Tag Archives: relationships
I like to watch you flirt
“I think the barista fancies me,” he explained as we wandered towards the coffee shop. “She’s quite flirty, you know?”
Yeah. I know. I know a million guys who are convinced that the barista in their regular coffee shop fancies them. They pop in of a morning, freshly showered and ready for work, and order their usual from someone who knows how to make it. That loving ritual of giving and receiving hot drink adds an extra tinge of flirtiness to an otherwise mundane transaction. A simple ‘how are you?’ can be transformed into a declaration of playful lust.
“No, she doesn’t fancy you,” I told him, twattishly. “Everyone thinks the barista is flirting with them – they teach them how to do it in barista school.”
“Yeah,” a twitch of something that looks like relief on his face. “You’re probably right.”
A guy with no sense of humour walks into a bar
Sorry ladies, the news is in. A study of 80 dudes somewhere in America, as reported by world class science journal The Metro, concluded that men don’t want you to have a sense of humour. Well, they do want you to have a sense of humour, but one which means you laugh at all their jokes rather than coming up with your own.
It’s a shame, because for so many years we straight girls have been desperately trying to earn the right to write ‘GSOH’ on our dating profiles. Guys might complain that we’re taking an hour to pick an outfit before a night out, but they don’t realise that while they’re tapping watches and rattling car keys we’ve spent forty-five minutes putting the finishing touches to our favourite version of that Aristocrats story.
I’m joking, of course, but you’re not obliged to laugh.
My other half
I’ve always hated the phrase ‘my other half’ – it implies a lack of completeness about me. That I, on my own, am never quite full or rounded. Not quite enough.
I hate ‘him indoors,’ which implies the kind of comfortable, settled domesticity that I’ve never really felt with anyone.
I’m ambivalent about ‘boyfriend’ and ‘partner’ feels too grown up.
I panic at the thought of a ‘husband.’
‘Boy’ is becoming tired, and not a natural descriptor for someone in their 30s.
Says ‘girl’ on the net. At the age of 30.
‘Mate’ is either too pally or too like an Attenborough documentary, depending on how you interpret it.
‘Lover’ makes me cringe.
Some days he’s my guy, my dude. That dickhead. And often he’s a twat.
But maybe my obsession with the lack of a proper word belies what the actual problem is with any of these statements: the ‘my’ that comes at the front of them.
No one is ever mine, of course.
Guest blog: Reclaiming my wheelchair through sexy lift snogs
If you could see the email thread that led to the publication of this guest blog, you’d think I had a fetish for Marks and Spencer. I don’t, though – honest. What I do have a thing for, though, is subtle public affection. Those snatched moments when you touch each other, or snog, or run a hand up under your partner’s clothes when you think that no one’s watching. So this guest blog, by Desire on Wheels, naturally presses a hell of a lot of my buttons. What’s more, it’s an insight into disability and sexuality that taught me more than I ever thought I’d know about early 20th century botanical gardens.
You’ll see what I mean.
What’s your ‘magic number’?
I have a list of all the people I’ve fucked. I know, that sounds intensely weird, and also a little bit creepy. I compiled it many years ago after a long, hazy night in a bar in Amsterdam, during which a good friend and I tried to work out what our ‘magic numbers’ were. I wasn’t particularly bothered about the total, but the exercise gave me pause for thought, and subsequent enraged weeping, when I realised that I couldn’t remember everyone’s name.
I thought I’d got it right at first. I counted people off on my fingers, smiling with glee when I got to a particularly good one, hissing when I reached the name of a person who’d fucked me over, and reminiscing over some of the filthier moments of my life. He did the same, regaling me with some sexy anecdotes as we sipped pints and hoped no one would notice that we were flagrantly ignoring the weird ‘you can smoke weed but not cigarettes’ rule that had just come into force.
Eventually, we both settled on our final numbers, and we clinked glasses – delighted at our powers of recollection.
An hour or so later, a cold dread crept over me: I’d missed one out. Not just any one either – a pretty significant guy, with whom I’d had some fairly intense experiences. Back to the mental drawing board, and the back of a napkin to make notes. And eventually the final list which, while possibly a bit strange, was a godsend when it came to writing my book: it meant I got the chapters in the right order and didn’t have to go back to cram in a quick fuck that I’d somehow forgotten.