Recently divorced looks for love at country festivals and online
The options are few when it comes to finding someone with whom to share the long days and nights.
Sympathy for the Gerbil
(With apologies to the Rolling Stones)
Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of no wealth and poor taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Packed some love handles on my waist
Pleased to meet you
My pick-up lines are lame
I don’t like pina coladas
And I don’t play video games.
Consider the hamster. Watch his little legs fly as he gets that wheel spinning. Round and round it goes. When it stops, nobody knows.
From the outside, the brave new world of modern dating looks terrifying. A cross between a giant hamster wheel for humanity and a game of musical chairs. For a misanthropic social misfit and soon-to-be double divorcee like myself, it’s all about as appealing as a bucket of cold, congealing spew.
Unfortunately, these days options seem limited in the love stakes. I’ve never been one for the glib chat-up line, and the shy-guy-of-hidden-depths pose surely wouldn’t cut much ice in heartless, shiny Sydney. The idiots who recently pronounced it the world’s friendliest town must have confined their research to bright-eyed, perfect-skinned teens in swinging backpacker hostels, conveniently overlooking the lonely reality of the singleton pushing 50.
Speed dating? Nah. It’s bound to be more start-up than hook-up, full of Bondi hipsters with bushranger beards sipping artisanal iced lemongrass chai organic lattes, cruising for LinkedIn connections and networking like mad. And that’s just the women.
I read recently that old-school matchmakers are making a comeback in the hipper boroughs of New York City. People like Erika Gershowitz, of a business called Three Day Rule, who prowls the pubs and clubs and tapas bars giving out cards. The outfit has six locations and 19 matchmakers, apparently. Its clients get face time with the matchmakers who bone up on their preferences. They get fashion consultants, professional snappers for their profiles and, best of all, someone else to do the actual dating for them. “Dating is a numbers game,” says Gershowitz. “We essentially go on bad dates for people.”
Professional help, yeah, that might work but I don’t think they have expanded to Sydney yet, and I can’t quite rid myself of images of Fiddler on the Roof, with some Barbra Streisand-type skipping from shtetl to shtetl in her shawl, singing ‘Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch”. And, yes, there’s bound to be a catch. And the matchmaker catch is a cool $US15,000 ($19,000) to a flat-out ridiculous $US250,000 for their “expert” services.
I even ventured recently to the Gympie Music Muster, mainly on the basis of its reputation as a happy mating ground. Well, it muster been love — if you look like you belong in the country and just stepped out of an RM Williams catalogue. Because all the hooking-up seemed to be confined to improbably tall and ridiculously fresh-faced young people, clad in Akubra hats, moleskin trousers and oilskin Driza-Bones. Now I can certainly appreciate the frisson, not to say the frottage, of a well-maintained oilskin but for an ageing city slicker in a nondescript pullover and a plain black coat, it was strictly voyeurism only. The closest I got to some action was an involuntary threesome when the tallest, shiniest and smoochiest new hook-ups, both cowboy-ed up to the nines, marched backwards, lips in some sort of vacuum-sealed vapour lock, without seeing who might be in the way, ploughing a perfect row through the crowd and driving their combine harvest of cowpoke passion right over me.
So one day soon, it looks like I may have to enter the world of online dating, along with everyone else. Vanity Fair, in an in-depth look at the subject recently, commented on how the Tinder-like, swipe-for-love apps had reduced the search for love to something like Uber for sex.
“You’re always sort of prowling,” one 20-something told the magazine. “You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day — the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”
That sounds even worse than loneliness. So for now, Tinder remains on the app store shelf, and my love life remains a one-man bonfire of the vanities.