By the time you switch on your pc and start reading our blog today, I will (for the first time in years) be relaxing (in bed with breakfast and my copy of Grazia!). Where you ask? Now that would be telling... No kids, no housework, no mobile (yes, NO mobile phone!), no work and NO ‘to do’ lists to tick off… pure bliss.
Don’t get me wrong, ever since I embarked (two weeks ago to be exact) on writing lists and itemizing my life in general, I ‘have’ been ‘kind of’ organized. I have grown to love a list. I really have. Shopping lists, work lists, ‘do today’ lists…in fact I’m so enamoured of lists that I’m verging on the obsessive/compulsive. But you see, I ‘had’ to start to do them because recently my life had become a little too chaotic for my own good and I was on the verge of buying my own ‘designer’ straight jacket! Now that’s where my lists ‘stop’ though, nothing more exciting than ‘domestic’. A single friend of mine, though, has taken the list a step further than most of us, she has devised the ‘perfect man’ shopping list.
You know what I’m talking about. That ridiculously specific, and truly unrealistic, mental checklist of what women want from a date or partner. The ‘I-Need-A-Tick-By-Every-Box-Or-I Won’t-Even-Consider-Him’ list. Come on Lola(and all you single ladies out there) you have got to stop being so bloody picky! Of course there are obvious must-haves (sense of humour, solvency, good looks, not already married…), but short nails? Big shoulders? Good shoes? Really, desert boots should not be a deal-breaker at our age. I’m serious. We’re (and I think I can safely speak for most single women at my age) going too far with these requirements. A friend of a friend is the perfect example. This, and I swear it’s true, is her list. He has to be: rich, a fitness fanatic, hair-free on his back, foreign (non-Greek, so that her babies will be mixed race, bilingual and beautiful) and (purely for aesthetic reasons) circumcised! Dear Lord! (Not that He’d be good enough for her either.)
Mind you, even she’s not as bad as Geri Halliwell (yuk!), whose perfect man list before she met aristocrat Henry Beckwith, apparently ran to nigh on 50 requirements and included being able to travel first class, bringing her soup when she’s ill and ‘liking’ her dog. How do I know this? That’s why I read Grazia and Hello… ’But we should have standards’, I hear you cry. True, but ‘having standards’ is a bit different from ‘demanding the bloody impossible’. You do deserve the perfect man, but you’ll have more chance of finding him if you haven’t eliminated 99.9 per cent of the world’s male population with your ‘Oh-And-He’s-Got-To-Be’s’. You have to bin your ‘men’ shopping lists or you’ll end up on your ownsome drinking vodka in your pj’s whilst singing along to ‘All by myself’. (Yes, just like Brigitte Jones). Believe me, I do know what I’m talking about. When I was an art student, my own mental ‘man’ list had the usual ‘phwoar’ elements,etc, but my specifics were way too specific. He had to be creative, awesomely dressed (which meant having the same dress sense as Paul Weller from the Style Council then), support Chelsea FC and to share my love of dead movie stars from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s! The result? I didn’t have a proper relationship until I was in my twenties. And not that that particular one satisfied the list completely, he was close, and more importantly then, pretty cute. But then, when that relationship ended, my new amended list was basically a top-to-toe description of him – but without the ‘I’m leaving London to move to Cyprus’ bit.
So you see I have had to sit my friend Lola down (who has been virtually date-less for the last two years) grab her by the neck and almost throttle some sense into her by telling her to ‘Give them a bloody chance! What the hell is wrong with you?!’ Having scared her into a corner with my ‘pep’ talks, guess what? A six foot, dirty blond, olive-skinned, blue-eyed, guitar-playing, writer has asked her out. And she said ‘yes’. And ‘yes’ to the second date, and ‘yes’ to the third date…and guess what?
All of a sudden after that she also became heavy-metal loving and bald men have been added to her ‘man list’ too. Red-heads and City-boys in pinstripe suits, and even men with beards! All completely different from each other, all not fitting her old ‘list’ and all pretty nice guys.
She phoned me the other day and thanked me for ‘throttling’ the ‘no list’ into her. She said she felt absolutely liberated. So you see girls, dropping prejudices and widening your net means you experience so much more (until you find ‘the man’) I mean. Lola discovered a host of things; how to play the guitar, that FTSE wasn’t just toe-orientated foreplay; and laughing at heavy metal music. Really hard). If she had stuck to her list she would never had met such interesting potentials. It’s about not being blinkered and opening up a whole new world of lovely men (yes there are some here too) to choose from. If you ask my married friends (I have a lot of single friends that still have to ditch their lists) who are ‘happily’ married, they got there by binning their lists. My mate Eleni always searched for tortured musicians but ended up with a man so at ease with himself that he ‘didn’t just have kitchen roll in his flat, but a kitchen roll holder!’ My friend Maria went against type, too, ‘I always chose tall men and I resisted my now-husband just because he was the same height as me – even though he had everything I wanted. But then I realized how mad I was being and decided to grow up and go for it. And very happy we are, too’.
Uh huh, grow up indeed. When you’re 17 it’s fine to reject someone because of his haircut. But at 30-something? One word: hairdresser (barber if he’s old-fashioned!). The bottom line is these lists are unfair. Unfair to us (we’ll never find the perfect specimen) and unfair to men. Can you imagine if men had such lists for us? And if cellulite and less-than-bouncy boobs weren’t on them? Do you see the level of cruelty I am talking about?
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