Let me read for you. Skip introduction 3:10
Romance books are booming, and I can see why. As a reader, I get that warm, fuzzy feeling when a man with a job and floppy hair falls in love with the quirky woman.
‘You’re not my usual type,’ he’d whisper in her ear. ‘And I love it.’
Purrr.
When it was time to start writing Book 2, I was in the trenches of dating and feeling tremendously unromantic. I assumed that falling in love and having babies would just happen, like school just happened… and my national insurance number just happened… but as I blew out 30 candles, 31, 32, 33…I was beginning to realise that things may not turn out as Disney had promised.
As a writer, there were two ways I could have dealt with this:
- Dig deep, deep, deep into my imagination and write a sweeping romance that lets us all escape our reality for 8 hours of audiobook time.
- To ‘write what I know.’
(I think we know which way it went).
The articles are not lying; being single in your thirties, as a woman, is faaabulous. I had my work, girl trips to Europe, and my cute flat with all the wardrobe space. As far as I was concerned, if my prince didn’t want to come because he’d rather play golf, then that’s fine by me….
Until it wasn’t.
It was always on my pink sofa on Sunday that I felt my single symptoms most. I would dream of a smiley husband with facial hair, children who were a mix of him and me (but mostly me), and trips to Centre Parcs. I’d sigh longingly at my ceiling… before making the decision to get myself back out there.
The dating pool was the 30+ range. I assumed this meant everyone was ready to settle down. Biological clocks were ticking; hairlines were receding; we had no time for dating games. And yet, there were games. So many games. Games to fill a whole Olympic stadium with. As someone who spent most of her twenties in relationships, I was not equipped for these games.
It would be small things like waiting two days for him to reply, and when his answer finally flashed up on my phone, I had to sit on my hands to stop myself from instantly texting back. The rule is to reply within the same amount of time (or more) as they did. If it took him two days, it would take you two days. A year? It will take you a year. It’s all about the chase, darling. It would only be a couple of hours until I snapped. I had to reply. My eggs were ageing by the second. He’d receive an enthusiastic, emoji-filled message that would subtly hint that I was free on the weekend – which he went on to ignore for a week.
Basically, I gave as much chase as a one-legged mouse.
I also did this thing where I thought every man was as honest as the Pope.
Examples of lines I fell for:
‘Ah, I forgot my work phone, can we go to my place?’
‘I am only living with my ex for financial reasons.’
‘There was literally no signal in the Cotswolds.’
(The last one might be true).
As an independent woman who was brought up on Beyoncé, you’re not allowed to wait around for men, but in the five years I was dating, I spent an embarrassing amount of time doing just that. I waited for texts, photos (that weren’t dick pics), a dinner plan, or a clue that something was going somewhere.
Seven of those hours were lost on New Year’s Eve, which I kept free, just in case the fun guy wanted to celebrate it with me. 5 pm came and went. Maybe he’ll call at 6? By 8, I realised he probably was not going to turn up at my door. Probably. But he could?! 11 pm…ok, he wasn’t going to come. I cried in the bath, as if I were in a music video, then saw in the new year, smelling of lavender and feeling more single than ever.
It’s tempting to compare my dating life to a romantic comedy, but I felt more like I was in one of those American teen movies from the early 2000s, except, instead of being a clumsy teenage boy chasing girls in hope of losing his virginity, I was a clumsy 32-year-old woman, trying to find a man who wanted to have kids with me.
If it were only me in this predicament, I would have asked my gynaecologist to do a double-check to make sure there was nothing scary down there. (Someone once told me that they dumped a girl because of the colour of her butt hole, and it got into my head a little). But it wasn’t just me; Most of my friends were single with no knight on the horizon. Even my Christian mates were tangled in situationships. That’s right, not even God could save us from the fuck boys.
It was like a club; I mean, we didn’t build a tree house and put a sign up saying ‘Boys are smelly, but we did have this sense that we were on this mission together.
Every time we met up, we came with our next instalment of:
Could He Be the One?
Guest starring
[Insert man’s name].
Sometimes we would ask each other for advice, one of us would say, ‘What do you think he meant?’ and suddenly we were experts. It was easy to spot the mistakes our friends were making, but almost impossible to see where we were going wrong. That’s the problem with red flags: they are only visible from a distance.
One of my friends, who is very pretty and very short, was seeing a guy. One day, she climbed onto his lap and asked if he wanted to be her boyfriend, to which he stuttered, spluttered and zoomed off.
‘He needs more chase,’ I said to her, with utter authority. But who was I? Only that week, I had spent three hours walking around a park with my guy, as he explained to me the reason why he couldn’t commit to a relationship was that he didn’t like his dad …or something like that. I forget. I kept seeing him, though. Self-worth was so 2016.
When each situationship had come to its inevitable end, my friends had different methods of dealing with it. My short friend would move on to the next man, look back at the previous one with horror as if speeding away from a car crash. ‘How did that happen?’ Another friend would confront her men via a short, snappy WhatsApp message with no emojis. She’d sign off with a two-word sentence like, ‘Keep well.’ With a gut-punching full stop.
I hadn’t honed my confrontational skills to pull this off. If I’m irritated, you will see it on my face, but I couldn’t send a selfie of me scowling. That would be odd. So, I found it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. There was no WhatsApp message to get my feelings out, just the occasional blog post, and then, er…. a book.
If you end up buying Bad Dates Club (coming September 10th), you will be reading a story about two flatmates in their thirties who are trying (and failing) to navigate the dating scene of today. There are men who weave in and out, but the heart, I think, is in the friendship.
It’s all fiction. Everybody is fake. There is no coffee place called Notty Coffee (as far as I know), or a man called Hugh Peterson. I made him up. But there are scenarios that might be familiar, maybe because you read about them on The Quack or from your own experiences. After all, we’re all members of the bad dates club.
THE QUACK 