Every Fortnight, Zowie Edwards brings you have tales from the Urban Dating Jungle. After a short hiatus Zowie is back on the dating game and ready to fill you in.
I blame Hollywood. The archetypal Love Story, rehashed in so many different forms, has seeped into the consciousness of the populous, meaning that perfectly sensible people expect to be left dumbstruck at the first glimpse of their future beloved. So complete is our delusion, we can fool ourselves into substituting a life altering, earth shattering, violin-music hearing ‘this is the love of my life’ moment for what is in fact a plain old ‘wow, he is really fit’ moment.
Such it was with ‘Mr Darcy’ and I. A romance which lasted a respectable 3 months and in which I was so blinded by his angular good looks and muscular torso, I overlooked his myriad flaws. The problem is, one is never quite willing to believe one is that superficial. The abundant demonstrations of self-centredness, of laziness and vanity were diluted, washed away by the all-consuming lust I felt for his fine self. And that’s not something it’s easy for a gal to admit.
In our post break-up days, I am ashamed to say I followed in the path of many a recently dumped London single lady before me – I grabbed my Best Gay Man Friend (BGMF), went out and drank my body weight in vodka. Even when it’s not right, it still hurts, and cocktails were my anaesthesia of choice. Of course, the result was, a week later I was bloated, fuzzy headed and mildly depressed. However I was undoubtedly also over him. Which was very fortunate for the BGMF because, he later confessed, if he had to give me one more pep talk extolling my relative virtues and convincing me “he really wasn’t that good looking, you know” he was going to stick a fork in his eye just to alleviate the tedium.
‘Mr Darcy’ was my first online dating relationship, and in a much more sober, retrospective and philosophical frame of mind than those initial drunken kneejerk times, I can’t say it was at all terrible. The reasons we split weren’t cyber specific. He wasn’t duplicitous or weird. Perhaps the pc does hold the portal to a chance at true love?
Read next fortnight’s column as I continue my search…..
Words by Zowie Edwards
