The Daily Echo
February 14th
LOVE, WHERE YOU LAST LOOK.
A Valentine’s Day Special.
By Eloise Elliot.
How many times have we all been told, ‘you know, the very minute you stop searching, that’s precisely when the man of your dreams will find you’. Now I’d have dismissed that as a pile of total and utter horse dung, if you’d said it to me not all that long ago. But lately, let’s just say from recent personal experience, I suddenly got to wondering all over again.
Could there possibly be any truth in it? Can it sometimes be the case that we invest so much time, trouble and energy into finding a life partner/soulmate, that sometimes all our good intentions have exactly the opposite effect, and send otherwise perfectly decent guys running for the hills? After all, we all know that men come with inbuilt radars for women who aren’t so much looking for a boyfriend, as auditioning for a husband. Don’t they?
And so, I decided to ask around a bit.
One: Laura’s Story: ‘You sometimes just have to bend the rules a bit to get a result’
So let me introduce you to my first interviewee, who has begged me on pain of death not to reveal her name on account of, as she put it, the holy mortifying shame of her story. So instead let’s just call her Laura for now, and leave it at that.
Now Laura is a lovely, bright, successful women who tells me she’s always had many wonderful things in life, fabulous blessings, all going in her favour. A job she loved and a great place to live in, for starters. She had family, great friends, disposable income; this was a woman who had it together. But, you guessed it: for years and years … utterly and totally manless.
And Laura had tried. God knows, this girl had seriously put herself out there. Speed dating, read dating (exactly the same thing, except you do it in Waterstones), she’s even tried a new craze, ‘eye-gazing dating’. Which apparently is a bit like speed dating, except you don’t talk to the guy sitting opposite you, to see if there’s any ‘non-verbal chemistry’. (I know, I know, but apparently it’s all the go in the States.) As it happened though, Laura just got a fit of giggles when some fella started to stare earnestly at her and that put paid to that. Brave soul that she is, she’d even badgered just about every pal she had to set her up on blind dates, and had gamely gone along on all of them. There she’d be, blow-dried, manicured, made-up, dressed-up, setting out with high hopes in her heart. And all with zero percent success.
‘It was the ridiculous hours I worked,’ she confided in me over coffee and a sticky bun …
I’m an investment analyst you see, and the hours nearly kill you. I’ve got to be at my desk from when the markets first open at the crack of dawn, right through till well after eight or nine in the evening, more often than not. So of course, by the time the weekend comes round, I’m usually just too bone-tired to even think about going out at night; all I want to do is catch up on sleep. And my pals. And it goes without saying, food.
Strange thing though; even though on paper, I ostensibly had it all – good job, a nice place to live, great buddies– the fact that I was perennially single somehow made me feel like I wasn’t living my life to its full potential. I often think the feminist movement did so much for my generation, and yet if you’re alone, you’re still made to feel it. I sometimes imagine the ghost of Jane Austen rising from her grave, pointing a bony finger at us and saying, ‘Ha! You lot thought the last two hundred years changed anything!
Anyway, flash forward to one Saturday a while ago, when I was meeting a girlfriend for brunch in this restaurant we both loved. Best eggs Benedict in town, and don’t even get me going on their garlic fries. The perfect kick-start to anyone’s weekend, trust me. So there we were, patiently queuing for a table, both of us starving and needing a) caffeine; b) eggs, bacon, anything; and in my case c) a very large and chocolatey dessert to follow. And we were both starving. Ravenous. So hungry, we were nearly getting ratty with each other.
Now I’m someone who normally does a lot of preventative eating before going outside the door. (And if you don’t believe me, you’d want to see my handbag; whereas colleagues all take their ipads and iphones everywhere they go, I take Hobnobs and KitKats.) But as it happened, that particular morning, I’d absolutely nothing in the flat to eat, bar a few stale Cheerios and an out-of-date Innocent banana fruit smoothie.
‘Ahh,’ the hostess at the restaurant told us, ‘bit of a seating problem, I’m afraid. We’re completely full as you can see, so there’ll be a bit of a wait.’
A bit of a wait? Not on your bloody life, not with me almost violent with hunger by now and ready to start gnawing at chair legs or else turning to cannibalism.
‘But there’s a free table for two right there!’ I spluttered, pointing wildly at a cordoned-off section. ‘Why can’t we have that one?’
‘Private party,’ we were curtly told.
Now I’m not proud of what followed, but trust me, the delicious smell of fries and eggs was starting to waft our way and take it from me, I was powerless. Homer Simpson-style drool was starting to dribble out of my mouth and I knew I either had to be eating in the next few minutes, or there’d be a riot.
‘Erm … yes,’ I answered back. ‘We’re … actually with the private group. Both of us. Ok if we’re seated now? Sorry that we’re a bit late …’
My pal flashed me a ‘you filthy, shameless liar’ look, but as I told her later, the end more than justified the means. And so two minutes later, we’re seated, we’ve ordered, coffee is on its way and I’m slowly starting to feel that bit more human.
Which was pretty much when we first took notice of the private party surrounding us. Now there must have been at least fifty of them, predominantly youngish, all incredibly well dressed and I distinctly remember almost all wearing black. Some chic, fashionista party, we wondered?
At midday on a Saturday though? Unlikely.
Then just as our food arrives, a guy approaches us. Friendly, warm open smile, shaking hands with us both and introducing himself as Adam.
‘So how did you both know Harry, then?’ he asked politely.
Harry? I thought. Who the hell was Harry?
‘It’s just I thought I knew most of Harry’s friends and I haven’t seen either of you girls before.’
Now I’m starting to get embarrassed, but my pal works in PR and is therefore that bit quicker off the mark than me.
‘Do you know, I was just about to ask you exactly the same thing,’ she smiled pleasantly back at him.
‘Oh, I knew Harry from work,’ Adam nodded. ‘Although I’ve only been at the company for the past three years, but we’d grown close in that time. I’m going to miss him like hell.’
OK, so now an alarm bell is starting to ring in my head. He knew him? What’s with the past tense? He’s going to miss this Harry guy? Have we walked into an emigration party by accident, where the host has just headed off to the airport with a backpack and a one way ticket to Sydney?
‘Tragic, wasn’t it?’ Adam went on.
Tragic? So now I’m starting to shoot my pal panicky looks across the table.
Have we just gatecrashed … a funeral?
Yes, was the short answer. Harry apparently had passed away in his early forties, a sudden coronary. Awful. Terrible. Just heartbreaking.
And now here we were. Trying to pass ourselves off as lifelong buddies to someone who actually knew him. And all for a plate of eggs Benedict with a side of garlic fries.
Now admittedly, yes, of course we could have ’fessed up there and then. We could have got out of there and still lived to tell the tale, but my pal is made of stronger stuff than that and decided to go down the ‘sod it anyway, let’s brazen it out, we’ve come this far,’ route.
‘And it’s not like we’ll ever see any of these people ever again, is it?’ she hissed to me in the loo, a while after. So we did, and somehow, someway, got away with it. Lovely, friendly Adam seemed to buy the pair of us as childhood pals of the deceased who just hadn’t seen him in years. So we chatted and we nattered and a few hours later, just as people were starting to leave, he shyly took me aside and asked for my phone number.
Well, I have to tell him, I thought. Simple as that. And the sooner, the better. Easier said than done though, because date one was just so perfect and lovely (dinner and a George Clooney movie and oh, the bliss of finding a straight guy who’d happily sit through it!)
So … what could I do? Ruin an otherwise gorgeous night with the first genuinely lovely guy I’d met in years?
Anyway, date one turns into dates two, three and four and still I haven’t told him. Weeks pass, months pass, I’m falling for him deeper and deeper all the time, and eventually the nagging alarm in my head can be silenced no longer.
So, over a quiet plate of pasta and a bottle of wine back at his flat late one night, I eventually pluck up the guts to come clean.
‘Adam? Remember the, emm … funeral we met at?’
‘Course I do. Vividly.’
‘Well, there’s something about it you need to know.’
And out it all comes. How starving we were, how desperate for grub, how my buddy and I would have happily wrestled old ladies to the ground, just to get a table for brunch that morning.
Then there was silence.
Awkward, bum-clenching, tense silence.
And then he suddenly threw his head back and guffawed laughing.
‘I know,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve known for ages. Since that day, in fact. Before I ever spoke to you, I’d asked poor old Harry’s family if they’d any idea who you were and they said no. Funny, I was wondering how long it would take for you to get around to telling me.’
Now that was three years ago and amazingly, we’re still together. We got engaged last Christmas during a magical skiing holiday and are planning a September wedding later this year. It’s all worked out magically.
But when people ask how we met, I just smile and change the subject.’
Lizzie’s story: ‘You haven’t the first clue who I am, have you?’
‘Men? Don’t get me started,’ Lizzie all but snorts down the phone, as I gently start to coax her tale out of her.
Because I had just about reached break point. Believe me, I’d had enough. I mean, come one, there are only so many bad dates one girl can go on, aren’t there?
‘Back in the day, I was a great one for internet dating; you know, all those sites like Match.com that faithfully promise you that five out of every ten couples that met via the site are now happily together, years later. And, like the moron that I am, I believed the hype.
Well, this is the way forward for me, I figured. I was between jobs and broke at the time, so I though this would be a fantastic way to socialise and meet like-minded guys, all without having to leave the comfort of my own cosy sofa. Plus, at least this way, I can interact with men sitting in front of my computer screen in comfy fleece pyjamas, with no make-up on and three-day old manky hair. Perfect!
But was I in for a right land, or what? Firstly, the lies people tell online, oh dear God, the outrageous, blatant whoppers. You couldn’t make some of it up, but here’s a rough guideline. For starters, if a guy describes himself in his profile as ‘cuddly’, it actually means ‘obese.’ Similarly, ‘enjoys a drink’, means ‘would basically suck the alcohol out of a deodorant bottle’. And, as I found out the hard way, ‘enjoys the company of women’, means, ‘ha! I’m actually going out with five other girls at the same time as you’.
And don’t get me started on the sheer number of openly married men all trawling dating sites just looking for a bit of fun with no commitment or intention of every being anything other than married. No kidding, I even found one who told me that, and I quote, “I’m not free to meet at weekends, because my wife would find out.” But weekdays between nine and five, when the wife was off at work, were OK by him. He’d even used his wedding picture as his profile shot … with his new bride conveniently cut out of it.
Needless to say, after a few months of this malarkey, I threw in the towel. Total waste of time and effort, I decided. So I started going out a bit more with friends, but none of us ever seemed to meet anyone interesting, date-wise. They were all either married, in long-term steady relationships or else gay. Demoralising, to say the least. I was well into my mid-thirties. Had I left it too late to find a significant other, and now had all the good ones been snapped up?
And that’s when it happened. I was at the movies one night with a gang of friends, and we were all having a drink at the bar afterwards. It was mad busy, the usual packed Saturday night, and next thing I knew, some random guy bumped into me, as I was on the way up to the bar to get in another round.
‘Sorry,’ he apologised, then looked at me a bit more closely. ‘Oh, hi! It’s you!’
I looked up hopefully, but no, it was no one I recognised. A tall, gangly looking guy, with long reddish hair all the way down to his bum, hippie-era-circa-Woodstock style. Who the hell was this?
‘You haven’t the first clue who I am, have you?’ he smiled down at me, and it was only then I began to see something vaguely familiar about him … but from where? My old job? No. The gym? Definitely not, sure I hadn’t shown my face in there in months.
‘Nice to see you with your clothes on for a change.’
Course by then, I was in a complete flop-sweat. Please for the love to God, don’t let this be someone I had a fling with years ago, and I was too drunk at the time to even remember?
‘Emm,’ I gulped, ‘I’m really sorry about this, but where exactly did we meet?’
‘Give you a clue,’ he teased, blue eyes dancing. ‘I see you every weekend, at about the same time every morning, except more often than not you’re wearing pyjamas under a raincoat. Oh, and you sort of pretend to drink low-fat milk; at least, you take it down from the shelves and have a good stare at it, but then you always seem to replace it with a full-fat carton. You’ve a big thing about chocolate croissants, which in a weird way I kind of admire. I mean any woman who eats chocolate for breakfast must be OK, I figure. Oh and although you buy The Independent every week, you spend a helluva lot of time flicking through Hello! And OK! which by the way, you never actually buy.’
He was having a great laugh at this, and then suddenly it came to me.
Petrol station guy. From my local Texaco garage. The same one I saw behind the till there every single weekend, when I’d stagger in there bleary-eyed and looking like a complete mong-head in my PJs with a coat flung over them, no make-up and still stinking of whatever I was drinking the previous night.
So I apologised profusely for not recognising him, but he gamely brushed it aside, then asked if he could buy me a drink. So we chatted and talked and it was amazing how much we had in common. A lifelong love of movies for starters. Turns out his name was Greg and he was putting himself through film school, so working at the garage helped pay his tuition fees.
Anyway, the following weekend you can bet I went into that Texaco garage fully prepared to stock up on my Saturday papers; no pyjamas for starters, decently dressed from head to toe and looking, for once, semi-presentable. And as Greg and I got to chatting again, he casually mentioned he had tickets that night for a movie screening and asked me if I’d like to go.
That was over a year ago, and neither of us have ever looked back. So I suppose the moral of my story is, don’t just look to the left and right … look everywhere. There are thousands of great, single guys out there, and they’re not necessarily trawling websites telling massive lies about themselves and doctoring their profile pictures. They’re in coffee shops and standing at bus stops and sitting beside you on trains.
Just trust me. They’re out there.’
Becky’s story: ‘Always the Bridesmaid …’
‘So Dave, my BGF (best gay friend) was finally getting married to his long-term partner and he’d asked me to be the bridesmaid, or ‘best woman’ as he insisted on calling me. Now at the time, civil partnership was a whole new thing, and I hadn’t the first clue what to expect from the day. Would it be all stiff and formal like a regular wedding? Because frankly, I wasn’t sure my stress ulcers could take it. You see, my younger sister had got married the previous summer and I’m not joking, my mum and Auntie Sheila still weren’t back on speaking terms after the blazing howler of a row they’d had over whether the bridal bouquet had exactly matched the toilet roll in the hotel bathroom. Or something of an equally similar magnitude, but then as we all know, the first casualty in any wedding is all sense of proportion.
‘I’m delighted to be best woman,’ I’d told Dave, proud groom-to-be, ‘but please promise me three things. No stress, no rows and above all, you’re not putting me in a stupid-looking pastel outfit that makes me look like a thirty-two-year-old trying to pass herself off as Bo-Peep. At my sister’s wedding, I’m not joking, you could have easily fitted three midgets under my dress.’
Dave had just laughed away all my stressing and fretting. Relax, he told me. Because gay weddings were all about style over substance and totally OTT glitter balls on the dance floor and prancing down the aisle to Liza Minnelli. And therefore the total opposite of straight ones, he swore blind.
But of course, the big downside; there’d be next to no straight guys there for harmless flirtations with. I could get that right out of my head from the get-go. So, not such great news, if you happened to be a single gal hoping to get lucky on the night. (Although now that I think of it, that wasn’t strictly true; there were one or two only straight men there aside from each groom’s dad. Trouble was they all happened to be elderly uncles and pals of the parents, all without exception in the sixty-plus age category and all grandparents by now. But there you go. That’s a single girl’s lot, isn’t it?)
And so, in the full knowledge that the whole day would be a manhunt-free zone, I gamely pitched up at Dave’s house on the morning of the wedding, bottle of champagne tucked under my arm, in a simple black dress that at least I felt comfy in. Who’ll be looking at me, anyway? I asked myself. Gay men spend their time eying up other gay men and refer to their women buddies as ‘beards’. Known fact.
So of course, by the time I get to Dave’s house for the pre-wedding boozy brekkie, it’s like the party was already in full swing. His family were all buzzing round getting hair and make-up done while Dave posed for one photo after another, wearing a tiara and veil from the Pound Shop, in between him wolfing down mouthfuls of champagne and yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Look at meeeeee, everyone! I’m a BRIDE!’
‘You never told me you were getting a proper make-up artist,’ I’d laughed at him. ‘Oh yeah, that’s Brien, I found him through a friend of a friend. Though it would be fun for the girlies. Go on, get him to lash a decent bit of war paint on you! At gay weddings, the best woman is absolutely allowed to look more fabulous than either of the grooms!’
So I sauntered over to this guy at the kitchen table, where he’d just about every Mac product known to man laid out neatly beside him, like a surgeon about to perform an operation. Turns out Brien was a complete dote too, tall and tanned with tight, gelled hair and a gym-toned body, but then as we all know, gay men go to the gym with the same level of devotion as religious people who do Mass every day. And he very kindly did a fantastic make-up job on me, really and truly transforming my usual pasty-face into someone glowing that I barely recognised in the mirror. I’d had professional make-up jobs done before, but somehow my face always ended up looking like a half-dissolved Rubex tablet, with the ridiculous amounts of bronzer and blusher they’d lash on. But this was really amazing work; Brien had somehow made me look like the best possible version of myself, the one that managed to get eight hours sleep a night and occasionally remembered to use night cream.
And all the time, he and I were giggling and messing and all I could do was look at him and think, why oh why are all the good ones gay? I always found any of Dave’s buddies miles easier to chat to than any of the straight guys I knew; for starters, you were completely relaxed and at ease with them. You knew from the off that sexual chemistry was right out the window, so you could just totally be yourself around them.
So Brien joined us all for the big day and I have to say, it was by the mile the best wedding I’d ever been to in my life, bar none. Kind of like a straight wedding, but with all the boring, crappy bits cut out. For starters, both grooms came down the aisle together to Nat King Cole’s ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ … none of your boring old wedding march here! Then another pal of Dave’s got up to do a reading. Solemn-voiced and sombre, he began, ‘A reading from the book of Beyoncé.’ There were weird looks all around but then of course, two seconds later, we’re all clapping and laughing and singing along too; amazing. The whole ceremony bit was all over in around ten minutes – which, by the way, is the perfect length for any wedding service – and before we knew it, Dave was married to the love of his life and dancing back down the aisle again to, what else? Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’, of course. You had to ask?
Anyway, at the knees-up afterwards, lovely Brien kept on asking me to dance time and again. We had an absolute ball and really got on like a house on fire so when he asked for my phone number at the end of the party, I was delighted.
My flatmate that bit less so, when I told her. ‘You already have so many gay men friends in your life,’ she warned me, ‘do you really need another one? They’re only filling up your time and preventing you from meeting someone straight. Someone that you might actually have a shot at a relationship with.’
Now OK, admittedly the girl did have a point. I seemed to spend far more time around gay men than straight ones, and I certainly spent way more time talking about their relationships than I ever did talking about my own. Or rather my own lack of them. In fact there was next to nothing I couldn’t have told you about gay-land.
Somehow though, I couldn’t bring myself to take my flatmate’s advice; Brien was just way much fun to be around. Plus every time we went out, he gave me the most fabulous goodie bag samples from Mac and Clinique, not to mention stunning nail polishes from Chanel … Come on, what girl in her right mind wouldn’t love having a new pal who came bearing freebie make-up samples? He and I became really close in a short space of time and pretty soon, we were inseparable. Then one night, after a plate of pasta at his flat when he’d asked me round to watch Strictly Come Dancing and slag off the judges, he tried to kiss me.
Well I nearly leapt off the sofa with the sheer shock of it. ‘Brien?’ I spluttered at him, ‘may I remind you that you’re a gay man!’
‘What?’ he looked at me, stunned.
‘Well … I mean, you are, aren’t you?’
And it turned out, like so much else in my life, that I’d got it completely arseways. He was straight! Really genuinely straight! Proper boyfriend material! Course he was well used to people thinking he wasn’t, the whole make-up artist thing for starters, and as I told him afterwards, the sheer amount of time he spent in the gym alone would make any women seriously think twice about his orientation. But once I’d got over the shock of it, I started thinking … you know, this is really lovely. The two of us got on brilliantly and chances are, if I’d suspected he was straight right from the get-go, I’d have been all tongue-tied and on edge with him, almost with an invisible sign over my head saying, ‘like me! Please like me, I want a boyfriend!’
Because of course, that was my whole trouble, wasn’t it? The very minute I knew a guy was available, I started acting like a compete desperado in front of him. Wow, what a turn-on. Was it any wonder I was well into my thirties and alone?
All that was about two years ago and I’m delighted to tell you that Brien and I are now happily and very compatibly living together. Funny though; to this day, when I tell people what he does for a living, I can practically see them doing a double take and wondering, does this one realise her boyfriend is gay? Just look at the biceps on him for starters!
Just as prejudiced as I was. But whenever it does happen, I’ll just laugh it off and say yes, I know what you’re thinking, because that’s what I first thought too. But guess what? I was well wrong and so are you.’
I suppose the moral of my tale is this; don’t judge anything by its cover … you might just be very surprised.’
So there you have it, girlfriends everywhere.
You might well think that Valentine’s Day is complete rubbish and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with you there. ‘A Hallmark holiday,’ my mother dismissively sniffs, claiming that back in her day, it just didn’t exist. Then of course, some bright spark sitting in a skyscraper on Madison Avenue, who I’d say scores of women would now want to disembowel if they ever met him, decreed that the gap between Christmas and Easter was just too long, and card companies needed something in between to keep their quarterly revenues looking rosy. And now here the rest of us all are, stuck with it, whether we like it or not.
Single people despise it, and with good reason; I mean, come on, who actually enjoys going to the newsagents only to have to battle your way through gakky heart shaped helium balloons and piles stacked high of garish pink and red overpriced chocolates? And you wonder; are these just ‘grab something at the last minute to keep herself happy’, type impulse buys for fellas, who know they’ll be murdered for daring to come home on the big day empty-handed?
Nor is it a barrel of laughs for couples either. The pressure of trying to be romantic, just because the card companies and newsagents decree it. And you just try getting a last-minute restaurant reservation on the big night, so you can pay hyper-inflated prices just to sit there looking at other stressed-out-looking couples all doing exactly the same thing.
But all I’m saying, is let’s try to get beyond this and see the bigger picture. Believe me I know from long and bitter experience all about being alone.
But I also know that romance is out there, and for all of us. After all, if I can meet someone, I know anyone can.
So if you’re reading this and you’re single, please let me leave you with this one final message.
Do not, I repeat, do NOT despair. Because trust me, he is out there. Somewhere.
And he’s just waiting for you …
Happy Valentine’s Day, keep the faith and much love,
From,
Eloise Elliot
xxxxxxx