When two exes make a why

I have a knack of making friends with my exes with the exception of one guy (don't think I'm giving too much away if I admit he's the excel spreadsheet one from an earlier post). Generally speaking I think this is A Good Thing: it would feel weird to not stay connected in some way with someone who you've shared a lot with.

But the other day this strategy was somewhat undermined when I discovered that two not-so-ancient exes had found themselves in a meeting together. God, how I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in that particular meeting room! But equally, how I cringe to imagine what was going on in their heads as they pondered the various titbits of inappropriate knowledge they had of each other...

A lesson perhaps in learning to keep my mouth shut. Either that, or an indication that I need to widen my search criteria and stop going out with men who end up in the same world as one another.

Either way, I smell trouble again at aforementioned Glastonbury. So far I know of three former/semi-current beloveds who plan to be there too. Well if nothing else it will add a certain frisson to the proceedings...

Gutless fuckers

I'm not a big fan of guts as a look, but today I've been pondering on why it is exactly that me and my beautiful amazing girlfriends put up with so much crap from loser men. What happens in our head? Why, when they are behaving badly, do we try to understand, to explain it away, to even get excited about the idea of possibly 'saving' this poor thing who's claiming to be afraid, or confused, or whatever other paltry excuse they've come up with for their crappy behaviour?

Whatever, I'm really sick of gutless men. I'm sick of men too scared (oooo!) to ask 'why not?' instead of 'why'. I'm sick of dumbing down so that they don't get put off by half a brain. I'm sick of doing all the work to put people at ease. I'm sick of people who don't think they have a responsibility for their behaviour, it's just not ok (especially at notquitethirty) to blame all your problems and fuck ups on your parents. Get over it boy! - it's your life now, so what are you gonna do with it?

I like complicated people who don't just want the easy life but really, do they all have to be mentalists too? Someone suggested to me today that the solution to my quandary is to look out for older men who've been able to afford therapy to sort themselves out. It's a creative solution, but I like it. So if you see me hanging around outside the Institute for Psychoanalysis, you'll know why...

I heart AQA

Example of an exchange I had with AQA following a recent date:

Me: did I have a good time with Stavros* last night?
AQA: If the evening was unmemorable, then AQA thinks that you can't have had a good time with Stavros. However, AQA thinks you should give him another chance.

Sound advice that I'm inclined to follow.

* Some identities have been changed

It's not you, it's me...

I read the NY Times piece just before Christmas about the questions couples should ask themselves before getting married. Interesting stuff. But I beg to differ with NYT on the things that really matter: over the years my girlfriends and I have amassed some truly classic stories about boys and the real reasons we extract ourselves from relationships. Here are some of the best:

• he wore blue Y-fronts

• he used an excel spreadsheet to work out which friends he needed to call when (am pretty sure there will be more on this particular sin in another blog)

• he was 'too nice' and therefore highly suspect

• he ordered chicken on his pizza

• he laughed hysterically whilst coming

• he felt like a brother, and she's not into incest

• he asked what her top five films were

• he said he didn't like curry

• his dad was bald

• he once said he might vote conservative (even though she wasn't very political)

• he had a funny neck

• he was called barry white

• he was rude to a waitress (dump the bastard, i say)

• he shopped at H&M

• he didn't shop at H&M

Lucky we don't all come clean when we're saying goodbye, huh?

The fine art of dating

Thanks to a particularly geeky teenage existence, I didn't get round to much dating when I was not-quite-twenty. And anyway, whatever dating meant as a nervous teenager, I'm pretty sure it isn't the same as dating at not-quite-thirty. How important is it to go through that agony of whether to put a kiss at the end of your text message? There's something quite delicious about waiting in hope for an email, something quite fun about debating how soon is too soon to reply, and that gutwrenching moment of saying goodbye and wondering whether he'll give you a kiss is pretty hard to replicate once you've found yourself in a relationship. Should we be seeing dating as a kind of 'vetting' process, a chance to find out about someone and decide whether you *really* like them. Maybe this dating period is even more important at our age, because most of us have been with people before and have (usually) enjoyed the easy intimacy of sharing a life with someone. It's maybe too tempting to slip back into old habits without thinking hard about whether its those habits or the new relationship that you really like. That plus the fact that more and more people seem to be coupled-up these days puts any new potential under lots of pressure.

But ok, if we accept that there might be some merits in dating, can someone please tell me what on earth it looks like in practice? Does it entail exclusivity? Does it include phone conversations? How often do dates happen? Should you meet each others friends? Platonic or not? Real me or CV-me? one guy I know said he thought you shouldn't be overly honest at the dating stage 'as no one else is, so if you are, you'll seem more crazy than everyone else out there'.

My girlfriends seem divided on this issue about the merits of dating. Some of them say that we're old enough to know what we want, and that this is nothing more than time-wasting game-playing to meet the needs of commitment-phobic gutless men. But then others are very positive about it and think that dating is a means of working out what you want. One thing they all believe: if someone just wants to date you, then you are still a free agent. Now where was the phone no for that cute guy?...