Single Sex

No, this isn’t a blog about sex per se, and it’s certainly not about having sex with oneself aka masturbation. I’m not that kind of blogger!

This post is about being single and what one has to do to meet the person that they want to spend the rest of their lives with. I have had a couple of very in depth conversations recently with single friends and being newly single myself  - singledom is very hard work indeed.  Why is it so hard though? Is it because we’re picky, is it because we have high expectations? Not sure, maybe a little bit, but women become of a certain age and it suddenly gets harder.

Meeting guys in your twenties is easy as twenty-odd men want to meet twenty-odd women. However, dating  in your thirties is harder as thirty-odd men only want to date twenty-odd women – so the successive rate of meeting a man of a similar age as yourself (prefeb 1-5 years older) when you’re in your thirties is a bit harder. Then, do they want the same things as you? It’s a well known fact that women mature earlier than men, so if you do find a thirty-odd man, does he want to start settling down and nesting with you? Or is he still clinging onto his hair and his misspent youth?

Also how do you know he’s not a psycho? You don’t want to get to his house and find he’s built a shrine to his exes or even share the bed with his teddy bear collection, or as a recent friend had the unfortunates to find out, he takes his shirt off to reveal a pair of well-placed moobs! So you get introduced by friends and when you’ve exhausted that supply, you try friends of friends and when that’s dried up you try speed dating, dating nights and finally internet dating.

Internet dating. Now this is a funny concept, so firstly you can be whomever you want to be on the internet – so instead of dowdy library-loving nerd you could be a glamozonian club chick. That’s funny, but not realistic if you want to seriously meet someone you have to be yourself. So, OK you pick the most becoming picture of yourself, not too much cleavage but just enough to pique interest, you write a funny and witty profile and then spend 3 hours answering the site’s forms on everything from political views, environmental stance, the family way etc.

Now this is a good idea you may think and yes it is – you don’t want to meet a tree hugging, vegan, charitable activist when in fact you’re a Nikey-wearing, taxi-taking, fly-swatter. Similarly you don’t want to meet a fun, booty-caller when in fact you’ve dreamed of the perfect fairytale and the two-point four. So, you dutifully fill out the forms which are a bit longer than age, sex and religion and you click send and hope that  the computer finds you a match.

But wait, stop. This process – the one where they match you on everything from political views etc – it sounds a but like something else. Yes, it sounds like arranged marriage. It does in a loose kind of way though, right? But instead of a computer it’s your mother or your aunt and in some cultures a designated matchmaker who made it their absolute priority to know about the eligibility of everyone. Has modern life gone back to the roots – have we all become jaded and disillusioned with the choice, the variety, the need for that perfect match that we no longer trust ourselves and let a few motherboards pick one for us.