But I pushed that out of my mind: after all, exceptions prove every cliché. I thought Musical Theatre Actor sounded cute, and what he’d written about himself in his profile sounded funny and charming. Oh what the hell – you don’t know till you try and all that. And so I wrote to him. He replied promptly and we thought it amusing that according to our matching points – we’d achieved, I think, five out of a hundred – we ought to avoid each other like the plague. We sent a few emails back and forth and his were quite a nice read, and I was soon curious to meet him properly and in person. Could he be it, I asked myself, already jubilating surreptitiously. We exchanged photos and I pushed away the fact that he looked undeniably gay. He looked cute, no question, but my gut feeling yelled at the top of its voice: “Listen up, blind-as-a-bat, can’t you see he’s as gay as a tree full of parrots?” Of course I could see it, blind bat that I was, but I was so stuck in my need-to-find-a-guy-ANY-guy mode that I simply ignored it. Anyway, this was during the time of metrosexuality and lots of guys looked a bit feminine; that was quite OK. And so what if he sent me photos where he was dressed and made up as a belly dancer – that was because he’d worked on a cruise ship, and I thought it was funny.
Number Seventeen and I arranged a telephone date. This was step two on the way to a real date – first photos, then phone, then the real thing. Again I managed to completely ignore how gay he sounded. He laughed in a girly, camp manner. But all the same, we chatted for a long time and recounted tales from our respective lives and I persuaded myself to think of Number Seventeen as interesting. And later I could tell my girl friends how we’d been on the phone for hours. That always sounds good, and so romantic! My feelings of romantic make-belief were shaken up some the next morning, when an email from Number Seventeen appeared in my mailbox. The opening line was: “Good morning my sugar-sweetie-bunny-bun” and my face immediately rearranged itself into a grimace of disgust. On his behalf, my entire body tingled with embarrassment – God, how cringemaking was that?! A whole cacophony of alarm bells was going off and still I wouldn’t leave it alone. Stupidity will reap its just rewards and that’s exactly what was happening to me. Which is fair enough, because if you are stupid enough to get involved in a wannabe romance with a musical theatre actor who is gay but won’t acknowledge it and pretends that he isn’t, you’ve got it coming.
My punishment arrived in the form of a truly terrible date. Yes, I actually agreed to a blind date with the non-gay gay waltzing mouse. I kind of knew that it wouldn’t lead to anything other than the immediate cessation of our email and telephone communication. But hope springs eternal and I didn’t want to have to think that I hadn’t even tried. I reached our designated meeting place, a bar, too early and decided to amble through the streets for a while. I saw him in the distance; he’d apparently arrived early as well and had decided on ambling around to pass the time, too. There was no mistaking him and the only thing I thought was, SHIT! He was distinctively, unmistakably gay. He looked as though he’d just turned seventeen and he pranced around like a gazelle. I wondered what he wanted from me and why he just wouldn’t allow himself to be gay. It was practically tattooed on his forehead. In giant bold letters. Did he want me to be his token girlfriend? Did he need to marry me to be able to claim his inheritance? I was baffled. We said hello and I covered up my resignation and mystification. He was very nice, no question, and he very much tried to impress me. But whatever he did, he was like the little gay one in a cast-for-TV boy band. Of course I don’t have a problem with gay men – but they are just not potential partner material.
Sadly, having a date with a guy who obviously prefers guys is a total waste of time. Number Seventeen and I chatted and, tense and uncomfortable as I was, I dredged up my entire repertoire of conversational topics. I kept looking surreptitiously at my watch but time just would not pass. Then Number Seventeen shared with me that he always had to fight the cliché that all musical theatre actors were supposedly gay. This made me choke on my apple spritzer that I’d been sucking on for a while now, bored stiff. I feigned surprise and understanding, saying: “Oh really? How stupid! I can well imagine that you get pissed off!” In reality, I could barely stop myself from dragging him off to the nearest gay bar. Where he would certainly have had a much better time than here with me. After wading through an endless hour and a half, I used my tiredness as an escape from this miserable excuse for a date. He said good-bye with a broad smile and a glint in his eyes: “I had a lovely evening, hope to see you again soon.” Thank God he made no attempt at kissing me and so I lied: “Yesyes, see you soon, very soon!” And breathed a sigh of relief when I was finally shot of him.
By next morning I had another “Hello snooky-pooky-honeybun” email in my mailbox. Oh my God! I didn’t reply. Only after he’d written umpteen emails asking how come I wasn’t getting back to him after the lovely time we’d had together, I finally had mercy on him and replied. I wrote that I was very sorry, that I thought he was very nice, but that there hadn’t been any kind of sparks for me. He replied by return, saying that he’d felt all manner of sparks and that he was very sad now. I replied one last time with some platitudes. And that was the end of it. I have no idea what that was about, this guy and his I-am-not-gay performance.
Number Eighteen: Blind date with a wannabe macho
In spite of this rather weird experience on the online dating circuit I wasn’t prepared to give up just yet. I still had one candidate lined up. Number Eighteen. I’d pulled Number Eighteen at random from the “recommended” pile and his profile impressed me with its wonderfully terse and ironic descriptions of himself. Sounded like sarcasm and a dry sense of humor. Excellent. I liked it. He wrote me an email that was simple, to the point and consisted of exactly four words: “Want to fuck? Regards, F.” Every halfway normal female would have slammed her laptop shut, screaming, but I grinned. Wicked! The guy is right, of course. To hell with all that small-talk and pseudo-romantic chatting up nonsense, we all know why we are hanging around this virtual dating cosmos – all our efforts concentrate on this one thing, so why not call it by its name: fucking. The man was right and I bought his reduce-to-the-max strategy. He sounded like a cool macho asshole. Brilliant. In fact, the exact type of guy I no longer wanted anything to do with. Still, I’ve always been consistently inconsistent and so I replied with a curt “When? Where? Regards, M.” The gentleman took his sweet time with replying, of course. Macho assholes don’t jump when a mere female offers to put herself out.
Days later, the reply. He’d been so surprised by my response, I’d been the first not to swear at him. Aha – he’d tried this little number before, then. I could just imagine the kind of emails he’d get by return: “You pig, how dare you, why don’t you go to a brothel, how dare you reduce women to sexual objects, blablabla.” I guess my brief note must have been a bit of a surprise. Number Eighteen and I sent a few more emails back and forth, it turned out that he was the marketing manager for a well-known British luxury fashion label. He sounded good, like a man of success, a man of the world, a man with good taste. Exactly what I was looking for. The photos he sent were promising too. Tall, very short dark hair, dark eyes, well-dressed, clear-cut features. He reminded me of Haakon, Prince of Norway, who had married the gorgeous Mette-Marit and would hopefully live happily ever after with her. I had no problem with dating a Prince Haakon look-alike. Rather the opposite – it lent a certain added excitement to the matter. Our first telephone conversation was promising, too. He sounded nice and witty and had a good sexy manly voice. Maybe he was the one? I could practically smell it, the sweet smell of success.
Which was not what he smelled like – that was the first thing I noticed during our first, last and only date. He smelled just awful. Sickly, woody, heavy and gooey, reminiscent of an old dandy. Musty, like I imagined the smell in the sleeping compartments of the old Orient Express. I suppose this was the absolute latest in hip luxury scent as worn by hip luxury-label managers, and my nose really had no idea. But what
ever the reason, my nose wrinkled its nose. And that was that – the guy could have looked like Adonis personified, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was finished. Another one bites the dust, I thought. And how do I get out of this one? I rolled my inner eyes in irritation but greeted him overly charmingly and flirtily so that he wouldn’t notice that my inner walls had long come up. Aside from the fact that he wafted about in this cloud of creepy perfume, he’d kept me waiting for two hours and didn’t look remotely as good as in his photos. He was smartly dressed, I’ll give him that – his scrawny body was dressed in the finest cloth money can buy, and there you have the problem: he was scrawny, brittle and pale.
No wicked little smile in his eyes. No joy in his face. Just these compulsive efforts to appear super respectable. Maybe he needed that for his job, but not when he was after a woman! My God, it’s so easy to win the heart of a woman: boyish charm, a wicked sense of humor and the playfulness of a child, that’s pretty much all it takes! See exhibit A: Robbie Williams. Number Eighteen, however, was a stick-up-his-butt merchant, as stiff and brittle as a Neanderthalian bone from the museum. It was a miracle he didn’t leave a trail of dusty bone crumbs behind. He didn’t even utilize his cool macho-asshole I-wanna-fuck-you-now number. He seemed totally insecure, tense and the diametrical opposite of sexy and confident. If only he’d run with the hard-boiled macho act. But as it was, he seemed as innocuous as a pig in a blanket.
However, I somehow had to get through this date. Sadly, I still hadn’t mastered the I-am-leaving-right-now number. We went to a dim little bar and I ordered a high-voltage cocktail in the hopes of being better able to cope with the evening. He ordered a Virgin Colada, a cocktail with zero alcohol. Most commendable, since he was going to drive – but what it meant for me was that he would stay like this all night, so dour and stiff and boring. Wow, how wonderful! For the first time ever I was grateful that the place was so full of cigarette smoke that your lungs were thinking of emigrating – it was better than constantly having your nose assaulted by his dreadful stinky perfume. We chatted about this and that, but the conversation never really got going. Where the hell was the cool “Want to fuck?” guy? I guess he had chosen a strategy that was out of his league and now he was tripping over his missing courage. There’s marketing guys for you! They promise you the earth with their cunning, expensive marketing-advertising-slang, but when it comes right down to it, you’re left bitterly disappointed because the promised unforgettable consumer experience doesn’t materialize. Even a luxury-label T-shirt with a price tag of 230 euros is really just a piece of cotton, the 110-euros-for-20-ml miracle cream can’t magically nuke all those wobbly pockets of orange-peel skin, and a guy who is looking for a woman on the Internet is just another poor sod who can’t get one in real life. That’s how it is. Yes, Sir.
Since I had no interest in the guy at all, I had some fun messing him about. I adopted the role of the fuck-crazy hussy and tormented him mercilessly. I was the man-eater who had no interest in being faithful, lasciviously smoked although he was a confirmed non-smoker, and flaunted my not unattractive figure for him to see by going to the ladies’ room a lot, sauntering across the room in an exaggeratedly slow and hip swaying fashion. I could feel his eyes on my butt. And I grinned at the thought of how he was getting his hopes up, which I would be pleased to dash in due course. The smug bastard. Some not very entertaining while later I asked if he would drive me home and, seeing his chance for a satisfactory culmination of the evening, he agreed. When we arrived at my house, I thanked him politely for the nice evening and for driving me home, and got out. Number Eighteen was entirely bewildered – apparently he hadn’t envisaged the end of the evening quite like that. He got out of the car, too, and mumbled: “But I thought, well, how about, well, what about me coming in for a nightcap?” He didn’t even have the balls to look at me. I laughed, shook my head, went through the obligatory kiss-left-kiss-right routine, waved at him and disappeared behind my front door. He didn’t contact me, I didn’t contact him. The deed was done and it hadn’t been fun. What an idiot. As was I, that’s for sure. Still, at least I couldn’t blame myself for not trying all possible avenues. But even so, it was astonishingly naïve to assume that Prince Charming was waiting for me out there in cyberspace. I think I’d watched “You’ve Got Mail” once too often!
Number Nineteen: The old man in my bed
I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I wanted a proper man in my life now. A real man. Someone with success and experience under his belt. I started to define exactly what my dream man should be and have. I was sick to the teeth of wishy-washy guys who didn’t have a clue what they wanted or who they were or where they were headed. I wanted someone who’d grown out of these phases. I wanted someone who would lay the world at my feet. My mum’s words of wisdom reverberated in my ears: “Find a man who has more to offer you than some crummy student digs and prepackaged salami from the cut-price food store.” OK – I’m going to listen to my mum because she’s almost always right!
When I was little and naïve, I was sure that you can’t help who you fall in love with. It just happens. And if he happens to be some destitute art student space cadet, then so be it – love is sacrosanct and can’t be reduced to mere material things. However, by now I clearly had good reason to revise my opinion. Naturally, I still didn’t believe some silicone-enhanced twenty-three-year-old blonde marrying a wizened seventy-eight-year-old multi-millionaire and whispering: “It’s true love – honest!” whilst fluttering their eyelashes at the cameras. But I am happy to announce I have extended my wish list for dream-man-material to include some important new attributes. My Mr. Right must be successful and well off, or if he isn’t yet, he must be well on his way. That’s how it is for me. And, let’s be honest: success is sexy. Some ratty misery-guts who constantly goes on about the horrors of capitalism, the evilness of money and the arrogance and greed of career-oriented people – is that supposed to be sexy? Certainly not! It’s extremely uncool. Who wants a whining garden gnome by her side? There’s a simple explanation why success makes sexy: a successful person does what he is good at, and he does it well. And that gives him satisfaction. Which is why he is happy and at peace with himself. And someone who is at peace is a superb partner. No relationship power games, no dramas, no feeling obligated to make the other person happy. Just simply enjoying each other’s company. That’s what it’s all about. And that’s damn difficult with a cynical, grouchy, poison-spitting loser. The correlation of success and increased access to financial means is a nice added value, making matters even sweeter.
Incidentally, the same goes for women. All those girlies who are too timid, too lazy and too lame to take charge of their own happiness are their own worst enemies. Don’t hook up with some guy and expect him to make you happy for life! You’ll need to provide your own happiness. And once you’re able to do that, your relationships will automatically be a lot less troublesome. I don’t mean to say you need to be single to find happiness – no, not at all. What I do mean to say is that, even when you’re in a relationship, you don’t hand over responsibility for yourself and your own life to your partner. What’s the opposite of vicious circle? Let’s call it a happy circle. I know it’s not a real term, I made it up, but who cares – it’s true: make yourself happy and you’ll automatically make your beloved happy. And when your beloved is happy, he will in turn make you happy. And so on and so forth, and they lived and loved happily ever after. That’s the theory.
Filled with these pearls of wisdom and a whole new thirst for action, I began to screen the guys around me based on my new criteria. While spending a summer Sunday in a beer garden with a girl friend, my eyes fell on exactly the kind of guy that fit my newly established preferences. My Number Nineteen. He was sitting nonchalantly on a wall and seemed to be waiting for someone. He had a lot of whitish-gray gelled back hair, a receding hairline, aviator sunglasses on his nose, wore an expensively labeled polo shirt and jeans with the legs rolled up, had flip-
flops on his feet and all in all looked very striking and interesting. Age-wise I estimated him to be in his late thirties, early forties. Yes it’s really true – gray-haired men are utterly attractive, provided the whole package is fresh and sexy. He seemed totally cool, the way he sat there. He didn’t play at being cool like all those twenty-year-old posers, he didn’t have to. He simply was cool. I kept watching him and the more I did, the more I liked what I saw. A wild discussion was raging inside my head: he’s much too old! How do you propose a little chickie like you would even get anywhere near him? And I’ll bet he’s married!
I didn’t mention any of these summertime fantasies to my girl friend. And, as coincidence would have it, the cool guy suddenly looked our way and started to wave, and my friend waved back. I was flabbergasted. Unbelievable – she knew him! There I was, my head awash with all kinds of convoluted how-to-get-to-know-him scenarios complete with potential success ratios, and then it turns out she knows him! She called him over and I could not believe my luck. Now, don’t start flapping like an overexcited moorhen, just put on your brightest, most dazzling smile, be charming and interesting and do your superwoman thing. I briefly checked (in my head) what I was wearing and thanked God that I hadn’t thrown on my usual sloppy-Sunday gear. I’d chosen Sunday-smart-but-casual style, a cool skirt with a tight top, you couldn’t really go wrong with that. Which meant that I didn’t have to sit there and berate myself for wearing the wrong outfit. The guy came over and sat with us, my friend introduced us. Number Nineteen looked quite passable even without his sunglasses on. To start with, the gentleman didn’t seem overly interested in me and conducted an animated conversation with my friend, without ever once including me. Damn! I was offended. Evidently, I had to resort to more forceful subterfuge. I went to get more drinks, entirely for strategic reasons. I was giving Number Nineteen the benefit of seeing me in all my glory. I was well aware of my luscious figure and was prepared to make best use of it in an important situation like this. It requires an astonishing degree of coordination to rise sylphlike from a beer table bench and stride catwalk-style along the pebbled path in your flip-flops. I must have managed quite well though, because later Number Nineteen told me how smitten he was with the way I moved and that he’d been quite unable to take his eyes off my butt. It worked! I’m such a hussy!
The One - No one said it would be easy Page 20