We Need to Talk

Dear Adult Dating Website,

According to my profile we’ve been seeing each other for just over a month. I know it’s not that long, but I think maybe now is the right time to tell you how I really feel. About you. About us. I want to talk about what we’re doing  and where this… this thing we have is going.

To be completely honest, so far, you haven’t helped me get laid. I’ve been out six times for various beverages with various men (and one woman) and I did not want to jump any of their bones. This might be more to do with the fact that I’m extremely fussy than with the quality of individual men (and women) you’ve put forward, but I can’t say for sure. I’m not blaming you, this is just the reality of our situation.

It’s true you’ve taught me a lot about who I am. Much to my surprise I seem to be an optimist and an incredibly predictable one at that. Each time it’s the same; I’ll canvass potential suitors, exchange emails, feel positive about our future together (the next few hours at least) and each time I’ve walked away disheartened. Don’t take this the wrong way, they haven’t been bad, mostly, just... Different. Not what I imagined. I didn’t, for example, expect my 25-year-old suitor to have braces. And each time, at the end of our date, they become just one more person I am not going to have sex with.

This is beginning to worry me because concurrently, the list of people I want to sleep with is shrinking at such a rapid rate I’m afraid that one day soon it will consist entirely of fictional characters from HBO and UK TV series. They’re really well drawn characters with complex story arcs and very realistic personal development, but still, it's probably not that healthy. 

It's true some of these things are my issues and I shouldn't heap them on you, especially when I know better than to get my hopes up. It's just that I always want to believe in what you're offering me. So often I think I should just walk away from all this but the thing is, as much as you bring me down, you also lift me right back up.

After a painfully average date, when I’m thinking I’ll never meet anyone I’ll truly want to connect with (read that as you will), I'll turn to you and find a new message from a hot Frenchman and immediately be filled with renewed anticipation. And there really is no reason to believe he’ll turn out to be any better than the others, but maybe what you do is enough. You give me reasons (in the form of hot men) to hope.

Even though you constantly disappoint me, I do enjoy being with you. When we’re together I feel like a different person. The kind of person who gets emails with homemade pornography as attachments. I become this girl who can go on Windows Messenger to talk about her sexual desires with a complete stranger, at least up until the point tells her he’s getting an erection. I feel like I’m growing as a person, group sex is something I’ve started thinking about lately and role-playing and light bondage and mostly that’s because of you.

I love the way you always know how to make me laugh, so often you do it without even trying. Like that message I got last week from Root12345:

Hi. I am looking for my fiancé of the future on the internet.

If you are the one, could you send me email?

I am serious. Don't kid me.

That really cracked me up.

And mostly you make me feel really good about myself. It might be 10pm on a Friday night and I might be sitting around in my underwear, sweating in the infernal summer heat, feeling sorry for myself because I’m alone in my bedroom on a weekend night, sweating for no good reason. 

Then someone, somewhere out there will send me a message saying I’m beautiful or I have a great smile or I look like a lot of fun and offer masturbate for me on webcam and I'll feel so much better. It’s nice to get a genuine compliment now and then. 

Speaking of which, I really loved this one, from a fifty-year-old, with the subject line: Would you enjoy a sex party orgy?

you look like a woman that is sensual and erotic .. and love sex beyond the "missionary" position?  ... be my guest for a long weekend and see what we can work out ..besides I am an exPenthouse photographer and you have a great body to be a pet ..!

It’s like you’re always keeping me on my toes. Remember when I ‘friended’ one of my dates on Facebook before meeting him and discovered we had a mutual acquaintance. That he'd been to primary school with my male housemate. That was certainly surprising. You see I never feel complacent around you and it’s exciting. I don’t know whether you’re going send me a really sweet poem:

 I'm not here 4 a teaz, 

My needs are 24/7.

Near shire station, with a 7-11.

Close to beaches, almost heaven. 

You for real or all talk? 

Overcome, deep boring, aftershock.

Side-winder, motor hammer, classic rock.

Pillion or doggie, ride a cock-horse.

Discreet, respectful. Party original.

Poet, lyricist, script-writer, storyteller for kids.

I not far from anywhere, so drop in, cum along.

Sing in harmony, a joint song. Duet, Corvette. Jet set.

Or someone who looks nothing like their profile picture. Like last week when I agreed to meet up with a really young looking 37 year old and when I turned up to the café only recognised him because I was late and he was the only person sitting on his own.

I didn't see that coming. It took me some time to pay attention to what he was saying because I kept trying to remember exactly what his profile picture had looked like and then trying to hold that image in my mind and superimpose it over the face in front of me. When I actually started listening though, I found that what he was saying was kind of interesting. Then I started wondering if I might enjoy doing some of those things we’d discussed in our instant messaging session (the thought of which had brought on his erection). OK, so maybe you've introduced me to one person who I might sleep with, but I'm not promising anything yet.

When I started writing this, I was thinking maybe it was all going too fast, maybe I needed time to work out what it was that I wanted from you. But reading back over the things we’ve done, the time we've spent together has made me realise that I want to keep trying with you. There are still so many things we haven’t done yet and even though I know it won't be easy I want to keep seeing you. For now. Until I actually get laid. 

Pending that:

Happy Valentine's Day, I got you a threesome.

‘Oh look, they’re in Annandale. That’s close... Wait, no, ARMIdale… Where’s Armidale?’

The answer is seven hours from Sydney by car. The reason I was asking was because I had received a message from a couple wondering if I would be interested in participating in a Valentine’s Day threesome.

A Valentine's Day threesome. Because stuffed toys are creepy and roses are clichéd?  Because the thought of buying another pair of satin boxer shorts is nauseating and last year’s fluffy handcuffs didn’t imply romance so much as a prison sentence?

To be honest, the reason for the event didn't particularly concern me. It's not like I was expecting to get anything myself for Valentine's Day, like I thought my beau was going to buy me a ring and instead I got a ring-in. So I contacted my couple, J. (woman) and M. (man) from ARMIdale, and told them I might be interested, but that distance was an issue, particularly as I couldn’t commit to anything before meeting them. They were surprisingly still super keen and said that they were happy to make the trip as long as I showed up. Since I am good at nothing, if not showing up, it was a date. I was nervous, excited and very intrigued. Ever since I joined the adult website and got my first email from a couple I’d felt like a threesome would be my white whale. The idea of harpooning (sorry) one so early in the year was very appealing.

In preparation of my coupling(?) tripling I went to the beautician for some maintenance. Judging from the photos I’d seen of J. (shots of her in lingerie, in one of which she was pulling down the edge of her knickers) she was a clean slate kind of girl and so I thought it might be good etiquette to do similar. I found I actually cared more about what she might think than I would if I were only meeting up with a man. Usually my attitude is if they like me enough to get to the naked part and if I don’t have a problem with how they style their bits then they shouldn’t care how I style mine. But this was different.

I was tended to by a very enthusiastic young woman who showed far more interest in my foliage than I ever had. My topiarist waxed, tweezed and even trimmed with such care and dedication I could only imagine her living in a house filled with perfectly pruned bonsai lined up on every available surface. I decided against going all the way. I'd gotten rid of every strand once before and found that looking down the end result reminded me of a conch shell or some kind of newborn hairless marsupial. Without clothes on, I wasn’t just naked, I was MORE than naked and so this time I requested a landing strip. The beautician asked whether I would like the bottom, along with the top of said strip to be waxed. I hesitated, but she assured that me the overall effect would be much neater. This is how I came to have a patch of hair resembling a Hitler moustache residing over my vagina. Meiner Kleiner Fuhrer. In hindsight I take this to have been a bad omen.

I started getting ready for my Valentine’s Day liaison almost two hours early, which predictably turned out to not be early enough. If I'd had an hour extra though, I suspect I still would have been late since I only would have used the time to decorate my bedroom floor with more discarded outfits. Choosing the right underwear was the root of my problem. I wanted to wear a sexy set of lingerie, however most of the clothes I deemed appropriate for a potential threesome required a nude bra. Though practical, these items have to be among the least sexy things designed to cover some of the most appealing body parts. I believe this is because they create the unsettling illusion of breasts without nipples. I also decided against wearing my very sexy corset lingerie. Unfortunately, doing up all eleven pairs of hooks and eyes requires immense concentration and the skill of a contortionist. If things went terribly once we got into the bedroom, I figured I might need to make a quick getaway and the thought of running down George Street with a jiggling chest and a corset half stuffed in my handbag was not reassuring.  

Fortunately, J. needed just as long to deliberate over her outfit as I did and we all ended up being half an hour late (an unexpected positive to a woman woman man scenario). We finally met at Opera Bar, Circular Quay. This turned out to be a mistake because the cruise ship Arcadia was berthed on the opposite side of the harbour and from the moment we sat down M. could not take his eyes off it.

‘Do you reckon we could get on that?’ he asked, to which his girlfriend replied (with more patience than I could have mustered) ‘No, I think you’d need a ticket’. Other gems included ‘Fuck, that’s a big ship. They must have had a big shed to build that in’ and ‘Who owns that?’ ‘P&O’ ‘Yeah, but who owns that’. It was like being on a date with the family from The Castle.

As M. stared off into the middle distance, J. and I engaged in polite conversation. She was blonde, petite and very friendly. She spoke with a nasal twang and we had absolutely nothing in common, but that was something I could have overlooked had I not found her boyfriend of seven and a half years to be a wing-nut-eared, passive-aggressive, alpha male, red-neck racist. He had a certain menacing quality to him, the chunky silver chain around his neck and his deep-set stare made me think of a pitbull.

‘So, what do you do for fun?’ he finally asked me.

Aside from meeting up with an increasing number of oddballs from internet dating sites?

‘Well, I’m learning French’. I hadn’t imagined he would think this fun at all, but then J. informed me that M. actually spoke Chinese. I was pleasantly surprised and regretting many of the snap judgements I’d made when M. told me that wasn’t exactly true. It turned out they were staying in a hotel with a lot of international tourists and he had thought it funny to imitate them, but not so they could hear, he told me rather sheepishly. 

I just sat there with a smile frozen to my face. I couldn’t let him think I found this humorous, but for some reason I still felt I had to be polite. Then he continued and said (haltingly because I think he knew what he was saying was not OK) that he found it offensive when he was in a lift with some of these tourists and they were speaking Asian [sic] amongst themselves because he couldn’t understand what they were saying. When this happened apparently he liked to nod along with their conversation making occasional ‘mmm’ and ‘oh yeah’s to imply that he could understand them, even though they weren’t actually talking to him. My smile began to fade and in that moment I knew this was one whale I’d be letting go.

To my surprise, J. seemed to take the news the hardest, she looked absolutely crestfallen. M., on the other hand was quite understanding however they both wanted to know why I had made my decision. I lied. I told them I thought they were lovely people, but it was me. I thought I’d be able to go through with it, but I just didn’t feel comfortable. The last part was true enough, I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of spending any more time getting to know them any better.

I was already wearing my jacket. I had my bag over my shoulder and I was thinking about which burrito I wanted from Guzman Y Gomez when M. made a suggestion. How about, since we were all out in Sydney, we spend the evening together as friends? I asked whether that might be awkward considering our previous plans and the fact that I had sunk them quicker than that other mesmersiing vessel. They didn’t think so.

In the end I felt so guilty that a couple had driven seven hours to Sydney to sleep with me and been disappointed that I went with them to a crappy club in Darling Harbour and even bought the first round of drinks.

It was as bad as I'd thought it would be. It was like every crappy suburban night out at the local club I had never wanted to have. While J. and I two-stepped to bad dj mixes of music I didn’t know on the dance floor, M. sat in a corner glowering and minding our bags. 

Close to midnight, around the time I thought it might be acceptable for me to finally escape, possibly the worst song of the evening, certainly the most ironic began to play. It started out sounding like any other synthetic pop song with lyrics seemingly lifted from 16 year-old girls’ blogs, but then the chorus kicked in:

But tonight I’m fucking you

Oh you know

That tonight I’m fucking you

Oh you know

That tonight I’m fucking you

And I could not look J. in the eyes. I have no idea whether she picked up on it or not, but in that moment she did not look happy. We continued dancing, ignoring the music and I found myself thinking about M. over in his corner of the room. Was he was listening to the lyrics? Was he was aware of the irony? Was he even aware of ‘ironic’ being anything other than a hit single from the 90s? 

  

Shortly after that I left. And I did not look back.

Irony (Tonight - Enrique Iglesias)

My Prerogative

Welcome to Choose Your Own Date, a fun new way to experience dating without leaving the comfort of your computer. No need to put on pants, no need to plot an exit strategy and no need to feel guilty if you eschew all further communication with the other party after the event. Throughout this post I will be offering a series of multiple choice questions so you can feel as though you were right there with me. C’mon, live a little… Vicariously!

On this occasion I was meeting R. and I had high hopes for him. He looked like the love child of Jude Law and Ewan McGregor and we’d exchanged some good emails, even gotten a little adult, shared some of our likes, and it seemed as though we were rather compatible.

R. was Irish-Welsh with an accent which was surprisingly pleasant. He'd recently arrived from the UK and was staying in a place with eight other expats, four of them in one room, five in another. This meant that if the night went well, the ‘my place or yours?’ negotiation would be over relatively quickly.

During our first beer, his phone rang. It was on silent, but I could feel the table vibrating. If you were in my position would you have:

A) Ignored it and hoped he did too, it’s rude to answer your phone on a date.

B) Told him to go ahead and answer it; you want to seem easy-going and this is just a casual meeting.

C) Told him to go ahead and answer it and then listened in on the conversation.

I went with C). R. apologised and answered it and even though he walked a little away from our table, I could still hear his end of the discussion. It went something along the lines of:

‘Hey man, where are you?... OK, I’ll tell him you’re there… OK, OK, sweet, see ya later.’

Then, apologising again, he told me he had to call another of his mates. That conversation went something like:

‘Hey, yeah, he said he’s there… Where are you?... No, he’s at the '...' Hotel. I just spoke to him. Just go in and see him. He’s there. OK, OK. See ya.’

And then there was a third call:

‘Alright, he’s on his way in. He’ll be there in a sec. He said he was there now. See ya.’

He apologised once more and that seemed to be the end of it. Until his phone rang again. To save me transcribing the conversations that followed, please re-read the previous three paragraphs.

The only difference in the exchanges was that the names of the establishments his mates were meeting at changed. Would this have made you:

A) Suspicious, though perhaps you couldn’t quite say why.

B) Think he had friends who couldn’t organise their way out of their socks.

C) Wonder if he was a drug dealer.

The second series of calls raised my suspicions. After it all happened a third time I voiced them.

 

Would you have:

A) Ignored it all; there’s plenty you don’t know about this guy, it could be anything.

B) Asked what the calls were about and let him explain.

C) Come right out and asked him if he was dealing.

Guess which option I chose.

‘So, who’s dealing what where?’

‘Huh?’ He replied unconvincingly.

‘You’re obviously facilitating some kind of a deal, I’m not an idiot.’

‘Oh. I thought I was being subtle.’

Uh I think everyone within earshot in the pub knew what was going on. When I pressed him for details he remained tight lipped, but he did admit that it was nice that he could now drop the charade. Yeah, must have been exhausting for him keeping up that act. If his fabrication had been any thinner it would have given the emperor’s weaver a run for his money.

At this point in the evening, knowing you were sitting across from a broker of illicit substances would you have:

A) Told him you received a call yourself while he was at the bar and that you had to leave because your friend/grandmother/brother was in labour/hospital/gaol.

B) Been honest and told him you weren’t interested.

C) Stayed because now things were really getting interesting.   

I stayed. I stayed for couple of reasons. First off, I love being right and since I’m not usually the kind of person who can pick the killer in a murder mystery, I was feeling pretty canny. Also, I had now met up with two men from the internet; one had biceps, the other was a backpacker drug dealer and strangely enough I was leaning towards sleeping with the latter. I think it’s because I’m a fan of the novelty factor (and wouldn’t that just be a much more interesting show than The X Factor?) and I’d been with biceps before, years ago, when I’d dated my gym instructor for a bit.

In retrospect though, I shouldn’t have asked him to come home with me.

Along with assuming I was incredibly dim, my date also misjudged me when he decided I was into being a bad girl. By bad girl I don’t mean a 90s film stereotype with long dark hair, a nose ring, maroon lipstick and ill-fitting leather. I mean the kind of girl who can look around her local and on the fingers of one hand count the guys she hasn’t slept with. The kind who has a signature move that her lovers remember better than her name. The kind of girl who actually has lovers, not just the occasional friend with benefits.

Now sometimes I get a little bawdy and raise my eyebrows in a manner that implies ‘Oh I KNOW all those ins and outs’ but in truth I think I’ve been fairly sheltered. I’m also not really one for talking dirty so when we things started to  heat up it took me a while to realise what was going on.

R: (breathy sexy voice) I bet you have sex all the time.

Me: (conversationally) Uuummm well, it’s been a while.

R: (while grabbing my arse) I bet you’ve been fucked by hundreds of guys.

M: (counting in my head) No… To tell the truth-

R: (running his hands over my breasts) You must fuck around.

M: (trying to be realistic) I’m probably pretty innocent.

R: (tongue in my ear) I bet you’re not at ALL innocent.

That's when I realised he wanted to have sex with a woman who saw more traffic than the Sydney Harbour Tunnel.

If you found yourself in this situation would you have:

A) Gone with it, 2011 is the year moving beyond your comfort zone.

B) Told him to stop talking and tried to do some of the things you’d been emailing about.

C) Pointed to the door and hoped that was one social cue he could understand.

I tried to go with it, I really wanted to just be able to enjoy the sex, but I couldn’t turn off the whiny needy teenage girl part of my brain that has to actually like the other person. I wasn’t enjoying myself and suddenly I wanted him off my sheets, out of my room and back on the street making obvious deals with his little gang of expats. Unfortunately, that meant I had some not sexy talking to do. 

I apologised, explained that I'd thought things would go differently, but R. did not take this well at all. He started sulking and asking what he’d done wrong and I actually felt so bad that I told him I really liked him and I wasn’t going to kick him out in to the... And as I gestured to the window, searching for a noun along the lines of cold, dark, night the sound of seriously hard summer rain came through the window, making the end of my sentence redundant.

And so R. left, slamming the door on his way out, leaving me to think about the choices I'd made and with a chorus of Brittney Spears via Bobby Brown in my head.

I don't need permission, make my own decisions

That's my prerogative