Читать книгу The Dating Game - Carolyn Caterer - Страница 3

“I could never be with a man who didn’t like the Beatles” Anna sighed with feeling.

“Well I could never be with a man who could remember them!” was Aleks’s quick response.

“To be honest ladies, I’m getting less picky by the minute and, musical preferences seem to be the least of my worries. How on earth do you meet guys these days when you are forty two years old and single?”

And that, dear reader (yikes I’m already sounding like that well-known spinster Miss Jane Austen) is how I came to find myself looking for love online………

My name is Jen and I seem to be suffering from an affliction that began in the noughties, or at least was first recognised by the media as hailing from this era; namely the excessive number of single women in their forties. It seems to be a crisis not seen since the end of the second world war when women outnumbered men and so many were left on the shelf.

Now, being left on the shelf wasn’t something I had ever planned and boy do I hate that expression, but I enjoyed my twenties and the freedom that gave me. Wasted a severe amount of time in my thirties on a man who seemed to be stuck in the nineteen thirties in terms of his attitude to women and their role in society, and then headed into my early forties flying the flag for independent women everywhere. I watched the entire series of Sex and the City to remind myself it was fabulous to be single (the trouble is I don’t think any part of Hampshire really matches up to New York). I did not have to bother with men at all when I had a rampant rabbit waiting and ready to go and it never farted, or snored afterwards.

Then suddenly it hit me: I was forty two and there were no available men anymore, or at least there didn’t seem to be. All requests to my girlfriends to set me up with their single male friends were met by the following responses:

“I think you’ve dated all my single male friends”

“All the single men I know are gay”

“I wouldn’t wish any of my single male friends on you – they’re a bunch of sad bastards”

This wasn’t exactly the response that I wanted to hear. After all if I was single and a good catch then surely there had to be some hot men out there looking for a soul mate? But it certainly seemed to be a case of very slim pickings as far as my friends were concerned.

I knew of course that there were decent men out there, but the question that had been running around in my head for more than a few months was how on earth do I find them? Actually, I had probably been mulling this over for a few years, but kept putting it to the back of my mind convinced that sooner or later someone decent had to appear on the horizon. It seemed however that walking off into the sunset with the love of your life wasn’t as easy as you had been led to believe in those childhood fairy tales.

I felt that if anyone uttered those words “Oh he’ll turn up when you are least expecting it” at me again, I would throttle them. I hadn’t been expecting it for the last three years, so either he wasn’t coming or my soul mate was useless at reading maps and, being a typical male, was refusing to ask for directions.

However, I wasn’t dissimilar to my friends and let’s face it they had all managed to meet someone and settle down and still appeared to like them a number of years later. So the question was, how had they succeeded where I had so far failed?

Let’s start with Anna; she’s my business partner. We run Jenna, a design agency and a very successful one at that, bearing in mind that we are not based in London. Been there, done that and happy to avoid the six thirty train to Waterloo in the morning I can tell you. We met when working for one of the big agencies in the city and it soon became clear that we worked well together and had a lot in common, so one day over lunch we decided to pool our resources and set up a business. We now employ eleven people, have a great client base and both of us are lucky enough to really love our jobs. Anna is great at bringing in the business and I am in charge of managing the clients.

Anna, as you have already gathered, is not a sad spinster of this parish, unlike me. She met her husband Ben at University and has never looked back. He is a veterinary surgeon and works at the equine hospital about ten miles from where they live. Personally I don’t know why someone would want to spend their time with an animal that seems to be dangerous from any angle, but he obviously loves it. Although not as much as he loves Anna. They really were made for each other, with lots in common and yet enough differences to keep the spark alive. Both adore their jobs and love to walk but also have independent interests; Ben likes football and Anna is a keen tennis player, so they either compromise or agree to go off on their own.

Then there is Erica. She runs her own bookshop and her husband of ten years is a Dentist (you can imagine what it is like when he and Ben are in the same room, comparing notes on anaesthetics and goodness knows what else). And yes this is really corny, but Erica met Matt when her Dentist was off sick and he got to gaze into her eyes as well as down her throat, which brings a whole new dimension to the phrase “tickling your tonsils” I can tell you.

Now they are like chalk and cheese; Erica is ultra organised and likes nothing better than rearranging her books after someone has had a browse and not lined them up quite right, while Matt can never find his car keys, has obviously not heard about filing systems and is incapable of putting anything away. You would think that this would be grounds for a divorce, but no, Erica loves tidying up after him as he creates chaos and he loves the way she organises him so that he appears to me efficient even when he isn’t.

Polly is married to Milo and they run their own Italian coffee shop. They supply the most divine cakes and chocolates as well as superb home made Italian cooking. They met while he was training to be a chef and she complained about her dessert. Good job it was love at first sight, as he came storming out into the restaurant in a manner that I understand would have seen Gordon Ramsay running for cover, but she obviously charmed the pants off him, which was just as well because her date at the time left the restaurant without paying, when he realised that she only had eyes for the head chef and no longer for him.

Working together was tough when they were building up the business but now they are in demand and Polly had a bit of a break from work, following the births of their two sons, now aged fourteen and twelve respectively. Luckily for Polly and Milo, Polly’s parents had set up a trust fund to pay for their grandchildren’s education and the boys are happily ensconced at boarding school, thus relieving Polly of daily child duties during term time. Hence she works like mad then so that she can take time off during the school holidays

And finally Aleks. Aleks always claimed she never wanted to settle down into cosy domesticity, but who ever listens to a teenager? Anyway that was before she met Dan when she was at Art College (and no she didn’t change her name from Alex, to Aleks when she got there. She was named after her Polish Grandmother and the quirky spelling really seemed to reflect her artistic leanings). Dan was head of the student union at the LSE. While Aleks had never shown any interest in politics she certainly did not hesitate in showing an interest in Dan with his passion for his work and his laconic manner outside of it and they married soon after they left university. He ended up working for a number of charities including Amnesty, while Aleks created the most incredible sculptures and began to gain a good reputation. At the age of twenty seven Aleks gave birth to Imogen who was destined to take after her Mum in the creativity stakes and Aleks’s life was complete.

Seven years later however it all fell apart when Dan collapsed and died from a brain aneurism, casting Aleks into a life as a single Mother and instilling in her a belief that nothing lasts forever.

She put on a brave face for Imogen and tried to make life as normal as possible, but it had been hard work. She moved down to Hampshire a few years later having decided that London held too many memories and she needed a new life for both her and Imogen. I met her one day when I walked into the gallery at Hartley Wintney to find an unusual piece to rent for one of our clients photo shoots and we became firm friends. I greatly admired her work and she began to build up a local reputation which at least gave her a steady income and enabled her to drive around in her battered red mini cooper and give Imogen the stability she needed.

In recent years Aleks had started to go out on dates with a number of middle aged divorcees but soon realised that creativity has a terrible habit of working outside a normal nine to five routine and so more than one relationship had fallen by the wayside. Lately she has taken to dating much younger men in the belief that they have more stamina and so won’t be so bothered at her odd hours and are more than able to respond when the opportunity arises. However, judging from a few recent comments, I think she is finding that this experiment is not really working out as well as she had hoped.

So those are my girlfriends (in a nutshell) and they have stood by me through thick and thin and when it comes to men there seems to have been more thin than thick (although they would claim that some of them were most definitely thick!)

I know that they would love me to find a man to settle down with and have done everything they can to help me. They’ve lent me their husbands for the evening when I have had to attend some work black tie function and am in desperate need of company and that is great, but on the other hand it has made me realise that I am missing out on things since the end of my last relationship.

Ah yes, my last relationship. Looking back on it I do wonder why I put up with him for seven years and that a three year itch would have been a good thing. I suppose Adam was pretty decent on one level but very selfish on another and had made it clear that he was not interested in the whole baby thing. As I was pretty ambiguous about the baby thing at the time I wasn’t too bothered, but it soon became clear that he didn’t want kids because he had no intention of having his status as number one in the house being usurped by anyone; not even his own flesh and blood.

Obviously my friends were too polite to point out his faults, but I could detect their frustration at certain times; when he had a cold it was of course ‘man ‘flu’ but he once got into a rage when he discovered that I hadn’t cooked his dinner due to a bout of pneumonia. I perhaps saw the writing on the wall then, but it took another two years before I came to my senses. He made the assumption that his promotion at work to a job in Manchester (he was part of a large company of auditors) would see me giving up the company I had spent years building with Anna, in order to go and be his supportive wife. When I refused and asked him how he had even taken the job without discussing it with me he gave me an ultimatum; it was him or my business. Needless to say I found the choice surprisingly easy. He came home the next day to find his suitcases packed and on the drive. Luckily I had always insisted on us keeping our respective houses, so the split caused me very little upheaval, even emotionally, and after two weeks I realised I didn’t miss him at all.

After two years in the relationship wilderness, I was beginning to feel that I was missing out on something and so that was when I started to look for a new man, but over the next twelve months I found very little that was on offer. It took me a while to realise that all my friends had found their partners in their twenties or very early thirties and that maybe the saying was correct; namely that a woman over the age of forty has more chance of being struck by lightening than getting married, or something along those lines.

After three years on my own I am turning to them again to help me find someone suitable who will be the love of my life. The thing is how to find him when I have to finally admit that I do not have the allure of a twenty five year old. No matter how young I may feel inside the outside is most certainly showing signs of the ageing process and besides, I want to find someone who wants what I want and probably doesn’t want to have children. While they may have been a possibility in the past the thought of late nights and early mornings and nine months of physical hardship, along with the fact that I would be likely to be old enough to be the mother of most of the women at the ante natal classes, good sense told me that my biological need was not really great enough to consider having a baby at such a late stage in my life.

A number of evenings were spent with the girls trying to work out if there were any men that they knew who were both suitable, single and that I hadn’t dated before, but we rapidly came to the conclusion that the answer was unfortunately ‘no’.

Then Erica came up with this stupendous idea about the online dating scene and spent a dedicated evening sipping wine, watching Star Trek the Next Generation on TV, while multitasking on the internet doing what she called ‘research’ in the hope that something decent might pop up in front of her eyes.

Finally she found a website called mygr8mate.com and rang to tell me the good news.

I was initially quite horrified at the idea, based on an experience from ten years earlier when I put an advert in the lonely hearts section of ‘The Times’ and had been bombarded with mail from three continents, none of which were Europe and ended up receiving a stack of letters from men who seemed to be keen to marry me, despite a very limited ability to converse in the English language.

However the internet dating scene had apparently really taken off in the last couple of years and this was the way to go. Erica had chosen a website that she felt would offer me a good chance of finding the man of my dreams and was determined to get me to sign up.

This certainly seemed to be a dating site with a difference; it appeared that she had to write about me and basically promote me to the poor bunch of men on the website who also had put themselves at the mercy of their friends. This was to prevent the “mate” being too modest or telling out and out lies on their profile.

Deciding that forking out for Erica to do the work was a good option I happily told her to go ahead, uploaded a photo of me (not overly flattering but do I want shallow appearance-obsessed men to be contacting me?) onto the page and waited for the emails to flow in.

Two weeks later absolutely nothing had happened. Six moaning ‘phone calls later to a cross section of my friends and I decided to be that modern woman you read about in Red and Cosmo and take action myself. I spent an evening (well,forty-five minutes) trawling through the available men within a 10 mile radius and came up with the grand total of…….. two! I emailed them and sat back secure in the knowledge that they would be unable to resist my witty repartee and overall gorgeousness.

Ten days later and neither of them had bothered to respond! So I expanded my radius to twenty five miles and found fourteen men. This time I decided to do a mass campaign (well I am in marketing) and emailed all of them, completely convinced that this pro-activeness on my part would charm the pants (or Y-fronts) off them.

Three weeks later I was seriously considering demanding my money back as I had received zero responses.

“What, NO ONE has written to you?” Erica gasped.

“Correct”

“Not even one response out of sixteen?”

“Uh huh”

“And no one has taken the initiative to contact you”

“Nope”

“Bloody hell, I can’t believe that. I wrote you such a good profile too. They are obviously a complete bunch of idiots”

“Maybe, but this really isn’t looking very promising is it?”

“You’ll just have to do something drastic”.

Fortunately not too drastic because, as fate would have it, Polly had booked the two of us in for a makeover and photographic session up in London for the following week, as she felt it would be good fun.

I think at this point it is important to share with you how much I dislike, or should I say hate, having my photo taken.

I am talking about a woman who, while completely unaware of any male staring at her from five feet away, can detect a camera pointing in her direction at five hundred metres and usually ends up with eight double chins being featured or eyes which look as if they belong to a psychopath. The photo I had uploaded was a rare one of me actually looking like me, but I have to admit, it wasn’t exactly glamorous.

However reassured by Polly’s presence, and encouraging words, I met her outside the hairdressers and succumbed to a great deal of preparation and copious amounts of bucks fizz to ease my nerves.

We had both asked to be made up to look natural as opposed to glamorous (though Milo had wanted her to go for the nude option) but couldn’t believe the amount of stuff that appeared to have been put on our faces and sat there looking at each other, only speaking to say “But you don’t look like you!” at regular intervals, before being ushered into a room for the photo session.

Half an hour later, shell shocked and still suffering the effects of more bucks fizz than should be allowed, we headed back to wait for the photos to be loaded on a PC for us to view.

Incredibly out of about sixty photos I did finally find six I liked and ordered them and they arrived a few weeks later.

Polly was adamant about which photo had to feature as my main portrait on the website, namely “The one where you look like you have enormous breasts” so who was I to argue with that?!

Four weeks later the photos arrived and I uploaded them onto the website, not expecting much of a response. That evening however I came home to find not an empty inbox but one that finally had some mail in it from potential suitors.

I’m not sure how you are really supposed to make any fair assessment of people in these situations; in fact the whole idea of internet dating does at times make me wonder if arranged marriages are actually far more practical and, from the bride’s point of view, far less hassle than trawling through a bunch of potential suitors with photos that make them look like Conan the Barbarian or a Yeti on his summer holidays. I’ve never been into men with more than their fair share of macho body hair, and yet these were the ones that seemed to be most attracted to my profile. But then at last someone wrote to me who seemed not only normal but quite witty. He was also completely gob smacked that I wrote back to him and we started an amusing dialogue, which lasted a few evenings and stopped me having to subject myself to repeats of reality TV shows and the ubiquitous Big Brother.

So after a couple of weeks of emails I agreed to meet him and chose the not so romantic setting of the Marks and Spencer Coffee shop at one of their superstores, about ten miles away. You see I am a practical girl as I figured that if the date didn’t work out at least I could enjoy myself doing some shopping afterwards!

Feeling ready for action I drove over to the aforementioned store with the good wishes of all my girlfriends literally ringing in my ears (thanks to text messaging) and prepared to meet my prince charming……