Help Me!

by Marianne Power

  I’d made the mistake of telling Paul about the barman and now I was regretting it. He made me go back to the pub, promising he would not get involved and now he was being an idiot and I wanted to die.

  ‘Shut up or I’m leaving,’ I spat, before punching him hard on the arm and walking to a table as far away from the bar as I could find.

  ‘I swear he didn’t hear me,’ said Paul when he came back with drinks. ‘So is it the one with the shirt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I calmed down. I looked up at the bar again just as Mr Twinkly was looking over.

  Our eyes met. I felt sick.

  Matthew Hussey says that eye contact is vital for flirting. He says we all think we’re good at eye contact but we’re not – for men to pick up the clue we have to go really OTT. He says you should look over at the guy you like and hold the gaze for a second more than is comfortable. Then look away. Then, look back at him again, with a playful smile that makes it clear to him that you are interested.

  I found eye contact like this terrifying. Playful smiling too – what even is that? What’s the difference between a normal smile and a playful smile? The Greek told me that if a girl smiled at him three times he’d go over. So the smiling thing was big. And I could smile at everyone under the sun – just not at men I fancied. I looked back up and smiled at him. He smiled back. I felt a shot of electricity go through me.

  I pretended to listen to Rachel and Paul chat, while my heart pounded and I downed my drink.

  ‘OK, I’m doing it.’

  Rachel smiled and clapped.

  ‘Shh. Don’t make a thing of it,’ I said, standing up and feeling as shaky on my legs as I had been during the stand-up. I walked to the bar. He smiled. I smiled.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Good, how are you?’ he said.

  ‘Can I have a bottle of Merlot and a pint of IPA please?’

  ‘How many glasses for the wine?’

  ‘We don’t need any, thanks.’

  ‘You’ll just drink it straight from the bottle?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, or if you have a straw, I’ll take that,’ I said.

  Look, almost witty banter!

  He got the drinks and came back to me.

  This was when Matthew would have liked me to tell him that I liked his smile or eyes . . . to ask him about the flat white or cappuccino debate but instead this was what came out of my mouth: ‘My friends have been teasing me because I’ve got a crush on you.’

  There was a pause. He looked at me. I looked at him.

  The words hung in the air. Around me the chatter of people catching up on a Friday night, unaware of the highstakes emotional poker that was taking place just a few feet away. I kept looking at him. He kept looking at me.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  Then he pushed the card machine towards me and said: ‘That will be £25 please.’

  Oh.

  My hands trembled as I typed in my PIN, picked up the drinks and walked back to the table. I worried I would drop the bottle, my hands were shaking so much. I felt humiliated, angry. But then very quickly there was another unexpected feeling . . . an unfamiliar feeling . . . what was it? Yes, that was it: I was euphoric. I had done something I would never have done before! I had bombed – but so what? Why the hell do we make such a big deal of these things? I didn’t know this guy. He didn’t know me. All that mattered was that I’d faced my fears – again – and had given it a go. Hussey agrees. He writes: ‘Sometimes the guy you are interested in will give you the cold shoulder or be into someone else . . . it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you tried. That’s the success story here.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t understand the word “crush”,’ said Rachel when I told them what happened.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or maybe he has a girlfriend,’ she said.

  ‘You did it – that’s what counts,’ said Paul, raising his glass. ‘Now let’s go across the road and find the next one.’

  In the Hideaway a DJ was playing Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’. More drinks were ordered. Then more. And more.

  By now I was smiling at anyone and everyone, including an old toothless guy who spent his days outside the bookie’s and a twenty-something with an open shirt.

  Then I smiled at a man with wild curly hair who was standing by the bar. He smiled back. We held each other’s eye contact for a few seconds. I looked away and looked back. He was still looking at me.

  Hussey says that women think that men don’t approach us because they don’t like us – but that’s not the case. Most are so scared of looking stupid in front of their friends, they don’t make a move, even if they think you’re the hottest woman in the room. So it’s our job to try to make it easier by positioning our group close to his.

  Hussey doesn’t recommend drinking a bottle of wine before you make this approach but I found it helped.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ I said, as I bumped into Mr Curly while I ordered more drinks at the bar.

  ‘I’ll forgive you,’ he replied. His eyes were so blue.

  I smiled playfully. Or maybe drunkenly.

  ‘I saw you earlier,’ he said.

  ‘I saw you too.’

  ‘You really hold eye contact,’ he said.

  He had a big nose and smelled of an aftershave I recognized but couldn’t remember the name of.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll have what you’re having.’

  ‘Malibu and pineapple juice.’

  ‘Really?’

  We talked. He worked in IT. He played the ukulele. He was getting a divorce. She was taking him to the cleaners. She had taken the cat too. I could only hear half of what he was saying over the music. He got more drinks. I could barely see straight. We danced to Britney Spears. I was hot in my jumper. I didn’t know where the others had gone but now it was just the two of us. We were dancing to . . . Rihanna’s ‘Only Girl (in the World)’ . . . I flung my hands up in the air and closed my eyes. This was what life was about! Dancing! Drinking! Having fun. What was there to be scared of? Guys liked me. Of course they did.

  Then we were walking home in the dark. ‘I just didn’t expect to be someone who got divorced,’ he was saying. ‘I hate living on my own.’

  Then he was talking about the cat again.

  Next thing I remember, we were outside Rachel’s, kissing on the steps. It was a horrible bumpy-toothed kiss. Messy and grope-y and weird. He tasted of pineapple and cigarettes.

  ‘This is nice,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  He watched me as I walked up the steps and fumbled with the keys. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. I knew even in my drunken haze that we had not swapped numbers.

  The next morning, I woke up fully clothed and feeling like death.

  ‘Well, at least you had a kiss,’ said Rachel, while we were watching Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner and eating a giant Snickers bar.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘How are you feeling about the barman?’

  ‘Can we please never speak of that again?’

  Him: ‘Hi, Marianne!’

  Me: ‘Hi, Jon!’

  Him: ‘I love your hair.’

  Me: ‘Thanks!’

  Him: ‘When it comes to getting a dirty job done, I’ll take a redheaded woman . . .’

  Me: ‘???’

  Him: ‘It’s Bruce Springsteen.’

  Me: ‘Take it he’s talking about cleaning the oven?’

  Him: ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing you bent over my oven. Or is that too rude?’

  Actually, yes, it was. I didn’t reply.

  An hour later another message: ‘You can wear rubber gloves.’

  I didn’t reply to that one either.

  Another hour later, a final plea: ‘We could forget the gloves?’

  Hot on the heels of the Bruce Springsteen fan came another suitor who only had one profile picture and he was wearing sunglasses in it. I should have known
that this was not a good sign.

  Him: ‘Hiya. How are you?’

  Me: ‘I’m good, how are you?’

  Him: ‘Well. Nice pics of you. Found love yet?’

  Me: ‘Thanks. No love yet. What about you?’

  Him: ‘I’m not looking for love. I’m looking for an affair.’

  Me: ‘So you’re married?’

  Him: ‘Yes. Does that freak you out?’

  Me: ‘No, doesn’t freak me out but it’s not a road I want to go down.’

  Him: ‘Is there anything I can do to change your mind?’

  Me: ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  Ten minutes later: ‘Can you hook me up with any of your friends?’

  Matthew Hussey is not a fan of online dating. He says it’s fine as a way of broadening the net, but we should not rely on it exclusively because it’s too easy to stay on your sofa chatting online as a way of avoiding interacting with people in the real world. Which is exactly why I downloaded Tinder.

  Who needed to be rejected by barmen or bump teeth with broken-hearted divorcees when you could flirt without even leaving the house?

  I’d never been on Tinder before and it was a revelation – this was where all the single men of London were! Posting photographs of themselves with tops, without tops. Smiling faces and moody black-and-white faces. In the pub, by a sports car, up a mountain, cuddling dogs. On their own or surrounded by glam girls – the picture that says, Look, women love me! I’m a catch!

  I erred on the side of generosity: anyone with a nice smile and their top on was given the benefit of the doubt. As a result I got a lot of matches and every few hours there was a new message: ‘Hi Marianne! How’s your day going?’

  I found it weird to tell a total stranger about how my day was going – did they really want to know that after days of putting it off I was finally going to wash my hair? Or that I was just about to head to the shops to get milk? I didn’t think so, so I settled on the boringly vague, ‘Great, thanks! How are you?’

  By the end of my second day on Tinder, I had four dates lined up.

  Cue mental breakdown. All Power of Now zen vanished in the face of dating.

  My full-time job was now hating my teeth, my bum and my hair. The voice in my head went into overdrive worrying that my dates wouldn’t like me or would tell me I looked nothing like my pictures – which, of course, I didn’t. I had put up my very best photographs. I know that this is part of the game but, seriously, I could have been done under trade descriptions.

  I called Mum, which was a mistake. ‘Don’t drink too much. You know it makes your face pink and puffy,’ was her advice.

  But I did drink too much. Drinking was what I did when I got nervous.

  First the civil servant. He lived in Surrey but said he would come in to meet me on the Southbank. We met in the bar of the BFI on Tuesday 10th February. I had spent three hours getting ready, trying on jeans and tops. Dresses and boots. Skirts and jumpers. By the time I’d left home (wearing jeans and a silk top and boots) I’d also calmed my nerves with two big glasses of wine. It was 6pm on a Tuesday and I was half a bottle of wine down. And after all those nerves and anticipation, I knew the second I saw him that I did not want to put my lips anywhere near him. We chatted easily but had zero chemistry.

  This is another reason Hussey says online dating doesn’t work – in the real world we find people attractive because of tiny things such as the way they walk, the way they talk or their hand gestures. Online you can’t pick up on these clues, which means that you spend a week having a nervous breakdown over a man that you know within ten seconds of meeting is not for you.

  On the Tube home I felt excited, though. My first Tinder date. Done. It wasn’t so hard or scary.

  Wednesday night was coffee with a photographer who had just come back from Iraq. He sounded interesting. He thought so too. I spent two hours being run over by his voice.

  Thursday night with a guy who described himself as ‘6-ft Scouser with a taste for the absurd’. His profile pics were of him wearing a comedy moustache and wig, and pics of him in what looked like a flamenco outfit at a festival . . .

  None of this was my kind of thing. I was too uptight for fancy dress. And I find absurd stuff stupid and childish. But then there was a nice normal smiley picture and I could see he lived locally so I just swiped anyway. We had a bit of texting that made me laugh. He told me he was good at making burgers and didn’t like lazy people. I told him I was a terrible cook and was very lazy. He said he admired my honesty. I told him I liked burgers.

  He said he didn’t like endless texting; did I want to meet?

  We met in the Crown and Goose in Camden at 6pm and within twenty minutes of quite boring conversation, he went in for the kill.

  ‘So are we going back to yours, then?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are we going back to yours after?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to.’

  ‘OK.’

  He didn’t seem that bothered. If anything he was relieved to have got the question out of the way.

  Unsurprisingly, Hussey is not a big fan of jumping into bed with someone in the first ten minutes. He says that while all men want sex, they also don’t like it when they feel you’d have sex with anyone. They want to feel special. ‘Does that ever work for you?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just asking like that.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what happens?’

  ‘I meet a girl and I say, “Are we going back to yours?” and she says, “Yes,” and we have sex.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you do after you have sex?’

  ‘Then we have sex again.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘We find other people to have sex with.’

  I felt like Mother Teresa on a date with Hugh Hefner.

  ‘What are you waiting for, a thunderbolt?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe.’ I said.

  ‘You wouldn’t settle for a bit of mild rain instead?’

  I found this funny. He was funny when he wasn’t being sleazy. I laughed and then he went in for a kiss. I let him.

  It was a wet beardy kiss but quite nice. I could smell his musty jacket. ‘Are you really sure I can’t come back to yours?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life,’ I replied.

  I went home alone feeling deflated. He made the whole dating thing seem so joyless. Meet someone, jump into bed, meet someone else . . . rinse and repeat. I knew it was a numbers game but I didn’t have the mental and physical stamina to play. It was only Thursday and I was exhausted.

  Three dates in one week and I hadn’t met anyone I liked. I’d been holding out for a fourth date with a charity worker whom I was meant to be meeting for a drink in the Charlotte Street Hotel on Saturday night – which also happened to be Valentine’s Night. He texted me on Saturday morning to tell me he was not feeling well. I told him to get better and we could rearrange. Later he unmatched me. I was hurt and confused but also relieved.

  I spent Valentine’s Day on the sofa with Rachel watching an Ashton Kutcher movie. He was on honeymoon with Brittany Murphy and it was a disaster. I fell asleep before I got to the part where they discovered they loved each other really.

  Week three and my final Tinder date was meant to be with Alistair, a Scottish guy who worked for the NHS. His profile said that he ‘liked to make sweeping assumptions about people based on their profile pics’. He guessed that I was Irish, liked swing dancing and vintage clothes. I guessed that he was Scottish.

  We had messaged for a few days and he made me giggle. It was easy.

  He asked if I wanted to meet up. I said yes. We agreed on Thursday 19th. He told me that he’d get in touch later in the week to arrange things.

  Wednesday night, I still hadn’t heard from him. It was annoy
ing. Pride meant I didn’t want to be the one to message him first but I wanted to know if it was still happening so I could make other plans if it wasn’t.

  So I messaged him: ‘Hello Alistair, how are you? Just wondering if we’re still on for tomorrow night?’

  The reply came back five minutes later: ‘I’ve been super busy with work doing early starts and working late, so won’t be that early.’

  No ‘Hello, how are you?’ No apology for not getting in touch. Not even a ‘Yes, I’m still up for it.’

  Then another message came up: ‘Could probably meet about 8/8.30.’

  Oh, do me a favour, why don’t you?

  My first reaction was to just delete him and silently fume, but then I took a breath and decided to take the high road.

  I replied: ‘Let’s leave it, you’ve obviously got a lot on.’

  He answered: ‘Yeah, it’s a busy week.’

  He then gave me a long list of what was going on at his work and how tired and stressed he was . . . I got angry again. I could not care less about his office politics. I didn’t even know the guy.

  I knew this was Tinder but surely some sort of effort is supposed to be made at this point in proceedings. Where was the charm? The wooing?

  When he’d finished sharing his to-do list, he added: ‘I would still like to meet though, unless you’ve changed your mind.’

  And actually I had changed my mind.

  I replied: ‘I totally understand work taking over but I’m a bit old-fashioned on the manners front. It would have been nice to hear from you, even if it was to postpone. To be honest I’m probably juggling too many dates at the moment, so let’s leave it altogether. Best of luck with everything and thanks for the funny texts. I really enjoyed them.’

  I was very pleased with my line about having too many dates. Actually I was pleased with it all. I’d never before stood up for myself in this way – with men, with friends, with anyone. It felt really empowering to say, politely, Actually this isn’t good enough.

  It felt groundbreaking.

  Hussey says that by making this stand I had made myself a High Value Woman. This didn’t mean High Maintenance or Hard to Get – it means someone who is self-confident and self-assured, someone who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to articulate that.