18 November - Dating Dos & Don'ts

This should really be part of my impending tome ‘100 Lessons You Really Should Have Learnt By Now (in your local bookshop self-help and comedy sections in 2008 perhaps), but here goes. If you’re about to meet for a first official date someone who you’ve thought was cute and you told your mutual friends as much and they egged you on to get together… then you should be in top form, best behaviour and so forth. I know this from … just plain sense but also because I get regular emails from this website I must have subscribed to once and you know, it’s good to be reminded. Her rule no. 1 with regards to dating is: Be fragrant and not tired, wound up etc. And my two gay friends (who should know better) just went and flaunted it. Granted, neither is a camp gay with high regard for fashion or cosmetic counters (unlike another I know who says he buys all Chanel face and body care products because he likes the packaging and especially the noise the little pump makes when dispensing the product. But I digress). So, a year ago they met briefly at a launch but didn’t vibe off each other and one went off with someone else that night. It was short lived.

Then a few weeks back R. (42) arrived and met a few of us after we’d been out for a v. long lunch and told me he rather liked J. (36) who was present and at this point very louchely slouched on a brown leather sofa at S. House. J. also told me he rather liked R. I was a bit surprised and pointed you ‘You met last year and didn’t vibe off each other ’ but had to concede that at least J. now looked very different as he sports a lumberjack style huge beard which didn’t exist last Summer.

So, emails were exchanged – we got very excited, they do have jobs that mean they understand each other’s world, visually at least and they’re similarly built and both are very manly looking, nothing sissy about them - and we left them to it. But I did know that on the day they met J. had been up most of the night and had imbibed lots alcohol by the time R arrived at 3pm. But I didn’t know that R. had also not gone to bed. So they probably had blurred vision, god knows what they saw in each other or maybe it was a case of ‘thank god there’s a gay man in this hetero gathering, I’ll have him’.

So…. They arranged to meet for breakfast on the day after J. returns from a trip to the USA (hence he’s a bit jetlagged) and R. turns up again after an all nighter so he’s a bit dishevelled. I get an email from J. to say ‘Nah, there’s no chemistry there’. But R. does like him and he’s a bit upset when he tries to arrange a further proper date and gets told ‘Better not’. You have to admire the level of frankness here displayed, no time wasters…. R. wonders if it was because he was out of it. I check with J. and he repeats not, just no chemistry. Oh well, my first attempt at gay matchmaking has failed. But I wonder, if they met in the queue to the coat-check whilst leaving the Vauxhall tavern, would they go for each other? J. told me he went home with someone from the coat-check queue a while ago and didn’t even bother to ask this guy’s name…. And it wasn't the first time either.