide:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/08/12/the-silence/

5. On not being a yummy mummy:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/08/17/the-one-where-im-absolutely-not-a-yummy-mummy/

6. On dating younger men:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/08/23/in-praise-of-younger-men/

7. On Toxic People:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/09/10/toxic-people/

8. On dating men my own age:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/09/19/sixth-date-syndrome/

9. On not being a Cool Girl:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/10/09/my-former-life-as-a-cool-girl/

10. On keeping my name:

http://becauseicanblog.com/2014/10/16/my-name-is/

Thank you for reading.

Lisa.

Tag: dating