Country life
Dating tips
Leanda de Lisle
Matchmaking is a popular pursuit in the countryside. Newly married women recently arrived from the towns look about, see a number of lonely single farmers and feel impelled to invite their spinster friends to stay. Unfortunately, putting one and one together doesn't necessarily make two. Countrymen and urban women often have different interests. To most of my Prada-clad sisters, hunting, shooting and fishing have nothing to do with foxes, pheasants or flies. You hunt for objets d'art, shoot Channel 4 documentaries and fish for compliments. Each is in many ways a blood sport, but in no way a field sport. Attempting to talk about purely rural pur- suits, they find themselves lost for words, usually for the first time in their lives. This seldom inclines them to romance. Howev- er, as someone outside my own circle once said, Wive la difference.' Matchmaking is not supposed to be easy. It is a challenge — and sometimes the stress can get to you. Friends claim that matchmaking interrupts my 'gay radar' and turns me into a liar. In evidence they quote the case of the bachelor who insisted on performing HMS Pinafore for the date I'd lined up for him, and the description I gave of a 200-lb women as 'Not fat, no . . . just big'. However, such incidents have taught me some valuable lessons and, with several years of matchmaking experience behind me, I am now ready to share my short-list of essential tips for would-be cupids.
1) Start young when you know plenty of single people. It's true that your twenty- something friends may not seem eager to find a life-time partner just yet, but the more bachelors and spinsters you can throw together, the more likely it is that a couple will fall in love. You will need early successes to sustain you through the dry years ahead. By the time you are 40, het- erosexual bachelors will appear to be as rare as unicorns and your girlfriends will have started to grow moustaches.
2) Keep a separate address book for your single friends, with the men's names writ- ten in blue ink and the girls' in black. That way you won't have to trawl through the names of a zillion couples when you are desperate to find an extra single for your weekend house-party. Furthermore, it should leave you plenty of space to add some personal details. This can be a useful memory prompt when you've met your sin- gleton only once — probably at a party where, after three glasses of wine, they seemed to be absolutely perfect for . . . (add cross reference). 3) As indicated above, you must always carry your single person's address book with you, so that no single person who comes within your orbit may then escape it. 4) Do not kid yourself that long-standing friends who have never shown any interest in sex will want to marry. Invite them home because they are good company, not because you want to palm them off on any- one — at least not anyone of a different gender. Surely they're more interested in sex than they let on?
5) Never tell a lonely friend that you are planning a matchmaking exercise — not even a girlfriend who has begged you to find a new man for her to meet. This is because a) they will be horribly self-con- scious all weekend, convinced you are watching their every move; b) rather than risk the public rejection of any romantic overtures, they will ignore or even abuse the person you have lined up for them; and c) if the person you have chosen as the match is not perfect in their eyes, they will angrily assume that you think they are des- perate, sad, ugly trolls.
These, then, are my tips for today. But what of the future? We should have a new kind of debutante season that would relaunch people at, say, 35. Country match- makers would then be able to pool their resources. The law of averages dictates that there will be at least some successes — and they can be enormously satisfying, or so I'm told.
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