No life
Dating dangerously
Toby Young
'Blasted mobiles.' room. Now, with enormous reluctance, I'm going to have to start dating again.
Dating. Even the word fills me with hor- ror. In spite of living in New York for almost five years, I've yet to master the intricacies of the American courtship ritual. I'm still not entirely sure what a 'date' is. If two men and two women go out to dinner, is that just a group of friends getting together, or a 'double date'? If you ask a woman out for a drink does that count as a `date', or is it what's referred to as a 'non- date date'?
As a general rule, if the woman calls me up and cancels a few minutes beforehand, then what we were about to do together would have constituted a 'date'. I've heard the most ridiculous array of excuses in my time. On one occasion a woman told me she couldn't leave her flat because her newly acquired kitten had 'abandonment issues'.
If you live in Manhattan, an additional problem is that so many people are writing books about dating you can never be sure that the person you're with hasn't agreed to go out with you purely for research purposes.
About three years ago a friend of mine called Meg was invited out for a drink by someone called Lawrence Larose. Six months later he and another writer pub- lished a book called The Code: Tune-Tested Secrets For Getting What You Want From Women Without Marrying Them. One piece of advice offered to young swordsmen, Meg discovered, was to ask a woman out on a `non-date drinks date' to assess whether it was worth inviting her out prop- erly. Needless to say, Meg never heard from him again.
I've always found the experience of being on a date extremely uncomfortable. The trouble is, being British, I'm very easily embarrassed. There's something far too direct about going out with someone solely with a view to assessing their suitability as a sexual partner. I prefer to sneak up on women and, when they're not looking, rugby tackle them into bed. American women, needless to say, prefer a more politically correct approach. On the few occasions when I've been able to persuade them to go out on a date with me, I've always marvelled at how unselfconscious they are about sizing me up. They've invari- ably had a checklist of questions that they shamelessly run through over the course of the evening. What do I do for a living? What part of town is my flat in? What kind of car do I drive? It's less like a romantic encounter than an extremely tough job interview. By the time the bill arrives I'm surprised they haven't asked for a urine sample.
Even when I've managed to jump this fence I'm still a long way from the finishing line. American women have a reputation for promiscuousness that, I regret to say, is thoroughly undeserved. They may demand equality in the workplace, but when it comes to romance they expect to be treated like Jane Austen heroines. At the end of the first date — which has invariably cost me an arm and a leg — I'm lucky if I get so much as a kiss. As a rule of thumb, I don't expect to get past her doorstep until the third date and, even then, it's unlikely to be for anything more than a quick snog on the sofa. Once you've embarked on the dating rat-run, there are no short cuts to getting the cheese.
When I first moved to New York, I naively assumed that, like London, the higher up the social ladder you climbed, the easier it would be to look up ladies' skirts, so to speak. In fact, the opposite is the case. The British aristocracy has more or less abandoned any illusions it once had about setting a good example, but Ameri- can Wasps still think of themselves as posi- tive role models. By far the safest bets, in my experience, are the people referred to over here as 'decent, hard-working Ameri- cans', i.e., lumpen proles. In addition to having a similar attitude to sex as our own royal family, they're the only people left in America who are remotely impressed by a British accent.
So I think I'm going to take a leaf out of President Clinton's book and confine myself to women with big hair. As his for- mer campaign manager James Camille once said, if you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer-park it's amazing what you can come up with.
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