Tag Archives: dating

In defence of monogamy
Here is a can of worms. Please sit down, make yourself comfortable, and watch as I try to sort them into delicate piles without squishing any of them.
I’m in a monogamous relationship. For me, that means that my partner and I both lust desperately after other people, but we try not to do anything about it, save sighing and making the odd comment about how beautiful those other people are.
When I tell people this, often they’re surprised, and some of them make efforts to persuade me that I really should consider opening up my relationship. That it’d be healthier if my guy and I could see other people, or that polyamory is actually the best course of action for everybody in the human race. I like the sound of it: I do. I like the idea that there’s a hell of a lot of love in the world, and you get to share lots of different kinds of love with lots of different people.
Thing is, I’ve tried it, and it sucks for me. It really sucks. I get jealous, angry, upset, and anxious. I feel worthless. My rational brain tells me that he can fuck other people without it having any bearing on how he feels about me, and that if he goes for a drink with a girl he fancies with a view to potentially snogging her at the end of the evening, that act itself isn’t sapping any of the fun or love that he and I share together.
Unfortunately, my irrational brain is a tedious Iago – piping up and screeching “I like not that!”, and ruining everyone’s fun.
How to initiate sex with your partner
When I was young I thought sex was probably quite a rare occurrence. From what I’d seen on TV and in films, it looked like sex within a straight, long-term relationship involved a fair amount of rigmarole. You have to shave your legs, wash your hair, put on makeup and look seductive. If you’re a dude you’ll probably have to do a different kind of groundwork: snuggling in front of a film, and inching your arm along the back of the couch painstakingly slowly until it finally comes to rest on one of your partner’s breasts.
I’ve never seen a TV couple start fucking the way we usually do.
“Do you want to shag? We haven’t done it for a while.”
Or seduce each other with the kind of lines you can only get away with if you know the answer will be ‘why not?’
“Do you want to touch my freshly-shaven cunt?”
Guest blog: the joy of unexpected sex
I often walk down the street and imagine a hot guy (who probably looks a bit like David Tennant but with piercings and maybe a bicep tattoo) stepping out of a nearby shop and saying “hey there, you look incredibly attractive and exactly my type – do you fancy coming into my dungeon so that we can have all the sex?” Sadly my life is not a porn film, and the closest it’s ever come to one is that one time a plumber came over and I’d forgotten to put trousers on before I answered the door. That’s where the similarity ended, though, as he blushed a bit and I had to pretend that my boxer-brief/jumper combo was how I greeted all my house guests.
This week’s guest blogger has had far more interesting experiences, though, and he’s here to tell you a couple of deliciously exciting stories about unexpected sex. Take it away Simon…
Guest blog: the joy of unexpected sex
Sex is fun, exhilarating, a relief, all sorts of things. When it is unexpected it is even better – and I don’t mean when your partner suddenly decides that “Tonight’s the night, dear” when you’re settling down in front of Match of the Day. I mean when someone you know, but haven’t paid a great deal of attention to, surprises you with an out-of-the-blue session that leaves you completely sated. It’s happened to me twice and both times were mind-blowing.
I used to work at a hospital. A bunch of us would get together once a year to put on a show – all very silly and amateur but we took it fairly seriously and I had massive, full-on lustful cravings for one of the nurses who was part of this group. Very sexy, black wavy hair and a cracking smile and laugh. A real shame, as my amorous advances were never returned and she ended up with someone who I considered far behind her in evolutionary terms. What I didn’t realise was that another nurse in the group (I’ll call her Evie) had her eyes and ideas set on me and I was totally unaware of it.
We gathered one evening in my flat – I lived quite close to the hospital – was the usual messy, friendly hilarious rehearsal for the show, spurred on with more than a few drinks and everyone (I thought) left quite late. I ushered them all out of the front door, dumped the empties by the bin, washed, brushed my teeth and jumped into bed to find Evie there wearing nothing but a chunky necklace. Genuine blonde, booby and a seriously gorgeous figure. This was well before the acronym “WTF” was invented but that’s probably what I thought at the time. (I should have written it down and patented it). However, being unmarried, unattached and certainly not one to look a gift nurse in the mouth, we had a rompingly good time involving massage oil, hands tied together, feet tied together, clothes pegs – use your imagination – and a pair of airline eye-shades. I am fairly certain I had four decent orgasms over the following hours and I am not sure I have managed that in one session at any time since. I know I was very late for work the next morning and several more in the following few weeks.
Wind the clock forward quite a number of years and I am on the way to deliver some training in the north of England. This is to an outfit whose manager I have known for some time on a purely professional basis – friendly, but definitely professional. I am due to be at her office between 8 and 8.30 a.m. but I get a call to ask if I can swing by her house to pick her up and drive us both in, then (she says) we can use her parking permit at work. So I drive up at about half past seven, ring the doorbell and she answers the door wearing a dressing gown.
That stopped me in my tracks for a start – I was expecting business attire and a “Let’s get the day started” attitude – but she had the gown open quite low, her hair was down and she did look absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and more than just a little sexy. Even more so when she reached past me to shut the door, then walked a few steps into the house, turned round and let the dressing gown fall away. It had the sort of effect that she obviously wanted. My jaw was probably following the dressing gown on its way down to floor level and my cock inside my trousers responded with a speed it hadn’t displayed for a while. I can’t remember if I actually said anything but, if I did, it was probably gibberish and pointless. She looked pleased at the effect she was having, climbed a few of her stairs and sat down, waiting.
I really didn’t need too much encouragement after that. Would any man? My jacket and tie came off remarkably quickly and I positioned myself at her feet and opened her knees wide, kissing and licking up the inside of her thighs as she lay back on the stairs and closed her eyes. I found she was extremely wet already – and extremely tasty, too – and the next few minutes were spent teasing her, opening those beautiful cunt lips to admire a swollen clitoris and to help it to swell even more. I slipped two fingers into her and she arched and shuddered and came hard and it was all I could do not to join her, though I was still mainly clothed. I stood up and started to undo my trousers and let my aching cock into the light; she turned her back on me, climbed another couple of stairs and stuck her arse out towards me, presenting me with a picture that most red-blooded men would like to frame and keep. Still with my trousers around my ankles, I slipped straight into her and she braced herself against the stairs with one hand and pulled me harder into her with the other. We fucked in that position harder than I had known for ages – the excitement of the situation, a new experience with someone who was almost a stranger made me rock hard with pleasure and I came like a train inside her, flooding her with my come for what seemed an age. For some inexplicable reason – guilt, pleasure, surprise? – we both collapsed and started laughing helplessly on the stairs and slithered to the bottom step in a sticky, tangled heap.
The trickiest bit was walking into her offices, washed and cleaned, over an hour later and keeping myself from smiling inanely while trying to train her staff with her present in the room.
The 3 best dating tips I’ve ever been given
People ask me for advice sometimes, and I find this a bit terrifying because ultimately I am just a bumbling nobhead, who stumbles through life trying to work out how to look like a grown up without anyone noticing that actually I am a ball of bluster and panic. I expect some of you feel like this too, but because I am human I think that I have it much worse: that I am surrounded by functioning adults who have brains and wisdom and the ability to fill out mortgage paperwork, while I still struggle with the concept of having to throw milk away when it starts to get smelly.
So when you ask me for advice, know that I am doing one of two things:
1. Making it up, based on ‘what I reckon’, and given that I often come home half-drunk and ‘reckon’ I should lie face-down on the carpet until my partner covers me with a blanket, my reckonings are unlikely to be particularly insightful.
2. I give advice that other people have given me before, which struck me as wise and thoughtful and far better than anything I could say.
Today I am doing the latter, and I present to you the 3 best dating tips I’ve ever been given.
Dating tip 1: say yes
A long time ago I had a horrible break up. I did that thing where you hide in your flat in your pants, crying to old episodes of Scrubs and eating cheese until you almost stop liking cheese. It was pretty serious. My life was never going to be good again and everything was awful and I couldn’t see myself doing anything at all because he wasn’t by my side.
Then my Mum called.
She told me to pull myself together and stop moping and all those comforting things that Mums are supposed to say. She told me I was beautiful and that I’d find someone else in no time if I wanted to, but that I didn’t need a man to complete me and yada yada etc. I cried some more, because all of this stuff was just clichéd and obvious bullshit which was instantly swallowed by the pit of my misery. I wanted something practical. Something useful. Something I could go out and do rather than just repeat to myself as a wishy-washy happiness mantra.
“Say yes,” she explained.
“Yes?”
“Yes. Say yes to every single thing you’re invited to from now on. Evenings in the pub, trips to the theatre, weekends away – everything.”
“Why? To meet someone else?”
“Don’t be a tosser,” she replied. “You do it because it will make you that ‘fun’ person: the one who always says yes. The one who gets excited about life and wants to join in with things. The one who’s always got something exciting on the go.”
“Will it win him back?” I asked, like a pathetic loser.
“Who gives a shit? You’ll be too busy rock-climbing or something.”
So I did: I said yes to everything. And so followed one of the most enjoyable three months of my life. I was skint, of course – all this socialising gave my wallet a thorough hammering – but by God I was having fun. A few weeks after she gave me this advice I was having dirty tent sex with a hot guy, and drinking vodka with strangers on a beach. Thanks, Mum.
Dating tip 2: approach people you fancy
We focus so much on how to ‘capture’ the man or woman of our dreams, and how to entice other people, that frequently we forget that the whole point is that we should like each other. I’ve heard a few variations on this piece of advice before, but none so brilliantly put as that posted by @ArchedEyebrowBR yesterday. In her post – online dating tips for the fat babe – she laid down some pretty significant wisdom that I think is relevant to everyone:
Don’t be at the mercy of everyone else: ask out the people you fancy, not the people you think will fancy you.
Hell yes. Something I have repeatedly and miserably failed at for most of my adult life, in part because I see so many things that give me pause for thought. He won’t like me – I’m too tall. He’ll probably think I’m too common. He goes for blondes.
Why is this stuff in my brain? It didn’t fall in there by accident – it’s there because I’ve had experience with similar guys that has led me to be wary of a particular reaction. It’s also partly down to the media constantly telling us what we need to be like, and down to my youth, during encounters at school which made me believe that like should stick to like. Goth kids with goth kids, fat kids with fat kids, clever kids with clever kids, and God forbid you should have a boyfriend who plays rugby when you’re a glasses-wearing sportphobe.
Anyway. Sometimes this stuff will be true – sometimes the person you fancy really will turn you down because you’re too tall, or whatever. But that is because they may well be a douchebag. And how much fucking better to know that you’re picking from a pool of people you have a genuine attraction to, than ‘settling’ for someone you think you might be able to get because you’ve always been told you can only have one thing?
Imagine if you were vegetarian and you’d been told that the buffet was 90% meat. You arrive at the venue expecting to be fobbed off with some crappy spinach and ricotta bullshit and a measly side-salad. Then you discover, to your delight, that the meat is actually cheese and you can have your pick of anything on the table.
ArchedEyebrow has literally just announced that, but for dating – tuck in.
Dating tip 3: you will never be happy ever after
Please don’t think ‘oh God what a depressing tip to end on’ – this is actually one of the most positive and uplifting pieces of advice I have ever been given, and it applies to LIFE as well as dating, because dating is basically part of life and is not some special expert subject on which only people who tell you to ‘play hard to get’ are qualified to comment.
This advice was given to me by the amazing Justin Hancock, who is wise. He was explaining mindfulness to me, and talking about being present in the moment. I’m not an expert on mindfulness, but this bit really struck home (I’m paraphrasing):
We often think of happiness as this big end goal – like we’ll get to a point in our lives and we’ll be happy. We’ll have a nice home, family, job, whatever, and by that point we’ll have reached peak happiness. Then we get sad about something and think OH NO I’VE RUINED IT and WHY CAN’T I JUST BE HAPPY. But it’s normal: happiness comes and goes, and we’ll never reach this ‘peak happiness forever’ – it’s a myth.
Actually, happiness is always a temporary thing. It’d be weird if it was just a climbing scale and, at a certain point, we reached a state of irreversible bliss. Even when we achieve our ‘dream jobs’ we’re not stagnant – we’re usually not content to just turn up from 9-5 and work to rule every day for the rest of our lives: we have ups and downs, fights with colleagues, deadlines that are unreasonable or realistic, new ambitions or needs or desires.
Likewise with dating: you can meet someone you love so much you want to lick their used socks and snuggle so hard into them that your face becomes melded to the crook of their neck, and still you won’t be happy forever. That person will eventually piss you off, and you’ll piss them off, or you’ll have to go for Christmas lunch with their parents or something and you’ll be miserable because their dad makes shit gravy and doesn’t do the sprouts properly.
The point is, no one will ever be happy ever after. Knowing that makes me much happier today.

How to be the best boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/lover
When I do the washing up, I sing. It makes the chores less painful, and it means that for ten minutes or so, I can flush out the bit of my brain that won’t usually shut up: the bit that tells me I have a million things to do and that I shouldn’t be wasting time on showtunes.
Sometimes I can hit the high notes, and sometimes I wail off-key. The quality of the singing is not important: it’s about the fun.
And so, when my partner opens the kitchen door and pops in to put the kettle on, I need him to do something which goes against all of his immediate gut instincts at the time: I need him to not make me stop singing. No ‘cut it out’ gestures, raised eyebrows or putting his fingers in his ears: I need an absence of mockery or distaste. To not just to tolerate my fun, but to love it. He knows how to be the best boyfriend – he doesn’t have to sing along, or tell me I’m good enough to go on Xfactor (I’d be one of the people they feature in the ‘you’re having a laugh’ section early on in the show), because it’s not about the singing. He just has to love the things that make me happy, even if they make me look like a dick.
I appreciate that, when I’m halfway through the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, that is no mean feat.
Sing like no one’s listening
It’s really important though, because if you can love my enthusiastic singing, you can love all the other bits of me that might be annoying or tricky or unphotogenic. The way I snore and talk in my sleep, the panicked way I run through the station to make sure we’re ten minutes early for a train, the way I come home late at night and fling my shoes across the room before lying face-down on the carpet.
The way I fuck.
If you want me to fuck you like I really really want to, I need to be comfortable that you’re going to embrace it. No ‘euurgh’s or ‘what the fuck?’s or ‘I don’t think you’re doing that right’s. Embracing and loving the weird things as well as the standard ‘suck dick, sit on cock, orgasm, high five‘ things.
Sometimes men ask me how they can find a woman who is kinky and imaginative and open to lots of new things in bed. I have a much much longer post coming on this at some point, but my initial gut reaction is to tell them this:
You may already know one, but it’s possible she doesn’t want to tell you about her passions. Maybe she wants to sing loudly in the kitchen. Maybe she wants to dance at that wedding. Maybe she wants to get naked and hump you with enthusiastic passion in the middle of the living room floor. But she’ll struggle to do any of these things if she’s heard you laugh too loudly when she’s fucked something up.
A long time ago someone asked me if he should tell his girlfriend that she was bad at giving blowjobs. No – God no. Never. Because saying ‘you’re bad at this’ is the exact opposite of encouraging. We get told all the time that certain things are ‘not good enough’ – as well-meaning friends and relatives take metaphorical red pens to half of our lives. Don’t tell someone what they’re doing wrong – tell them how to do it right.
‘I love it when you do X’ will always be more effective than ‘you’re bad at Y.’ Because if you hurt someone over Y, they’re unlikely to try Z.
How to be the best boyfriend (partner, lover, whatever)
So, what’s the most important quality in a partner?
I think it’s enthusiasm. Enthusiasm for me and what I do, even when I do it wrong. Enthusiasm for trying again, and failing again, and laughing together on the sofa. Being as comfortable with someone’s quirks as you are with their successes. Let me sing in the kitchen, lie face-down on the carpet when I’m drunk, and whisper my weirdest fantasies in your ear.
Syrupy e-cards encourage us to ‘dance like no one’s watching’, but we know that someone usually is. If you want someone to really open up about their deepest fantasies, their most exciting secrets, and all the fun they’ve dreamed of having, you need to smile even through their fuck-ups. Don’t wince, or groan, or imply that someone’s failure means they should never have tried, or that their fun is less important than the way they come across: enjoy the times when they let themselves go, and do something for the sheer, sparkling fun of it.
No matter how bad I am at it, make sure I always want to sing.