Bad Date Blog

This is actually an old blog that I posted on the now defunct 360 site at Yahoo. Someone held a competition to see who could write the best blog about a bad date they had had. I didn't win but I didn't expect to. The blog I ended up writing, which I have reproduced below, is one of my favourite blogs. I haven't had much time for writing lately so I thought I might just recycle this blog:

Bad Date Blog

I don’t go on a lot of dates – I don’t get asked out much. And while I would like, perhaps even crave, a more romantic action in my life I am very bad at eliciting it. Part of my reluctance comes from the fact that I am choosy when it comes to men, and I also hate letting people down. Therefore if some poor bloke asks me out and I turn him down I tend to feel guilty and uncomfortable about doing so.

The reason why I have a current policy of being so choosy is that I have terrible taste in men (and in people generally, perhaps). I sometimes think that I have a Neon sign mounted over my head that everyone can see except me. I suspect that it says something like “Arseholes, please queue up here!” Then, quite apart from that, I also transmit what I like to call my ‘rogue Mummy vibe’ or my ‘Auntie Meredith’ vibe. Life’s losers and professional victims tend to circle me like sharks circling a bleeding person. In a room full of crowded people, they elbow others out of the way to come to my side. Their eyes alight on me and a look of hope and great interest spreads across their faces. “Ah!” they say, “if that nice lady could just be my friend then that would be good. If she were my friend then that would reflect well on me, and if I could subdue or control or diminish or compromise the qualities that make her a person that reflects well on me then how happy and nice I would feel. And if I impress her with the tragedies of my life then I am sure that she would willingly, and at short notice, make herself available, without demur, for
· Sex
· Sympathy
· Life coaching
· Counselling sessions
· Organising my life
· Walking the dogs
· Making peace
· Watering the plants
· Other
· (circle any that apply according to desired relationship status and sexual preference)
“I am sure she understands,” they say to themselves,” that she was put on this planet to fill the aching void within me, and free me from having to do so myself.”

Why have I started the Bad Date Blog with this long vitriolic ramble? Because it explains a lot about my romantic past. I have not had many dates in my life, but a high percentage have been bad. But the trick to writing a good blog is, I think, to pick a bad date that was interestingly bad. During my one big love affair I had 3 years of bad dates. They were bad because they were filled with stony silences, my partner looking bored and absent, me prattling away to put him at his ease (which never happened) followed by perfunctory demands for sex. Bad? Yes – but too dull to write much about.

So who to choose? The handsome actor who constantly shushed me every time I mentioned I was on the dole, then looked around to see if anyone had overheard, following this up by perfunctory demands for sex? The British painter and decorator who put on the soundtrack to Zorba the Greek, danced around his lounge room in his socks and leopard skin print undies, announced he had herpes, and followed this up with a perfunctory demand for sex?

I could almost make a story about the 2 Israelis I met at an art exhibition. I thought I was meeting up with them AND a crowd of other folks for drinks. But the other folks never materialised and I realised that I had in fact been lured to a date where perfunctory doesn’t even start to describe the quality of the demands for sex.

“We love Australia… so beautiful… and Australian girls love sex… so do we… You drinking wine?... You like wine?... So do we… gets you in the mood for sex… We go surfing… we look at art… we have sex… We are in army in Israel… did we mention we like sex?... I am his captain… He is under command… but in sex we are all equal… Wanna have a threesome?... We go somewhere and have threesome”

“No.”

A short but astonished silence greeted this answer. There was a brief exchange in Hebrew, and the beta male quickly left the room. The captain turned to me:

“He go… he find another girl for sex… We have twosome… We go now.”

“NO!!!”

As this ejaculation was the only one I was going to allow to happen that night, the matter quickly came to a close.

The actual story I want to relate revolves around a man whose name I realise I have now forgotten. I went out with him a couple of times in the late nineties. I can see his face clearly in my mind, so I am quite startled to find that I have forgotten his name.

He was a tall young man, around about the same age as me. He had dark, curly hair cropped short, and a slim build. He was not handsome but had a pleasant face, with intelligent eyes and a ready, quirky smile. His manner was diffident and good natured and he was an articulate conversationalist. I met him when he gave me a tarot reading. One thing lead to another, we met a couple of times for a drink, and when my birthday came around he offered to take me out for dinner to celebrate. I appreciated the invitation, actually, as in those days I was choreographing and performing full time, and this means I was living the bohemian life and permanently broke.

We met in a café where he wished me a happy birthday, and announced that he intended to show me a really good time, but that I would have to pay for both of us because he didn’t have any money. He then gave me a card with an amusing message. I had turned 30, and the card depicted a grumpy old lady with her face screwed up as if revolted by something bad. I forget the exact wording but the message was something along the lines that turning 30 was akin to lingering around like a fart. Maybe my mood was affected by the fact that I was mentally doing sums and wondering if I could afford to take me and my swain out for a meal, but I found that I didn’t like being compared to one of the grosser bodily functions.

One very cheap and nasty pizza meal later, we retired to a cheap and sticky pub for a couple of drinks. My new age beau had been regaling me with stories of various psychic development workshops he had been to. Now, I find this kind of stuff interesting but I was wondering why he had been to so many – how to draw your spirit guides, reiki, tarot, astrology, recovering past lives, discovering future lives, talking to the angels, swimming with the dolphins, sending healing to the planet, sending psychic messages to the extraterrestrials – believe you me he had done them all. Finally he started telling me about the support groups he was attending. One was for men to get in touch with their emotions. His particular challenge was to get in touch with and express his anger. I was just wondering why it was so important for him to do this, when he told me about the other support group, which was for people who had grown up in abusive situations as children.

His father had had mental health problems. One of the ways these manifested was through extreme paranoia – the father was living in daily expectation of some unknown but deadly enemy descending upon the household. Family life revolved around placating the father by cooperating in his comprehensive preparations for coping with this calamity. Food was horded, hiding places had to be hidden in, escape routes had to be travelled, and the day to day activities of the family themselves were scrutinised for tell tale signs of slackness and betrayal. The worst thing was that the father regularly beat the mother, and before doing this the 2 sons were called in to take a seat and watch in silence – it was a kind of ritual. One day, when they were teenagers, the older brother snapped, grabbed a kitchen knife, and stabbed the father in the neck. This brother was serving a murder sentence in prison at the time of our date.

My date chatted on about the other members of the group – his experience had by no means been the worst. One story sticks in my mind – one woman in the group had a father who had built a torture chamber under their house and equipped it with implements of his own making and design. Every day after school, this woman had to go into the chamber, select one of the implements and then the father would torture her with it.

I was just drawing back from gazing into the abyss that my companion had been so explicitly describing when I found that I was being confronted with a slightly perfunctory request for sex. This chick, he said suggestively and wistfully, had once taken him into her bedroom, tied him to the bed and tickled him with a feather. Wouldn’t I like to…?

No.

No. Parts of me were still in the underground torture chamber, worrying about that woman, and I just felt numb.

Poor, poor boy. If this had been a bad date for me, it had been a terrible, tragic life for him. He had done well to emerge into adulthood as a warm and open human being, but his frantic addiction to alternative lifestyle workshops revealed him as a man with a hollow space that was more than I could fill. Moreover it was a space that was big enough to swallow me whole. I just had to walk away.

I wonder where he is now. Has he been able to reconcile himself to the fact that some damage just has to be lived with, that some hurts can never be workshopped away, and that he just has to draw a line in the sand and get on with his life somehow? Or is he still out there, nursing his dream of some nice lady who will swoop down and carry him off to her boudoir, tie him to her bed and restrain him from the awful burdens of being responsible for his own wellbeing, and tickle him into a state of comfort, wholeness and joy.