This might sound callous, but I don’t care if you break up with me by text message. Same goes for email. Sod it – text the ‘letters’ section of the Metro for all I care. If you’re going to dump me, just dump me.

Yes, I’ll be sad. But I’ll be no more sad than if you – quite literally – made a meal of it. Took me out for dinner, had a long discussion prompted by occasional irritating sighs, ending with The Chat: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t fancy you any more/we have nothing in common/I’ve met someone infinitely more likeable.’

It hasn’t been emotional

People say that the reason they wouldn’t break up via text is because it’s cold-hearted. But the problem is that few of the relationships I get into are emotional enough to require a drawn-out conclusion. Most of the ‘break-ups’ I have been involved in recently have happened either because

• he’s found a girlfriend who’d rather he didn’t fuck anyone else
• he lives outside Zone 3 and so I am far too lazy to see him regularly

And so in this context, a break-up text will do just as well as a long conversation. If he’s a boy I’m shagging he’s a boy worth shagging, so naturally I’ll be sad that I can’t fuck him any more. But I’m not going to cry my face off over a tub of Häagen Dazs – we were probably never that close.

More importantly, it takes me just five minutes to read an email, less than one minute to read a text, but it takes an entire evening to have the break up chat. A whole evening. Think of all the things I could do in an evening! While I’m listening to you tortuously apologise for ending something that was inevitably going to end anyway I could instead be dying my hair, writing another blog, livetweeting The Apprentice or – crucially – finding someone else to fuck.

There is nothing more valuable to me than time. And giving me more of it, even if it means swallowing your natural desire to project emotion onto sex, is a wonderful thing to do.

Just tell me

But the main reason I think text break-ups are fine is because very occasionally, because of the way I meet and interact with guys, I end up in a weird limbo where I’m not entirely sure if someone is still with me. In the last year I have had three guys who have broken up with me by just ceasing all communication.

Two guys stopped fucking me after a few lovely evenings which I’m reasonably sure they enjoyed. One guy stopped fucking me shortly before we were due to go away together for a weekend.

This isn’t a rant about getting dumped. I’ve been in many ‘things’ that have ended, so I don’t get particularly upset about the endings themselves.

But what I am emotional about is not knowing. Because I like to plan. I like to know. Just as I like to know how you like your blow jobs and whether you’re into spanking, I also like to know exactly where you stand on the issue of whether you are or aren’t willing to put your dick into me.

It’s not you, it’s me

And it honestly is. I think I’m alone in this, because I’ve told other people about my preference for rapid-fire, heartless relationship comms and had them weeping over my cracked and battered soul. But a text or email at least has an immediacy and honesty that I wholeheartedly respect.

You might wait for weeks for the right moment to have ‘that’ conversation and (in the case of some of my past boys) end up never having it at all. So if your mind’s truly made up, and you really really mean it, what better way to tell me than to bleep it to my phone?

Not only will you have furnished me with useful information, you’ve also saved me time. I’ll be able to read it, digest it, mourn and move on in less time than we’d have spent on pre-dinner drinks.

Initially I thought number 20 was a massive liar. I only saw him once, but he was great – beautifully scruffy, with a lopsided smile and a penchant for getting so stoned I could feel the high through his tingling skin. It was good, for a first date. But I still thought he was a liar.

(more…)

This doesn’t happen. It might happen to other people, but it never ever happens to me. Therefore it might as well be light-speed interstellar travel or a stint as Emperor of the Universe – it is an almost-impossible dream. Moreover it’s one which, frankly, I’m not sure I’d want to have anyway.

The typical night out clubbing involves meeting people in a pub or bar, getting just drunk enough that you feel at your most attractive, then heading to some odd-looking fashionable warehouse to flail madly while some preening dickhead presses play on a stereo and underpaid miserablists charge you £20 for a gin and tonic.

That does not make me feel very sexy. Let’s break it down:

Groups of friends

Few people go clubbing on their own – they go with friends. And in a group of friends it is much more difficult to make an initial approach. What if your friends see you and whisper behind their hands? What if they’re nudging you towards him/her like you’re nrvously asking for a snog at the school disco? What if all of his/her friends laugh as you approach, or loudly tell you that your chosen one is taken?

Loud music

I don’t want to sound like your moaning grandma, but I am about to do just that: why the living arsefuck (yes, in my head your gran talks just like this) do you want to go somewhere where you can’t hear what anyone’s saying? Why do the kids these days insist on placing themselves in rooms with noise so penetrating that you can’t think, let alone share a coherent and captivating sentence or two with your neighbour?

Heat

Nightclubs are hot. They are boiling, boiling hot. I would no more try to approach a stranger in a nightclub than I would insist on jogging to a first date.

Yes, my sweat is beautiful and arousing and gets your dick hard when we’re in bed together, but if the first time you meet me I’m humming like a tramps’ sauna, chances are you’ll be unlikely to want to dick me.

Dancing

No. Unless you’re stunningly good at it, nightclub dancing is a shockingly difficult way to get laid. It’s a very distant descendant of the partner dances our grandparents did together, but somehow all the beauty and sex has been stripped out of it until it’s just a repulsive husk of its former self – a rutting, gyrating dignity-killer that leaves us all looking like someone’s last choice.

Tea dancing, swing dancing, anything you do with a partner is fucking sexy. Beautiful. It’s closeness and warmth and the good, good scent of your partner and – if you’re lucky – the feeling of their growing erection pressing into your hips. It’s whispering into their ear that you want to squeeze it and making plans for later in the evening. Your grandparents did this – it’s why you are here.

What happened to that sort of dancing? What happened to chatting, and wooing, and subtle glances? Why do we now feel like we have to dance like we’re actually humping things in mid-air, or cavorting wildly with some invisible partner? I want men to sidle up to me, tap me on the shoulder, and take me by the hands. I want to get wetter and wetter as I feel their hands stray – ever so slowly – to my bottom. I don’t want to have to rub my crotch on them while they gurn over my shoulder and twist their hips around like they’ve got scorpions attacked to their bollocks.

It’s obscene.

I’m a massive fucking pervert – I love strip clubs and Beyoncé videos and all the rest of it – but even I have an issue with the idea that to pull someone you must first embarass yourself with undignified dancing until you’re dripping with a stinking sweat, eschew all forms of verbal communication then complete your advances by performing a borderline sexual assault on someone and hoping they don’t punch you in the face.

Sorry, that was a bit ranty, but it’s true. Even if you love clubbing, and live for the nights where you drop some pills and punch the sky in a delicious orgy of pleasure and music and people, I still don’t think you’d say the club is a sexy place to be.

Proof: If you pull someone at a pub, would you bother taking your fresh and eager loved one to a nightclub? No. You’d whisk them off to your house, slap on some Janis Joplin, and slow dance them until they’re utterly drenched in fuck.

Love is like being tied to a rock that you also sort of want to have sex with.

It’s like being repeatedly punched in the face, but by something quite nice, like a pillow or a bowl of trifle.

Despite all of my best efforts not to fall into this pitiful trap, I am in love with a boy.

Being in love changes people

Love seems to make my friends do odd things, like deliberately go on tedious, all-inclusive holidays. Like buying joint-owned kitchen equipment and cooking things with butternut squash in.

Likewise love makes me do weird things, like spout inexplicable platitudes about his possessions. Like cancel an evening’s drinking so I can stay in on a Saturday night with his big arms wrapped around me. Like writing a blog which – let’s be honest – you couldn’t crack one off to if you tried.

Love makes me think more about a boy than about things that matter – like my career.  

It makes me lazy. All I ever want to do is sit with him, on him, by him, until my bills go unpaid and my washing up starts to evolve new breeds of bacteria. Until the sun goes down and the world is destroyed and everything I’ve worked for crumbles to dust.

I love love

Don’t get me wrong – there are up sides. He is, as you’d expect, especially spectacular. Of all the boys who have stamped their footprints into my ice-cold heart, his are some of the very few that I want to put my own feet in and go “Ooh, look, big. GIGGLE.”

He’s beautiful when he lights cigarettes, when he’s biting my nipples or bringing me coffee. He’s funny and fun and good and gentle and filthy and kind and calm. He makes me relax and he makes me laugh and he fucks me like it’s the end of the world.

He’s the one whose friends I’ll meet. Whose house I’ll stay at. All the other boys get fucked and moved on, but he’s the only one who gets to spend the night. He’s the one who can stroke my face without making me hiss, and he gets to call me pretty without me vomiting copiously all over his living-room floor.

I hate love

But ultimately the great stuff is desperately overshadowed by the bad. Love is a fucking bastard. It makes me irrational and needy. It tempts me into shit decisions. Problems I’d previously have stamped on become reasons to run to him for a hug. Challenges stay unchallenged, because he makes them easy to forget.

I don’t want to love him – I love me – normal me. I love the me who can tell boys to fuck off when I’m busy, who has enough motivation to pull myself together when I’m miserable and do good things when I’m not. Love can make me blind to a lot of things, but I’m not yet blind to what I could achieve if I weren’t sitting so comfortably in his arms.

How do you solve a problem like a hormonal imbalance?

For a long time my solution was to break up with guys if I thought things were getting emotional. But things have gone too far this time. I cannot decide to not be in love because I am in love, and so I am irrational.

How can I not see him when I need to see him? How can I not love him when, at just the moment I think I’ve steeled myself to tell him I’m off, he says something that makes me laugh like I’ve had a lobotomy? When just the idea of his shoes lying jumbled by the kitchen door makes me grin with possessive, deranged pride?

I love his shoes.

His shoes.

I am ridiculous and I love his shoes.

If you’re expecting some sort of conclusion or words of wisdom after the above torrent of out-of-character arational loved-up bullshit then you’re probably a fucking idiot. But I’ll forgive you. If you’re powerfully idiotic then you may well be in love yourself. Unfortunately for all of us there’s no known cure, but to relieve the symptoms I can thoroughly recommend wanking and gin.

 

What do you mean you want to fuck someone you’ve only just met? What on earth would your mother say? Well, whether our mothers like it or not, sometimes we want to fuck strangers. And sometimes those strangers are people we’ve met on the internet who could turn out to be anyone – from secret millionaires to serial killers.

In my experience, people you meet on internet dates are far more likely to just be normal people with whom you have little in common, and who you’re reasonably unlikely to fuck. But if you do want to fuck them, here’s my magic list of rules for staying as safe as possible.

Note: as safe as possible, not 100% safe. There is no way that I know of to absolutely guarantee your personal safety, but then such is true of many of life’s funnest activities. Also, this is written as if it’s a girl-meets-boy thing, but I reckon you should use these rules no matter who you are or who you’re banging.

Meeting

Now, everyone knows that you should meet in public, right? OK. So that’s an easy one – pick a pub, or a coffee-shop, or a well-lit community centre, and arrange to meet at a time when people will be around.

So – central London Wetherspoons at 7 pm? Great.

Outside a small cafe in an area of town so heartbleedingly cool that it’s often empty? Not so great.

Fun GOTN dating fact: About a year ago, after a bit of chat with a fun-sounding guy on OKCupid, I asked him to meet me for a drink. His response was that it might be a bit more sexy if we meet somewhere secluded. In the dark. He suggested a particular spot in Hyde Park, at 8pm in midwinter.

I did not meet this man.

Telling people about yourself

The first date is great for getting to know someone, right? Well, yes – you need to find out about them and you need to tell them about yourself. But I’d strongly urge a teeny bit of caution. You might be proud of your job, but do they really need to know exactly where you work?

You might hang out in a particularly cool bar quite frequently, but would you like a rejected date rocking up there and haranguing you because you never called after the first shag? No.

Fun GOTN dating fact: I once went on a nice first date with a seemingly lovely guy. For reasons I won’t go into, I refused a second date.

He subsequently sent me five emails in quick succession, of increasing levels of nastiness. My particular favourite was one addressed to ‘you fucking bitch’ that thoughtfully reminded me that he knew where I worked.

Inviting someone back to yours

Dangerous – bear in mind that just as you wouldn’t post your address on the internet, neither should you really invite internet strangers to your house unless you know them well.

I have invited a couple of strange guys back to my place, and both of these times I have had stomach butterfies when it turned out they were more keen on me than I was on them. After you’ve let them down gently, it still takes a couple of weeks to get over the worry that they might turn up at your door bearing roses and erotica and asking for a second go.

However, if you want to take someone back to yours, but are worried that they might either:

a) do something you haven’t consented to or

b) nick your fucking telly

then it’s worth having backup.

There’s no ideal way of doing this, to be honest – anything you do will need to be pretty extreme, thus implying that you think they’re untrustworthy. And if you think they’re that untrustworthy then it’s best not to invite them back.

But I’ve done it a couple of times, and the only solution I could think of was to take something that they value and hide it somewhere in my flat. Obviously you have to ask them for it (ideally in a joking, coquettish way) and they have to know you’ve taken it, so they know you need to be on good terms with them to give it back afterwards. Watches, keys, wallets – anything that they wouldn’t fuck off without.

It is crucial that you remember to give it back – you don’t want to get stuck in a second-date situation just because you’ve still got their Tesco clubcard.

Fun GOTN dating fact: I once rescued a drunk guy whose friends had abandoned him outside a strip club I was in. I took him home and put him up for the night, but insisted first on getting his driver’s license. He was so aroused by my aura of cheeky dominance that he proceeded to lunge adorably at me before passing out face-down on the floor.

Going home with someone

He might not have brought his serial killer axe with him, but he could just have left it in the cupboard under the stairs, ready for when he’s lured you back to his house. So vigilance here is especially important. Here’s the drill:

• Text a friend with his address straight away, let him know that you’re doing this.
• Send your friend a link to his dating profile, his real name, and a picture of him if possible.
• Ask your friend to call you in a few hours. Give them a set time, and make sure your date knows you’ll be expecting a phone call.

Now here’s the key part, so listen very closely: you should not at any point believe that any of this stuff is excessive or overly paranoid. It is not – this is completely normal, sensible, and wise. Recommend to your date that they do the same thing.

These precautions are as necessary as using a condom for the first fuck. As important as wearing a fucking seatbelt or looking both ways when you cross the road.

If at any point your date makes you feel bad or odd about being careful, hop on the first bus to fuckoffsville and don’t ever see them again.

Fun GOTN fact: None of the guys I have ever been on dates with have questioned any of this.