Oh help. For
a brief, but serious moment today, I considered online dating. Two things
stopped me: pride, and the (not-entirely
unfounded) belief that most of the men I have ever dated/aborted relationships
with/known, are already there,
waiting to be ‘harmoniously matched’ with my profile in a brutal twist of
fate/inevitability/act of God known as the ‘muhahaha’.
And come to
think of it, thirdly: Cupid might be
a nefarious little dickhead with a ‘GSOH’ and an arsenal, but I’ve always
believed he struck in truly candid moments - when our guards are down and our
egos are on coffee breaks. That’s how you let love in, I thought; you let
yourself be seen, truly seen in all of your flawed vulnerability, and you pray
that understanding and recognition fan into the beginnings of ‘something’.
If we’re
all little independent shops, with wares to sell to the world, there are plenty
of things we put in the window to entice passersby. Bunting perhaps, a well-placed
teapot, a suggestively tasseled lampshade. But inevitably, there are things that
make it into the window we don’t consciously place there: a gurning clown mask
of social clumsiness, the dusty old jewellery box of long-ago-loves that still manage to get us dancing to their
haunting tunes, bogeys. And in the tactile hustle and bustle of the high
street, all of these things are on show, and available to touch and hold (but
once broken, considered sold).
In virtual
second lives we can be who we want to be, or worse, who we think we should want to be. Stay with me, I know, these cyber
projections can be just as revealing of the real life bogeymen feeding the reel,
(if you know where to look in their Microsoft shop windows), but gone is the
dragging of coat tails and the smell of adrenaline. I’m no die-hard romantic,
but every dalliance I’ve had, good bad, or unpublishable have all arisen (not a
euphemism) from some conscious decision I made. To go to that party, to take
that job, to queue for body paint at four in the morning; (his name was Darcy, I kid you not, on a beach in Thailand
- no white shirt, but you can’t have everything).
I’m going
to have to smash the metaphor here, because I can’t get my head round ‘window
shopping for soulmates’ Guardian or otherwise.
I, like
hordes of women before me, wanted to be Bridget Jones. I wanted to be Bridget Jones because I wanted her flat, and her
job, her friends and her nineties London lifestyle. (I grew up in Singapore,
and the idea of a poky flat in London had for me, all the romance of a gothic
spire). And to top it all off, despite all the fags and the booze and the
misery – which, with all that disarming ‘British humour’ ends up looking quite
fun - she got her Mr Darcy. Not a metaphor, an actual Mr Darcy (Colin Firth, squared).
Recently
the scales have fallen from my eyes, although so far I’m not hiding any under
my clothes. I’ve noticed I’m getting perilously close to the tipping point into
singular singleness at every table I sit at. In every room I enter, all the
good ones are taken and the rest have been taken in ways you don’t want to
remember, or worse, they remember that night you got really drunk on sambuca
and nearly took someone’s eye out on the dancefloor.
And that’s fine, fun, even - I don’t mean in a hair-twirling, prick-teasing ‘fun’ kind of way, that way psychosis lies. (I can’t keep from
calling a spade a shovel even when sober, so you can be sure that on a date –
and for ‘on a date’, read, ‘after several large gins’ - there ain’t no chance
I’ve got any ‘gee mister, how’dja get all that clever stuff to fit in your
head’ going spare). No, I just mean I have good friends and none of them have
tried to set me up with ‘Clive from Accounts’. For which I am very grateful.
And up
until recently, say, yesterday, holding court was just dandy. ‘Why not settle
down with a well balanced main course m’lady? implores my world weary
inner-butler. ‘What, whilst the buffet car is still serving?’ I trill, and swan
off down the carriage for another vol au vent. A word about vol au vents –
they’re full of hot air, and if you’re unlucky, crab paste.
The point is not, that I am single, but that I now notice that I'm single. And for the most part I find myself becoming everything I wished for: typing this diary in an (albeit
borrowed) flat in London, pursuing my career in penniless glee, with legions of
smack-the-pony-and-blow-me-down-with-a-feather brilliant friends standing by, ready to rush in with gin at the
drop of a proverbial pillbox. Enter Mr Darcy right? Emerging from the
cyberlake, white shirt plastered to his alabaster profile? Or in terrible
knitwear, captioned ‘let’s see what happens’. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a - "
Not this
time, dear reader, for now, I’ll hang onto my stubborn whimsy of taking life as
it comes. For now I will resist being ‘saved’ from the perils of impending
spinsterhood by ‘click-and-collect’ knights in silicon armour. This beige box
in Islington is not a tower: it is a spire, my
spire. For now, I like me, just
the way I am.
**Just realised
Bridget is back, single and onlinebloodydating. Fuck it Fielding, just when I
thought I had a handle on this.
