Around the World in 80 Dates (2 page)

Before we go any further, I think we need to take a moment to discuss terms. It's important to clarify exactly what I mean by
great relationships.
What I'm not talking about is a shag. One-night stands are the emotional kebabs of the relationship world: easy to get after the pubs close, leaving you feeling like rubbish for the next three days. No, I'm talking about meeting someone I actually like and want to get to know. Someone who makes me laugh, reads me bits out of the newspaper, will run out for tampons, lets me cut his hair (badly, once), has a bath while I sit on the loo seat cutting my/his toenails. Someone I'm willing to introduce to my friends. I'm talking about a Soul Mate. And I'm completely serious when I say I don't believe he exists here in London.

If you think I'm being harsh and haven't given the locals enough of a chance, or perhaps you're new to London and are considering the perilous climb up Mount True Love yourself, I'll outline the options. There are a number of well and wearily trodden paths to a new man. Your friends unconsciously reveal what they really think of you by the kind of
someone I thought you'd like to meet
man brought to dinner parties. Rather than catching up on your paperwork, you could squeeze in some
best of a bad lot
power-flirting on the commute to work (and be devastated when, even though you didn't fancy him to begin with, he brushes you off). Maybe you're considering signing up for online dating or going to places where you should, but absolutely never will, meet someone suitable? Since over the last year I've tried them all, I'll share what I've learned with you. I've sat chatting to Belgian lawyers in Starbucks (willing them to be even a little more interesting); I've dabbled with online dating (where all the guys have done the
Nick Hornby's Guide to Women
course and are single parents with angelic but troubled kids, or run small, quirky, yet failing businesses). I don't even want to think about going to another cultural event (to meet graduates of the
Tony Parsons' Guide to Women
course: bitterness over ex-wife, partially concealed by exterior of witty self-loathing, which in turn is momentarily obscured by an encyclopedic knowledge of early punk bands). Maybe you can tell me about evening classes. I can't work out whether eligible guys need to do Woodwork 101 or if the classes will just be full of women like me. Likewise, I haven't signed up for a fourteen-week religious or spiritual workshop and I won't go near any therapy that involves garden hoses, buckets, or splash mats. I'm not looking to discover the meaning of life. Get karmic social services on to me, because I'm really not interested in my inner child. I just want a decent boyfriend. And by all means share your experiences with your girlfriends, but I am completely serious when I say that the actual task of searching for your Soul Mate, like getting your bikini line waxed, is strictly a one-woman job. It's a selfish, solo occupation that can't involve all your other single female friends. When too many of us in relationship recovery get together, new boyfriends are the last things on our minds. Instead we perpetuate and mythologize our misery, building a shrine to our exes out of empty wine bottles and Kettle Chip packets. I don't want to talk about old relationships. I don't want to spend months trying to understand what went
wrong. If your car plunged through the median of the highway, you wouldn't spend a year showing your friends photos of the happy days when it was safely parked outside your house. You'd just go out and buy another one. Get right back into the fast lane. Move on.

But we're so busy working, we don't have the time to find the person we want to
move on
with. So we turn to the
labor-saving devices
on the market, designed to lead us to Mr. Right in the small amount of time we have allocated to the task. A perfect example of this is online dating. Online dating seems convenient because you can do it surreptitiously from your desk, during meetings at work, or with flirtatious, drunken abandon when you get home in the early hours of Saturday morning. That's pretty much where the convenience ends, though, because no matter how good the profile and nice the picture, you need to know more about him before deciding if he's worth meeting. So, you chat back and forth via email, maybe send a text message or two, then you're ready to talk on the phone. The first physical contact (i.e., ear-to-ear) is crunch-time since you can generally tell from his voice and conversation if you want to meet him or not. Unfortunately, it's generally “not” but by this point you're involved with him and finding a reason to end that involvement—even though you don't know him—is cringingly hard (tip: keep a fictitious “unresolved ex” up your sleeve for these occasions). Hope turns to guilt as you become locked into a continuous and exhausting process of assessing candidates, like interviewing people for a job you know they'll never get. And in the meantime, that's another two hours a day spent in front of your computer. Something has to change. Enough of these
relationship patches,
which, like nicotine patches, stave off the need without satisfying any of the desire. I wanted a fantastic, glorious, wonderful relationship. Otherwise, what's the point?

But for this to happen, I knew I needed to make a better job of meeting Mr. Right. I felt I'd tried everything in London. Maybe it was time for a more radical and far-reaching solution?

Rather than traveling to recover from Mr. Wrong, what if I went traveling to find Mr. Right? I mean, I was sure Fate had him out there waiting for me, so why was I wasting time in London moaning when I could be out in the world searching? I'd put my heart and soul into my job; maybe it was time I put the same amount of effort into my love life.

So, after some soul-searching, I quit my job at Lonely Planet. I had a new job now: finding my Soul Mate.

The business and management skills I'd developed over the years would most likely come in handy. Making programs for the BBC had honed my research and interviewing skills. Setting up and running Lonely Planet's European publicity and promotional operations meant devising campaigns while jumping on and off planes to oversee launches and train staff, plus doing a ton of interviews and public speaking stints. Like anybody with a big, fat job, to do this well I'd had to be able to network, research, talk people into doing things they weren't that keen on, time-manage, meet deadlines, budget, and plan.

So, traveling would be the answer to London's dearth of suitable men, and my professional skills would hopefully lead me to possible candidates, eliminating the unsuitable, undesirable, and unstable from among them. But where should I start looking? I couldn't just get off a plane in another country shouting,
“Soul Mate, I'm here. Come and get me.”
I was confident Fate had a number of them out there for me to meet (as I've already said, I believe we have more than one), but where, and who could they be?

I decided that the first step to answering this question was to work out who they
had
been. If finding my Soul Mate was now my job, as with any other job I'd need to put together an up-to-date résumé. A Relationship Résumé: a document that set out my romance history, giving me an insight into the kind of person I'd gone for in the past. In short, whom I dated and when; the role I undertook in the relationship and the reasons for leaving it. Based on that, I then needed to write a Soul Mate Job Description, outlining the position I was looking to fill. The task was too big for me alone, but I was hoping that my global network of friends would help. If I emailed them the Soul Mate Job Description, they could act as Date Wranglers, sending it out to
their
global network of friends and corralling suitable dates for me around the world.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I hadn't done this sooner.

Okay, the Relationship Résumé:

DATE:
1984–85

TITLE:
First Love

COMPANY:
William

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Going to festivals; riding around on the back of a motorbike; protesting at Greenham Common; finding politics; losing virginity.

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
Laid off; replaced by someone who drank Bacardi Breezers.

DATE:
1985–89

TITLE:
First Live-in Relationship

COMPANY:
Peter

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Learning to cook; having lots of dinner parties; buying things for the flat; having Sunday lunch with his family; getting engaged.

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
Applied for a position overseas.

DATE:
1989–95

TITLE:
Wife

COMPANY:
Philip

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Being spontaneous and not worrying too much about tomorrow; sharing adventures; being supportive of each other's dreams; saying “No, Philip, that's too crazy.”

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
Was relocated back to the U.K.

DATE:
January 1996

TITLE:
Transition Relationship

COMPANY:
Dan

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Drinking Jack Daniel's and staying up very late; watching a lot of Tarantino films; listening to heavy-metal music; bursting into tears.

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
Short-term contract.

DATE:
February–June 1996

TITLE:
Career Advisor

COMPANY:
Edmund

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Going over to his house or sitting on the phone every night and listening to what he had written that day on his book. Criticism was not welcome, only attention and praise.

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
Communication breakdown.

DATE:
August 1996

TITLE:
Fellow Adventurer

COMPANY:
Jason

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Swapping travel stories and talking about all the crazy places we had been/both wanted to go.

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
I met Jason a week before he was due to set off to pedal the planet for four years. NB: Carried out some freelance work for this company over Xmas.

DATE:
1997–98

TITLE:
Company Trustee

COMPANY:
Grant

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Listening to Grant complain about his ex-wife and how glad he was they had split up.

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
They hadn't split up.

DATE:
1999–2004

TITLE:
Coco the Clown

COMPANY:
Kelly

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:
Feeling everything was my fault and that I was too demanding/needy/neurotic/successful; believing things would get better if I could only understand what the problem was.

REASONS FOR LEAVING:
I was unwilling to job-share.

Hmmm. Writing the Relationship Résumé had been an illuminating but not terribly uplifting experience: It looked like I hadn't been in a good relationship for ages. For a moment I wondered if I was better off forgetting about romantic relationships and sticking to having fun with my millions of other single female friends.

But that was silly. My single friends wanted to be in a relationship as much as I did; even if
I
wimped out and stayed single, there was no guarantee
they'd
stay that way (and I hoped for all their sakes they wouldn't—I wanted them to meet their Mr. Rights, too).

No, I wanted to be in a good relationship. I missed having that close connection with one person, feeling that I was at the center of something rather than bobbing around the edges. But I wanted one of the early happy-style relationships, not one of the hard, rubbish ones I seemed to have specialized in in recent years. Clearly the Soul Mate Job Description needed serious consideration if I was to avoid disappointment and disaster.

First I needed to decide on the kind of person I wanted to meet. Well, since I was five feet eleven, height was very important: I needed the chemistry when someone's tall enough to put his arm around my shoulders—I absolutely could not date someone shorter than me. I wanted someone who was affectionate without being overbearing—such a hard one to get right. Someone who was smart, funny, and adventurous and had his own friends. Since divorced men have a marriage-shaped hole in their lives that they are looking to quickly fill, and single women have a disaster-shaped hole in their lives they want to keep empty for as long as possible, I didn't want someone who was going to take me over completely.