Romantically Challenged

by Sami Lukis

  This does not make me feel undateable or unshaggable or unloveable. It makes me feel proud and confident and empowered. And the best part is, when I eventually decide to make the magic happen again, I feel like a born-again virgin. So I get to enjoy all the fun and nervous anticipation of the ‘first time’ all over again.

  My dear friend Jenna (not her real name for reasons you’re about to understand) is the undisputed Penguin Club President and our most dedicated member. As I write this book, Jenna is about to celebrate her seven-year anniversary in the Club.

  Seven years without sex doesn’t bother Jenna as much as you might think it would (although it really does give a whole new meaning to the term ‘seven-year itch’, doesn’t it?) She lives quite happily with her dog, her two cats and her extensive collection of vibrators. She doesn’t have to shave her legs, or worry about Brazilians or ingrown hairs down there, like, ever. And she’s reading the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy for the fourth time. At around the five-year mark, she completely gave up and relocated to Hobart for a while.

  When you’ve been a member of the Penguin Club for that long, you probably deserve a lifetime membership. But none of us would ever wish that on our darling friend. However, if Jenna doesn’t get her groove back by her ten-year Penguin Club anniversary, I’ll probably book her an appointment with ‘The Yoni Whisperer’.’Cause by that stage, it probably wouldn’t hurt to at least give it a go.

  In my tragically vast experience, blind dates are always scary. It really doesn’t matter how many times you put yourself through them, there’s always a very real possibility that it will turn into a horror show.

  My greatest fear is that we’ll run out of things to talk about and be forced to endure those excruciatingly awkward silences that make me question why I keep saying yes to blind dates when I absolutely know there’s a very real possibility that this excruciatingly awkward situation might occur.

  My other fear is that he’ll talk too much.

  I once found myself on a blind date with a pilot who had a serious case of verbal diarrhoea. Before I’d even finished my first glass of wine, he said, ‘So, Sami, you know if you play your cards right, I’ll put you down on my staff travel.’

  I’ve since learned that if a guy ever uses the phrase ‘if you play your cards right’ on a first date, you should get up, leave immediately and lose his number. However, I didn’t know this at the time, so I just put it down to nerves and his desire to impress, and the date carried on.

  The date reached a new level of weird when the Pilot decided to tell me about the best threesome he never had. With the excitement of a kid waking up on Christmas morning, he gave me a detailed description of that time he got absolutely smashed at the races and managed to pick up not one but two hot girls, but by the time he got them back to his crib he was too drunk to get a hard-on so he passed out while the girls did their thang without him and then he had to make do with a solo flight after they left.

  So that was probably my second cue to leave. But by that stage, I was so intrigued by the inappropriateness of his first-date chat, that I decided to stick around and see what other crap might spill out of his mouth.

  By the time I’d finished my second glass of wine, he’d told me all the dirty details about how his last girlfriend was a swinger. He’d never done it before but she introduced him to the scene so he gave it a go and he really quite enjoyed it, but now they had broken up and he had no one to go with so he was looking for someone who might like to go to a swingers club with him now and then.

  And then he suddenly stopped talking and sat there and stared at me, waiting for a reaction.

  And that was my cue to leave.

  I told him that swinging wasn’t my scene and I thanked him for the wine and wished him all the best and said I really hoped he’d be able to find someone who could help him satisfy his needs, and enjoy the perks of his treasured staff travel benefits. And I left.

  My friend Annie had her worst-ever blind date with a guy who hardly spoke to her at all. He’d invited her to a Liberal Party fundraising lunch, which is a fucking weird place to take someone on a first date anyway. In the limited chat they’d had pre-date, they had never once discussed their personal political leanings. Things got even more wack when she arrived at the lunch to discover they were seated at the head table with the Prime Minister. Then her date spent the entire lunch fan-girling over the PM and completely ignoring her.

  Annie says it was the most boring, pointless date she’s ever been on. She was even more baffled when she later discovered that the guy had paid $5000 each for them to sit at the head table. She was tempted to call him afterwards and tell him he should have spent the money on a Louis Vuitton bag for her instead. That would have been a much smarter way to spend 5K. And it probably would have given him a much better chance of securing a second date.

  When it comes to first dates to forget, my mate Galeb wins the prize. He was suitably aroused when a girl asked him back to her place after they had shared a very flirty dinner. Things got hot and heavy pretty quickly, but he was concerned to discover a series of weird looking red lines on her stomach and at the tops of her thighs as he was undressing her. When he asked her what they were and if she was okay, she said, matter-of-factly, ‘Oh no, I’m fine. I just like to cut myself while I have sex.’ He suddenly wasn’t feeling so aroused, so he excused himself and went home. And he never saw her again.

  I was once turned off a guy because of his thin shoulders. I knew it wasn’t his fault. He was born that way. Which, incidentally, I’m sure his mum was quite happy about. However, I couldn’t enjoy having sex with him once I noticed that his shoulder width was narrower than mine. It’s the most stupidly superficial reason I’ve ever had for putting the brakes on a new relationship, but there must have been some kind of deeper, perfectly rational psychoanalytical explanation for my behaviour. Because Jamie Dornan has thin shoulders, and I’m quite certain I would enjoy having sex with him.

  Okay, let’s be honest here. Superficial turn-offs are a brutal but very basic factor of dating. We’ve all had them. My friend Jane can’t date a guy if he has a prominent Adam’s apple. She’s especially repulsed if the protusion in his neck moves around while he’s speaking. She simply can’t look at him. Another friend had to stop seeing a gentleman because of his South African accent. She cringed every time he opened his mouth. Galeb was instantly turned off when a woman turned up to a fancy restaurant for their second date wearing yoga tights. I’m not sure if it was the hint of camel toe that pushed him over the edge or just the fact that she was wearing activewear on a dinner date, which I’ll agree was an especially unacceptable level of effort on her behalf.

  Angie had to call it quits with a fella after he arrived at the pub to meet her friends for the first time, wearing – gasp – sandals with socks. Now, can we all just agree for a second that this turn-off is perfectly understandable? I mean, how could poor old Angie possibly risk being seen in public with this guy and his unsightly sock sandals ever again?

  I was once on a date with a guy who told me he was turned off a girl after he heard her ‘pee like a racehorse’. He’d taken her back to his place and things were getting hot and heavy in the bedroom when she excused herself and disappeared into his ensuite. She’d been holding it in for a while, poor thing, and the bathroom acoustics really weren’t very kind to her that night. The guy was completely repulsed as he lay there in bed, listening to her relieving herself, loudly. Of. Every. Last. Drop (it went on for ages, apparently). After hearing that, he said he couldn’t have sex with her again.

  I once had to break up with a guy because I was repulsed by his pheromones. I’m not talking about your standard, run-of-the-mill morning breath or a little nasty post-workout BO. I’m referring to the guy’s natural body scent, which seemed to be secreted from his pores, glide through the air and slither directly up into my nostrils, creating a reaction in my whole being that was especially repugnant.

  Whenever I was in h
is company, the odour was undeniably nauseating. Yes, I know I sound overly dramatic but I swear it was true. It was one of the most bizarre dating situations I’ve ever encountered and it’s the only time it has ever happened to me.

  It was terribly unfortunate, because he also happened to be a really, really nice person. He was handsome, sweet and generous. He’s the kind of man who would probably buy your mother flowers on your birthday, to thank her for having you. There was seriously nothing to dislike about the guy. Other than his au naturel eau d’odious.

  I can only imagine it was some kind of chemical reaction that took place when his pheromones met mine. If pheromones are supposed to attract people in an animalistic, scientific way, doesn’t it make sense that they could also have the reverse effect?

  The situation was especially unbearable when we had sex. That foul natural odour oozing from his pores mixed in with all the funky sex sweat would literally make me gag. Which is not ideal when you’re having sex with a lovely guy who you actually quite like.

  I desperately wanted it to not be a problem, so I tried everything to overcome the issue. I’d heard the best way to combat a bad aroma is to breathe in the biggest, longest, deepest lungful you possibly can, and it will miraculously disappear. I tried that. Several times. Didn’t help.

  I bought him one of my all-time favourite aftershaves, hoping it would mask the smell. But the sweet muskiness of the perfume combined with his pheromones only intensified the odour from pungent to putrid.

  I asked my friends if they could smell it. I once discreetly asked a girlfriend to give him an extra long hug and take a big whiff when she met him. Of course, she couldn’t smell a thing. She thought I was psycho.

  I hoped the smell would gradually subside if I spent more time with him. It didn’t. The stench was always there. Whenever we were together. Lingering, like . . . well, a bad smell.

  In the end, I accepted the fact that it was a primal chemical reaction between our bodies, warning us that we just didn’t fit. I think it was the universe begging us not to multiply. So it’s quite possible that he was having the exact same reaction to my body odour the whole time.

  I didn’t want to embarrass or upset him by discussing it. I mean, how do you tell someone their body odour is repellent? So I just broke up with him instead. And I really hope that lovely bloke has found himself a gorgeous lass who thinks he smells absolutely delicious.

  Pre-online dating, my single squad and I tried to be strategic about facilitating ‘random’ meetings with the opposite sex. We thought we were being proactively single by frequenting places where you would expect to find a higher ratio of men. Like the pub. Or the footy. Or the pub when an important footy match was playing on the big screens.

  Didn’t take us long to work out that most men who go to the pub to watch the footy . . . go to the pub to watch the footy. Not to pick up. Occasionally some loud, messy drunk would pay us a little attention after the game was over. But that never ends well for anyone.

  Then Tinder came along. And men stopped paying us attention altogether. They didn’t have to make any kind of effort at all, because they already had their Tinder hook-ups lined up for later.

  Swipe right. Line’em up. Get laid. That’s pretty much how it works.

  The comedian Judith Lucy summed it up best when she told me during a radio interview that it would be more appropriate if Tinder was renamed ‘who’s in my area with their pants off’.

  I’ve heard way too many horror stories to ever try Tinder. Call me crazy, but I reckon an app that’s used mostly by people who just want sex (stat!) is probably not going to help me meet my life partner. I know a makeup artist in LA who deals with twenty-year-old Victoria’s Secret models crying in her makeup chair over their latest hideous Tinder experiences, because some jerk hasn’t bothered to message them back after they had sex. So, if a Victoria’s Secret model isn’t having any luck on Tinder, how the fuck are we mere mortals supposed to?

  I haven’t actually tried any online dating avenues. Unless you count my one laughable experience with a regular matchmaking service. I’d already said no the the Millionaire Matchmaker years before, but this particular agency assured me they were for ordinary folk. When they started advertising on the radio station where I worked, they jumped at the chance to help me find my match. Plus, they offered to forgo the hefty joining fee (damn, those things are expensive). I agreed to go on one date, which would be recorded for my radio show. I painstakingly filled out the extensive customer profile, so they could identify my perfect fella. At best, I thought, the expert match-makers would find what I couldn’t: the man of my dreams! At worst, it would make for a fun radio segment for our mostly female listeners.

  They set me up with a nice looking fella named Jeff. We met for dinner at a restaurant at Walsh Bay in Sydney. Things seemed to go well . . . for about three minutes. Then we somehow got talking about first impressions. And Jeff told me the first thing that popped into his mind when he walked into the restaurant and saw me was, ‘Geez, she’s gonna be hard work’.

  That was his first impression of me. And he thought it was perfectly appropriate to tell me that.

  He then sculled about six beers as I tried desperately to maintain conversation (oh by the way, guys, here’s a helpful tip: you should always resist the urge to scull six beers during the first hour of a first date. It’s a serious dating disability).

  I also discovered that Jeff and I had very little in common. He exposed the full extent of our tragic mismatch when he confessed to me that his lifelong dream was to live in Las Vegas and marry a stripper. That’s actually what Jeff told me. During our date. Which was all being recorded for radio. When he saw the look of horror on my face, he tried to pretend he was joking.

  I don’t know whether to put his behaviour down to nerves or just the fact that he was a fucking moron but, either way, that promotion backfired spectacularly on the matchmaking agency.

  Although, in their defence, I guess I got what I paid for.

  Dating and texting go together like douchebags and Tinder. These days, one really can’t exist without the other.

  Regardless of how you meet, the initial dating process is pretty much conducted entirely via text. I can’t remember the last time a man picked up a phone, called me and engaged in an actual conversation to arrange a first date. I once dated a guy for six whole weeks without ever having one single telephone convo.

  It’s a rude shock to my girlfriends who are re-entering the dating colosseum after marriage-kids-ugly separation-nasty legal battle-divorce. I’ve had numerous calls from my newly single friends, screaming, ‘Honestly, Sam, I have no idea how you’ve endured dating in this city for all these years. It’s fucking brutal out there.’

  And I always reply, ‘Yes, hon, dating certainly has changed heaps since you were last on the scene. By the way, it’s perfectly acceptable to split the bill these days, remember. And you do know that scrunchies and butterfly clips went out in the nineties, right?’

  Still, there’s no established etiquette when it comes to texting and dating. And, let’s be honest, men are pretty average communicators to begin with. So when you give them unsupervised access to a keypad, there’s always a very real possibility that something/ everything might get lost in translation. Case in point: I gave my number to a nice guy I met at the pub, who asked if he could take me out to dinner sometime. I was understandably perplexed when I received this text from him the next morning:

  It was lovely to meet your brain.

  That’s it. The whole text. I have no idea what happened to the actual ‘asking me out’ bit. I’m no textpert, but reading between the line, I can only guess that he was trying to let me know he was more interested in my brain/personality than my looks/bits. He was probably trying to be clever or original or funny (bless), but why couldn’t he simply write, ‘Hey, I enjoyed meeting you last night. When are you free to catch up?’ Or better still, why not just pick up the friggin’ phone and ask me out, th
e old-fashioned way?

  This dating/texting co-dependency often results in us ladies wasting far too many hours trying to decipher the latest cryptic text we’ve received. Dinner with the girls often turns into a full-blown strategy meeting, whereby text messages are discussed, dissected and decoded. Every word, every phrase, every punctuation mark is assessed and analysed from every conceivable perspective. Until. It. Friggin’. Makes. Sense.

  And I’m sorry to tell you this, girls, but age does not bring clarity to this situation. It seems that men of all ages are textually challenged. Some of the smartest, most astute forty-year-old women I know have found themselves stumped by a male-derived SMS.

  One guy sent me this little gem after our first date:

  Hi. Let me know when you’re up for some putting practice.

  Well, first things first: at least his text came with a salutation. But. The bizarre thing about this text is that we had never before discussed golf or putting in any form (putt putt included). So it left me wondering if:

  a) The text was meant for someone else.

  b) ‘Putting practice’ was actually code for something else i.e. dinner? Sex?

  c) Was this was his subtle way of letting me know he wasn’t interested in anything romantic and would prefer to keep things on a strictly platonic level, which may or may not include the occasional round of golf?

  I didn’t bother finding out. I mean, come on. Does it really have to be that difficult?

  A text can make or break the dating process, especially in the really early stages.

  I was once turned off by a guy because he wrote ‘hehehe’ in his text message. Okay, I know it was a total bitch move on my part, but the moment I saw those six little characters sitting there on my phone, I had absolutely zero interest in having sex with him. Despite the fact that he was a super hot, insanely fit Ironman. You know, the guy who runs 50 k’s, swims 20 k’s and rides 1000 k’s all before breakfast (or something like that). Yep, he was one of them. But when he sent me a text to ask me out and he used hehehe (three, to be sure), he immediately lost any sex appeal he’d had pre-hehehe. I cannot explain why I was so opposed to it, other than to say a man over the age of thirty should never hehehe.