Still, this hasn’t stopped me chatting to a 24 year old, a 27 year old and a 26 year old. It is often said that I look ten years younger than my actual age, but my mind is clearly ten years older than any of these wonderful young ladies. Would it work? What is the age differential beyond which a long-term relationship becomes impossible? Until now, the biggest age differential I’ve experienced was a brief fling in the late 90s with someone who was 18. It would be unreasonable of me to say that wasn’t fun, because it was; but long-term? Nahhh – we were on completely different planets unless we were in bed, in which case, everything was most splendid, thanks.

For some reason, 28 to 18 seems like a much larger age difference than, say 38 to 26. Which is odd, because it isn’t. Indeed, it’s less. But the emotional and personality changes I went through seemed to magnify that 18 to 25 period of my life where, in hindsight, my moral line of goodness was moving up and down like a yo-yo. So maybe 26, 27 or 28 isn’t too young for me?

Yet again, I worry too much when I should be just seeing what cards fate deals me. I’m looking for a royal flush, but I’ll settle for a good pair (sorry… :-))

I provide this ‘service’ (and I use the term ‘service’ in the loosest possible sense, obviously) as a free-of-charge benefit from the few week’s worth of experience that I have had of internet dating. Whilst it’s skewed towards men (because I don’t understand females, as my regular three readers will know by now), I believe that the same rules apply to you girls too. Having spoken to several people, had a bunch of long conversations, dated one and possibly dating another (or two!) next week I feel like I have something to offer (or at the very least, something to say :-)). It has surprised me the dramatic range in responses that are received particularly when it comes to continuity and consistency when talking to the same person (you girls have it worse: from what I’ve heard from those I’ve talked to, you really do get some highly tacky and sometimes alarming chat-up lines from very odd men).

So please be seated and let us begin. Needless to say, there are plenty of chairs. The coffee is free, but you have to serve yourself.

Internet dating 101

Be yourself when describing yourself. Don’t craft some artistic work of genius that required a thesaurus, dictionary and a web site of quotes to make sound right if you barely understand half the words you’ve used, let alone used them in conversation. If you’re seriously expecting a date with this girl, then she’s going to find out sooner or later: make is sooner rather than later, you’ll save a whole pile of time.

Your interests had better be your interests. Never set foot in a garden, but think gardening sounds cool to the chicks? Went abroad once when you were a kid and feel that traveling sounds like a neat interest? She is going to ask you where you’ve been. What are you going to do, pull a whole load of places out of your arse? And when you don’t know what pruning is when you’re stranded in her garden supposedly helping out then you’re going to look like a combination of startled deer and complete noodle.

Don’t lie on your profile. Got children? Make sure you don’t put “zero” under children. Looking for a bit of sex on the side because you’re bored with your wife/girlfriend? Well, you’re not looking for a serious relationship then, are you? Married, but very recently separated? That’s not single. That’s married. At a pinch, just-separated, but involving someone innocent in a hugely over-complicated divorce isn’t exactly fair unless you’ve declared it in advance. Yet again, she’s going to find out; and if you’re hiding things of this magnitude then what else are you hiding? What a great start to a relationship: distrust from the outset. Oh, and that includes your major bad habits. How long DO you think you’ll hide a smoking habit? “Just popping to clean my teeth after walking the dog, babe, you know how that fresh air messes up my mouth.”

Your picture had better be of you, recent and accurate. A picture that is 10 years old from your good side in mediocre lighting is not a recent and accurate picture. Neither is one that was taken and touched up in photoshop. Neither is one that was taken when you’d spent half an hour making yourself look perfect when normally you just walk out the door after a 2 minute shave. Wear glasses? Make sure the picture shows it. Normally have a beard? Don’t show a clean shaven picture. No-one likes unexpected surprises and a beard cannot be explained away as “I forgot to shave this morning”.

Don’t mail-shot. Guys: Girls talk. They share, they chat, they show your profile to everyone in their office and they have a whole seventh sense that we don’t have (this is one beyond the ‘sixth’ sense). Read their profile carefully. If you’re going to contact them or reply to their first contact, write something relevant and just for them: do not copy and paste it out of your document of standard responses. It’ll take you a few extra minutes, but it’s worth the effort. Your personality and something about you will ‘leak’ into the words that you write – it’ll give her an opportunity to learn stuff about you that you don’t think that you’ve even provided. This is a good thing as it saves anyone wasting their time. Read her stuff carefully too: there’s something to be learnt.

The internet isn’t confidential. You write it, it’s public property. You write something really tacky or really stupid, then it may get shared. Even I’ve shared an edited snippet from one of the people who responded to me because it was so staggeringly incredible (it sparked my grammar police rant: “we’ll fix your apostrophes now, and without charge.)

Keep the first meeting brief. I’d be lying if this advice came from me, but it is very good. If you organise a complete evening including drinks and then dinner, for example, you run the risk of being stranded with someone you hate for a great number of hours with no polite escape route. Try either a) meeting at lunch for coffee or b) meeting later in the evening or straight after work before other plans (real or made-up) for an hour at most. Why? Because first impressions count. You’ll know within minutes if this person is who you thought they would be and if you could spend longer than an hour in their company without going utterly bonkers. It’ll also allow for any surprises (picture looked good, but it wasn’t of her) to be worked out before you both end up being forced to survive an entire evening together.

Listen and talk. Aim for speaking about 50% of the time, but seriously, listen to what she’s saying too. You’re having a conversation, not reading from a pre-prepared script. The best dates are when this just ‘happens’, they are the ones where you click almost immediately: treasure them – they’ll be the ones worth running for. You’re both trying to learn about each other and you’re not going to learn jack shit if you’re too busy trying to impress by talking at 100mph without stopping to breathe. Likewise, if she doesn’t let you get a word in edgeways or talks about her subjects alone without hooking onto anything you say then execute the “Brave, brave Sir Robin” maneuver as soon as possible.

Be a gentleman, not a jerk. Fine, open the door for her. Offer to pay for the meal. But don’t insist. We live in the 21st century here and if she wishes to go halves, go halves. Insisting on paying despite her protest may not score you as many points as you think it might, unless she’s positively drooling over your credit cards, in which case that’s probably a bad thing too…

——

So the bottom line? Be honest if you’re looking for a relationship. I’ve had relationships in the past where I have had to pretend to be someone else either because I felt that I had to hide something or I had to look like I was turning into someone that I was not. Firstly it’s exhausting and secondly it’s impossible over the long-term. If you build a house of cards, every breeze is going to scare the shit out of you. I do want a relationship, hopefully one that’ll turn into something serious; but as I keep being warned, perhaps I need something a little more casual at first. Needless to say, my profile doesn’t say I’m looking to get married any time soon.

Whether this advice is worth the finger-wear used to type it will become clear to me over the coming weeks. I’m sure that you’ll be distressed to hear that I’ll be sure to keep you all posted.

About some of it, anyway :-)

1. Searches for ‘signs a boy fancies you’. This search term pops up many times a day almost word for word. I wonder if the people who got there through a search engine found it helpful?
2. Clicks from tags.These mostly come in the few hours immediately following a post and tags like sex, naked, love or life appear to attract the most visitors. I wonder why? ;-)
3. Clicks from karalina’s blog. Clearly she has more readers than I :-) And whenever I comment there, I get a whole pile of visitors as a result *flexes his typing fingers in preparation* :-)

I’ve found this most interesting. I don’t confess to understanding my feed stats page as that graph goes up and down for no obvious reason and doesn’t appear to be in synchronisation with my posting habits. It just looks pretty. But the blog statistics, now reading that is as much an exercise in psychology as writing this blog in the first place.

Along with the fancying search, a surprising number of people have searched for ‘Messenger Live Wine’, ‘drunk MSN wine’ and ‘messenger wine drunk’ and have found themselves here as a result. I guess wine is a popular drink to have whilst enjoying chats on messenger. I was surprised not to see the word ‘regret’ slapped into those terms, too.

So there you have it folks: if you’re drinking wine, you should be on MSN.

It’s the simple things that make you smile :-)

On the subject of simple things, it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t be a little nerdy because I am, after all, back home after an evening of drinking with friends and I’ve had a touch too much. So therefore, I’d like to link to a few pictures that NASA’s New Horizons probe took whilst it whizzed its way by Jupiter on its way to Pluto. It’ll make its closest pass of Pluto on July 14th, 2015: three thousand and fifty-five days from now. Mind you, it has to go a long way: If you shone a bright enough light from earth, it would take over 5 hours for it to be visible from Pluto. And New Horizons won’t be stopping at Pluto, either, it’ll fly by at over 50 thousand miles per hour, fly out through the Kuiper belt and off into deep, dark space. Whilst making its brief ‘stop’ at Jupiter (and picking up an extra 9000mph thanks to Jupiter’s gravity), it took many wonderful pictures and this one of Europa and this one of Ganymede are incredible.

If you’ve got a 200 dollar telescope, you can see Jupiter for yourself — but these two guys, they’re just pinpricks in the sky lined up neatly next to their parent planet. Europa is particularly cool as it may have a relatively warm ocean under its ice crust. It is perhaps one of the greatest hopes for discovering live elsewhere in this solar system: let’s hope our explorer’s instinct allows us to do this exploration; we live in a big universe and we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own solar system.

Sorry about that folks, it’s the price you pay for visiting this blog: the occasional astronomy post.

As I’ve said many times before, I wish you a good-night, where-ever you are on this planet and a goodnight to the three people whizzing around it at 17,500mph on the International Space Station.

Sleep well :-)

Now, obviously I fancy her a little. Well, quite a bit actually, but I’m more than happy to just remain friends: it gives me another valuable female perspective on things which I’m clearly not qualified to decide all by myself: indeed, she’s actively encouraged me to get out there and date people.

Waiting for the but?

Wait no longer. Here it is…

Something strange happened this evening and I’ve no idea what it was or why it happened. Here’s the story: we’ve talked a lot. She tells me (as everyone else has) that I’m not ready for something complex and that she wouldn’t date me anyway because she’s so convinced that my non-readiness means I need something a little more casual (ok, so I’m taking everyone’s advice except from my own, but I’m going somewhere with this, I promise…)

Despite this fact (platonic, platonic, platonic!) I appear to have been tested in some way. She did a pretty good hatchet job on herself, physical attractiveness wise (utterly unjustified, I might add, having seen a picture of her), and e-mailed me a picture of her friend with a “we might be coming up to your neck of the woods near to easter, do you want to come and meet with us if that happens?”

Well, of course, my answer was yes! It would be a pleasure to meet her having spent so much time chit-chatting. Her friend (and don’t get me wrong here, her friend is attractive) was meeting her on-and-off boyfriend, thus it seemed like a good foursome with perhaps dinner, nice company, nice conversation and some good wine.

Now, for some reason, she expected me to fancy her friend. Apparently, I was meant to pick up on the “on-and-off” bit and spy an opportunity to sneak on in there and get on with her friend more than her. I don’t know her friend, but I am beginning to know her (I think, but sometimes I’m not sure how much I know anyone, really). I saw this as an opportunity to meet her and failed to notice right up until she became almost blunt about it: she’d expected me to say something completely different.

So I asked her, “I don’t understand. I want to meet you, she’s taken – why are you so adamant that I like her?”

It turns out it was some kind of test. A test to see if I was shallow – if I could see beyond someone’s cute body and attractive face to see what was underneath, indeed, if I even cared what was underneath. It was a set-up. And I didn’t bite. So I passed.

My question to my three readers that ever respond (and anyone else who feels that they can offer some thoughts on this subject) would be:

Why?

Why the test if we’ve already established that we’re going to be just friends and that I should date someone as a matter of urgency?

Surely someone’s shallowness is obvious in other ways during conversation, thus I fail to see the requirement to be tested.

I suspect that I was subjected to one of these tests last year, but was blissfully unaware that it was taking place until it was too late. Maybe I’m a little more observant this time around, or maybe the examiner wasn’t quite so subtle as my ex-girlfriend.

If there is one thing that really sinks my battleship it is games in relationships. In fact, my entire skeleton shakes when people play unnecessary games in any aspect of their lives. Why bother? Isn’t everything complicated enough without the cloak and daggers approach to learning about someone?

What test are you taking today that you’re not aware of?

Either that, or I ask too many questions. Hmmmm…

Life, eh?

So it’s back to the drawing board. I have put my profile back up on the dating site and have started chatting to new people again. The great quest for Miss Right continues, possibly interspersed with several Miss Not-Quite-Rights and Miss Wrongs along the way.

Rights, wrongs, I blame the spring. It’s the mating season, right?

“You’re not ready for that yet. For a complicated relationship, I mean. You need something a bit… simpler.”

To which my reply was “what do you mean by complicated?”

She said “Well… you’re just lonely. What you need is some sex, cuddles and someone to veg out on the sofa with twice a week. Oh, I don’t mean one-night-stands, you need a hassle-free relationship for a month or two. That’d sort you right out. Then you’d be ready.”

“Ready for what, precisely?” I replied trying to figure out where she was going with this whilst having an eerie feeling I knew exactly where she was going.

“Oh, you know, for the whole love, moving in, having babies thing. You’re rebounding, you feel lonely and normal enough to want a girl’s company but you are not ready to make a true commitment: particularly a complicated one. You’ve only been able to hold yourself together for the last month or so, let alone make decisions of that magnitude. You’re doing too much too quickly, you need to slow down. You’re not ready.”

“I’m not ready?” I replied with perhaps a touch too much sarcasm, “I feel ready.”

“Trust me. I’m your girlie with no vested interest: you’d be making a serious mistake going for a complex serious relationship at this time. You’ll hurt someone and that someone is probably going to be you. You sure you got enough in reserve yet to deal with that?”

Compromise time. I needed to think this all over, so I rashly promised “I’ll ring my Mum, run it by her and see what she says.”

“If you present it exactly like you did to me, I’ll bet you 50 euros payable next time you’re over that she’ll agree with me completely. 50 euros…” She paused briefly before continuing “… I’ve known you for a long time, so I’ll bet a further 50 euros that you’ll take the bet and lose.”

Of course, I took both the bets (don’t I ever learn?)

I was sitting on the sofa, thinking about what she’d said and the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. It was time to ring Mum. The phone rang. It was Mum. How do mothers just know when you need to speak to them? Oh, I understand what a coincidence is, but still – it did appear to be perfect timing: almost to the second.

I kept my promise to my female friend: I presented the facts (as I understood them) to my Mum in exactly the same way as I had to her. And Mum’s answer?

Her answer means I’m 100 euros down next time I’m on the continent. Either that, or I can spend the next five years avoiding Germany until she’s forgotten, but she didn’t forget the other bet with her that I lost either (despite the currency change: she helpfully converted Deutsche Marks to Euros for me in a handy e-mail reminder), so I’m probably screwed unless the Euro collapses. You’ve probably guessed that I’d be lost without female friends, they’re as close as I’ll ever get to having a girl-to-boy dictionary of my own.

The second opinion put my brain into ‘Spock mode’ where it calmly analyses the situation in a reasonably detached fashion. I even made a list of pros and cons to help visualise what was happening. Nope, they’re right, I’m wrong. I’ve missed being able to step back and view the big picture: it is a skill that I believe is all part of that great thing that we call “wisdom”. I lost this skill for several months, and even now it needed two separate opinions from outsiders before my mind was capable of putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 4 rather rather than 69.

Sometimes when you’re in a situation it is hard to step back. If you’re emotionally weaker than you normally are, it’s even harder. By speaking to someone I’d not spoken to for a long while and feeling good enough to be able to talk sensibly I received a gift that I would potentially have missed for weeks: a valid fresh perspective.

To be honest, all the evidence was already there given I’ve written this, this, this and this in the past weeks, I just failed to put it all together coherently.

——

I’m me again; that’s the scary bit on the road-to-recovery over with. I can afford to walk rather than run and besides which, you see a lot more when you’re walking because you have time to look around you. Time to stop and smell the roses.

Wood. Trees. Can’t see one for the other sometimes. Perhaps I need glasses.

It is this incredible ability to generalise that ensures you can sit in chairs you’ve never seen before because you recognise the general concept of a chair. It’s this same skill that lets your mind build a complete picture, a belief, a feeling or a thought out of practically no information whatsoever. It just helpfully fills in the gaps spun together with whatever mood you are feeling and creates a complete story. And if you’re feeling a bit lonely or sad, then guess what kind of story you’re going to get? Yup. A sad love story.

Generally, I’m an optimist. My mind tends to look at the optimistic outcomes to situations, and thus I fill the gaps accordingly and help bring about my own happiness. But occasionally during times of particular emotional upheaval or just the odd day like today, I temporarily get a “pessimist’s society” one-day pass. Then my bad, bad mind does the rest and I’m convinced that every decision that I have made in the last week or so with regards to relationships and dating is fundamentally flawed. To make it worse, the two friends who were going to be here tonight had to cancel because of travel difficulties so I find myself with myself, wine, a word-processor and my blog – and we all know where that leads.

Of course, I’m smart enough to know that my general state of mind is the portion of my mind that is filling in the gaps, so I have a good night’s sleep and feel happier tomorrow life will suddenly seem a little more positive. These are precisely the ups and downs that are smoothed out with a good relationship: right now, I could do with company.

The mind is a dangerous machine in the wrong hands.

I think I just put the wrong hands on today.

But let’s consider for a moment, what would it be like to be able to read someone’s mind? And would you really want to? Would it be a curse, or a blessing? Suddenly, your life would be like the film Liar Liar in reverse: you’d hear the words from someone, but you’d know what they really thought before the brain-to-mouth translation hardware kicked in. Personally, that strikes me as a curse, not a blessing. My mind is a private place and my thoughts are mine – as a person, I get to choose what I share with others.

Let’s just look at just a handful of the thoughts I’ve had today about people that I’m delighted that they were not aware of: I’ve clocked several very cute bottoms, I’ve stared at a couple of fantastic cleavages, I’ve thought several people were being idiots but kept it to myself and I’ve had “impure” thoughts about two members of the opposite sex (a complete mental undressing and position analysis in the case of one).

My brain has a specific department that filters thoughts into several categories: those that must never be said, those that can be said with adjustments and those that can be said verbatim without alteration. I’ve known people who simply don’t have this department; and it doesn’t allow for much wisdom to be accumulated as you’re always too busy saying words without thinking of the consequences of those words: no listen, no learn.

The only place any of us have true privacy is in our own minds.

Treasure it. Think something naughty now — safe in the knowledge that no-one can ever know what you thought. Go on, treat yourself…

This has made the last two days mighty odd: I have had to say goodbye to people I didn’t even get to know properly – and I’ve found myself regretting not getting to know some of them a touch more. By some, I don’t mean a huge number – I mean two. Apparently, over 50 people added me to their favourites list and I had conversations with waaaay less than half of those, some of which lasted one message, some of which lasted several. One of which ended in a phone number – and I’m dating her (I think! Early days, but so far, so good :-)). I said goodbye and thank-you to everyone I was talking to because for better or worse, I believe it is polite and the “right thing” to do. Some of them got a few lines, some of them got a vast letter. It was the two who received a vast letter that have been hard to let go of.

For some odd reason that I’m pretty sure a therapist would have a field day over, this has troubled me. I didn’t have to say goodbye to any of them, technically. I mean, they didn’t know I was dating someone again and it’s not as if I’ve passed the “threshold of no return” (sex, if you want a translation), so surely I could have flirted with them all a bit more and seen what happens? Isn’t that the point of internet dating? But no. I’ve got this conscience thing (goddammit) that tells me that they ought to know the truth – regardless of whether it’s going to work out for me or not; but therein lies the complexity. I’d love to get to know the other two more, but it would be for all of the wrong reasons of which the two most obvious are:

1. I’d be comparing. Did I choose wisely with the date I made, or should I have chosen differently?
2. Surely I could just be friends? I could say “let’s just chat as friends” until I’m blue in the face, but the above negates any plausibility in that – hell, even I don’t believe I could do it. I’ve had (and still have) friendship-only relationships with females (yes, it can be possible, gents), but it strikes me that a dating site is the wrong place to start such a friendship, after all, it’s a dating site, not a meet-some-friends site.

So where is my Miss Right? Am I dating her now? Did I walk by her today without knowing? Is she thousands of miles away from me right now? Have I just let her slip through my fingertips on the dating site? Life is full of questions and the funny thing is, the simpler the question is to phrase and the fewer words it uses, the harder it appears to answer.

So come on ladies – what would you have expected a man to do in this situation? Think of this as helping me with my girl-to-boy dictionary.

One of these days, I’ll write a book all about love – if only to illustrate just how little I understand about it. It’d be a cracker – 75,000 words just to say “nope, I don’t get it, do you?”. Anyone got a suggestion for the title?

Clearly since a good chunk of my life will be spent at work, I might as well enjoy that too (and I do, so that’s OK); but it’s my time I’m worried about. It’s my options I don’t want to see closed. Tonight’s feature presentation is about me, all me and nothing but me. I call this my selfish hour: you should have one too – I recommend wine, some Doritos and a variety of delicious dips as the surrounding accessories. If you smoke as I (sadly) do, empty your ashtray in preparation. You will also need a sheet of paper (maybe more, it depends on just how selfish you can be!) and a pen. Now write down the things that really, really mean something to you: the stuff that makes life worth living. Whilst you’re at it, knock out any of the “big questions” that you can’t answer yet. Come back when you’re done.

How big was your list?

Mine was fucking huge. Some of them I have (like a roof over my head, good friends and a career that I enjoy and find intellectually stimulating), some of them I don’t (love, someone to grow old with) and some of them I still don’t have the answer to. These are the “big questions” I mentioned above and to give you an example, one of mine was “Do I want children?”

So, do I want children?

Er… um… well, you’ve kinda put me on the spot here… you see, well… um… you know, I mean… I think… um… that’s a tough question… er… but, yes, but… no, and well… ask me again tomorrow.

And since tomorrow never comes because it’s always today, I’m secure in the knowledge that now isn’t the time I have to answer that. For me, no matter how many times I re-edit the list, the big thing is to grow old with someone who loves me and who I love in comfort and the big question is that of children. How do you keep a question like that open when you’re looking for the former? If your partner wants it, you may feel pressured into answering something you’re not ready to answer. If your partner does not want it then, well, that’s a question that has been answered for you: you’ve lost the choice.

I’ve tried to have children with a partner only once in my life, and needless to say, nothing happened (either I’m firing blanks, or we just didn’t do it often enough or try for long enough) and believe me, whilst I was trying, I wanted children bad.

Maybe it is one of those decisions that just needs to make itself (condom failure, forgot to take the pill, used the ‘random good fortune’ method of contraception, thought that pulling out in the nick of time would do it, etc.). It would be nice to have children. I’d get an excuse to play with train-sets and Lego again (which will be distressing if she’s a she rather than being a he, but there you go) and see the world through a child’s eyes again. Watch someone’s mind and personality develop from nothing into someone who could start a blog (not sure if my mother would be proud of these writings, though).

Besides which, I can fight off a cold in 24 hours. my weight remains a constant right-where-it-should-be regardless of what rubbish I pour down my throat, I am fit an healthy regardless of my lack of exercise — my DNA has advantages, you know.

Anyway, I’ll throw this open to comments and questions from my audience of two, karalina and dregina :-)