H: Eight

Chapter Five: In which the word according to JP is revealed

A week later a package arrived by courier to Simon's office. Enclosed
were two things. A ten page doubled spaced document and a Parallax
Pictures compliment slip, adored only with JP's stylised signature.
Simon beat down his naturally curiosity, put the document to one side
and got on with his day's work. He waited till lunch time. Somehow,
even though reviewing JP's manuscript unquestionably counted as work,
something in Simon's Protestant work ethic made him feel that the
personal association meant he should leave it till personal time. At
lunch he took the envelope out with him, wondered over to Soho Square
and, having bought a sandwich, positioned himself on a bench and began
to read.

This is what he read.

The Londoner's Practical Guide to Dating
By JP, A Londoner
Book Proposal

Tired of staying home alone, watching American television shows in
which unfeasibly beautiful couples cavort? Fed up of leaving your love
life up to chance and alcohol? Fed-up of finding yourself tongue-tied
at inopportune moments? Wondering why all those around you are coupling
up whilst you stand idly by? Wondering why your life isn't more like
you wanted it to be?

British? Single? Male? Living in London?

This will help.

First, know that you are not alone. Or rather you are, but you are not
alone in your aloneness. There are thousands, millions in the same
situation. And they many of you live in London - one of the greatest
cities in the western world, but perhaps the one with the worst dating
scene. All around London, every night, in overpriced, undersized
apartments people many men sit alone. They heat up TV dinners from
Marks &;amp; Spencer and Waitrose, they speak to old friends on the
'phone or write long lonely emails, they regret past loves and
fantasise about new ones, they wank futilely into Thomas Pink shirts,
and lament in silent agony the absence of a girlfriend in their
lives.

And they don't do a damn thing about it.

The Londoner's Practical Guide to Dating is not for those men. The
Guide is for men ready to do a damn thing. This book is for men willing
to recognise that one's romantic and sexual life requires just as much
effort, planning and practical preparation as one's career, health or
hobbies, possibly even more. If you are willing to make that leap and
abandon the British laiser-faire attitude towards love, then this book
is for you.

It's not self-help mumbo-jumbo, its not feel-good footsie-wootise, its
not psychological clap-trap. It's true, it's practical, it's designed
from Londoners, it's drawn from hard earned experience and success, and
it's tailored for you. It's a guide to the dating life you wish you
had, and soon will.

Simon winced a little at JP's somewhat grating approximation of 1950s
men's magazine syntax, but couldn't deny that it was compelling -
challenging and irritating in about equal measure. He made some notes
in the margin and turned the page.

The English and Dating

At this point, some evidence must be produced for the central premise
of the book. That in matters amorous, the inhabitants of London are in
desperate need of all the help they can get. Are Londoners honestly so
much worse at this game than the rest of the world, or does everyone
feel this way about themselves?

Let us take three categories of evidence to test this
proposition.

(1) Evidence from Fiction

If our literature and movies are anything to go by, the last time a
British man excelled at courtship was in the court of King Arthur.
After that point, there is little fictional evidence of British amorous
skills: none of Shakespeare's romances are set in England; Byron is the
only one of the so- called romantic poets who ever got a girl; Jane
Austen's heroes are always hopelessly inept - in fact, in Austen's
universe, the more skilled at romance a male character is, the less he
is to be trusted, perhaps an indication of a very British distrust of
people who can actually articulate and act on their emotions.

In the movies, the greatest British romantic comedy star of our time,
Hugh Grant, is famous for playing a hapless, bumbling fool who gets the
(invariably American) girl despite, not because, of, his
"English-charm". And that's the glossy, fantasy version of English
man?.

(2) Evidence from Blond Celebrities

In 2002 the beautiful and talented Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow
spent six months in London performing in a West End play. To her very
public horror, she was asked out on a date but twice in all this time,
a decrease of several gazillion percentile points from her State-side
average. As she told Now magazine:

"British people don't seem to ask each other out on dates?. If someone
asks you out, they're really going out on a limb, whereas in America it
happens all the time?. Someone will come up to you and ask you for
dinner and you'll say 'sure'. It's no big deal and no weight should be
attached to it. It's only dinner, for God's sake?.. Yet in Britain,
mostly what happens seems to be that people meet at work. If there's a
little something there, then they hang out together and, all of a
sudden, they're boyfriend and girlfriend."

(That an English pop-star, Cold Play front-man Chris Martin, was
subsequently able to woo, impregnate and marry Ms. Paltrow is perhaps
evidence that occasionally true love can surmount the seemingly
insurmountable, but doesn't diminish Gwyneth's core assertion: that the
Americans have a system for courtship, which the British lack).

Another high profile North American bemoaner of the British male is
Leah McLaren, an extremely comely Canadian journalist who found herself
seconded to London for a love free 2002; this is Ms. McLaren in the
Spectator:

"After going out with roughly a dozen single men in London, I have come
to the conclusion that the modern English male knows little to nothing
about courtship, and what he does know frightens him?.

Since moving to London, my romantic life has been characterised by
last-minute text messages, incomprehensible drunkards, first-date
coke-bingers and split bar tabs ? I have often tucked myself into bed
and stared at the ceiling contemplating the cluelessness of the English
male date. I have come up with the following:

a) Many went to boarding school at an early age, thus forfeiting
essential affection from their mothers, leaving them all but incapable
of intimacy with women.
b) Many drink too much, leaving them all but incapable of intimacy with
women.
c) They are repressed homosexuals.
d) They simply don't like women."

Ms. Paltrow &;amp; McLaren are far from the only international woman
to bemoan the ineptitude of the British Male, they are simply amongst
the most recent and high profile, but their views are fairly de
genus.

(3) Evidence from life

If you don't trust these blond American researchers, then do some field
work of your own. Consider for a moment your cross section of male
English friends. If you are in your mid-twenties to thirties, the
chances are that they will break down, fairly symmetrically into the
following two groups:

a) The comfortably coupled - married or otherwise long term attached.
Of these, they will break into the following sub-groups: (i) those that
married family friends who they have known from birth (ii) those that
married school or university girlfriends (iii) those that married work
colleagues.

I'd wager reasonable money that the number of British men in your
social group who have met their partners through the innovative step of
going up to a relative stranger and saying: "Hello, you look
interesting. Shall we get to know one another?" can be counted on the
fingers of one sock.

More sobering still than the comfortably coupled are our second
category
b) The chronically single: men who have not been in a romantic
relationship of any sort for six years or more. These men are not just
single, they are chronically, systemically single. Despite often having
decent jobs, basic motor-neuron skills and above average amounts of
designer clothing and kitchen apparatus, these men seem to seem to have
none of the emotional or social apparatus to seek out romantic mates.
Worst still, they seem to have lost all desire to do so.

Asides from the odd drunken anomaly of a one-off, one-night snog or
shag with an old school friend/office colleague/foreign stranger in a
West End bar, these men are effective eunuchs, their emotional and
sexual lives withering before the bemused and concerned eyes of their
comfortably coupled friends.

The genesis of the Chronically Single Man can generally be traced to a
painful break-up from a long term school or university girlfriend, and
this is appropriate because they seem to be stuck or regressed into
some permanent public-school infancy, gaggling together, retreating to
boyish pastimes of computer games and sport in the absence of anything
moister with which to spend their time.

Simon put the manuscript down here and starred into the middle
distance, a little annoyed that he recognised himself so easily in this
description. Was he really that transparent? Really that generic, or
was JP just having a specific dig at him. He stopped to think about his
own circle of friends and was forced to admit that JP's description
rang true. In the margin he wrote "Will this ostracise or provoke
empathy?" The next paragraph increased his discomfort:

Further, it's a fair wager that you will find almost no one occupying
the wide spectrum between these two extremes. Your social group will
divide into a few comfortable couples in whose warm, gravitational
orbit will revolve a collection of chronically single satellites. In
between there is only cold vacuum.

Taken together these three lines of evidence lead us to a number of
distressing conclusions; it would appear that not only are British men
not up to much in the dating stakes, but more fundamentally, dating as
it is understood elsewhere, is almost non-existent in the UK.

The entire interregnum between long term relationships and hopeless
singledom, taken for granted by our American and European cousins, is
absent in the UK. The wide spectrum of liaisons, and affairs; of seeing
someone, and going steady; of bagatelles and romantic friendships, of
fuck-buddies and frissons, of single-bars and sex-pals; of dinner and a
show, is simply not there.

What should be a system of complex numbers, chaotic but beautiful
coupling fractals is thus reduced into a binary system: 0/1; on/off;
chronically single/comfortably coupled. As in any complex human
context, this bi-polarity is impoverishing. It denies the complexity of
our relationships, of our emotional needs and range, of our human wants
and fears. We date, after all, to know we are not alone.

The British modus operandi is also in stark contrast with the situation
in the rest of the developed world.

Throughout North America, as our blond celebrity ambassadors have
reminded us, there exists is a highly evolved set of codes and rules
for courtship; dating is an intrinsic part of the American social
landscape.

Even the most inept American will date on a fairly regular basis, and
will know the basic principles: you meet someone, either in the real
world or online. If you think there is the slightest possibility of
attraction, you ask them out to investigate. The first meeting is
low-key - an after-work drink, perhaps - the conversation is mutually
exploratory, the stakes are relatively low - both sides are aware that
an assessment is going on, but because there hasn't been a long build
up of suppressed and repressed lust or hopeful longings, one can get
out of an unsuccessful date with ones ego relatively intact. The man
pays, his role is pursuer; the girl accepts - her role is to be
tactically chased. If things go well, then a second more substantive
date is planned. Dinner perhaps, or a weekend lunch and a walk in the
park; physical intimacy proceeds in parallel with emotional knowledge
and time, and whilst there is endless Agony Aunty columns worth of
debate as to how far good upper-east side girls should go on the first
date, the point remains - there is a progression and a logic which is
relatively transparent to all.

Now, there are weaknesses to the American model (a rather
overly-regimented procedure, and a tendency towards the transactional)
and certainly the Americans are no freer of their Puritanical past then
the British are of their Victorianism, but nevertheless a substantive
and well understood system of courtship exists. That it exists
underlies an important attitude: that the business of finding love is
too important, too central an aspect of our lives to be left
unattended. It requires a system, and at least as much energy and time
as our professional quests demand of us.

The continental European solution to the same problem focuses more on
passion and heat then it does on systematic rules. Chivalry, romance
and the grand gesture are still very much part of everyday life in much
of Western Europe. In Italy, public busses skid to a halt mid-piazza,
should the driver spy a beautiful Senorita walking past; in France,
seduction is both art and sport; in Spain - as in South America - not
even Catholic orthodoxy has tempered the heat of Latin blood and love
and romance and flirtation are intrinsic to existence.

Again though, the underlying rationale is the same: the business of
finding one's soul-mate is important. It deserves to be treated with
importance. Buses should screech to a stop; poetry should be written,
risks should be taken.

The British, sadly, seem to think differently. Armed neither with the
systematic approach of the Americans nor with the passion of the
Europeans; the British populace face the quest for true love armed only
with two things: alcohol and chance.

If dating is not an option, and the climate and our stiff upper lips
and distaste for public displays of emotion preclude the grand-gesture;
then what are we left with? A six pack fuelled stationary cupboard snog
at the office party? A really big club night at a club where you hope
that if you run about enough with your mouth wide open eventually
you'll fall into someone in a similar state and your tongues will
accidentally meet?

This is not sustainable. Surely this is no way to populate a nation, to
quest for happiness. And in this age of globalisation, of digital
information flow, of healthy US-UK relations, surely Britain cannot
long stand alone?

Indeed, it does appear that, in London town at any rate, the old order
is crumbling?. London is the crux point of the crisis, because
London-woman, in touch with America dating models through movies, and
ever closer to the romanticism of European men who she meets on every
cheaper EasyHolidays, is beginning to raise her standards.
No longer satisfied with the "lets get drunk in a group and then shag
by accident, not refer to it, get embarrassed, and then repeat until we
can call it a relationship", model of British courtship, London-woman
wants more.

And she's beginning to be able to get it, because London is becoming,
by the multi-cultural minute, a more diverse place. Year-on-year the
statistics are clear. The world is coming to London. As of 2003
net-immigration for London showed an increase in internationalism, an
increase in languages spoken, and a net decrease in indigenous, Brits.
Put simply, this means that White Britishers are leaving London for out
into the wide open, date free, spaces of middle-England, whilst
multi-cultural men and women are moving into their Hampstead
homes.

These changes are visible on the streets and in the parks of London.
Where twenty years ago the average exposed belly on a summer's day was
white and pasty and flaccid, the average child a sticky white mess of
freckles. Today a stroll through Hyde Park will discover toned, tanned,
international mid-drift; the beautiful caf? latte coloured children of
inter-racial couplings: white and Black, Oriental and Latino, Asian and
Arab: In their green eyes set against honeyed skin, you are seeing new
London.

Translate that into the dating world, and what it means is that there
are more men from abroad in London than ever before. Men who didn't go
to boarding school, men who have experience of expressing feelings and
opening doors, men who understand flowers and flirtation; chivalry and
cunninlingus.

Up against that competition, in an environment that suddenly has
embraced such outlandish, un-English activities as "speed-dating" and
Match.co.uk; in this terrifying new jungle, with these scary new
predators, the typical white British male is in danger of extinction.
He needs help.

Here Simon wrote "Inverse-racism" in the margin. But he couldn't help
feel that JP might be right.

The Londoner's Practical Guide to Dating will be that help. Coming just
in time, the Guide will combine practical advice with penetrating
insights. Chapters will include:

1. Why Can't the English teach their children how to date?
The Status Quo. Reasons historical, comical, pastoral and tragical for
why things have got as bad as they have.

Sidebar: Fulham musical chairs and other British mating rituals

2. A Game of You
Understanding dating as a game. The basic rules of engagement, opening
gambits, moves and counters, thrusts and parries.

Sidebar: why there is no such thing as a good chat-up line

3. Know thy Opponent/Know thyself
The psychology of attraction, dating without words, types and
typos.

Sidebar: Multi-ethnic dating - when worlds collide

4. Gentlemen, Choose your Weapons
Different types of date: first dates, make or break dates, maintenance
dates, end-dates. How to control the dating stakes.

Sidebar: Speed Dating, Internet Dating, and other novelties

5. Sons of Monkeys
Social Darwinism &;amp; Dating - birds, bees and honeys

Sidebar: How do you stop a dog from humping your leg?

6. We Date to Know we are not Alone
The Single Ego and Dating - God hates a coward.

Sidebar: Dating, like democracy, is the worst of available systems.
Asides from all the others.

Simon sat in Soho Square for sometime after he finished reading. He
looked around him at the many couples frolicking freely in the sun,
casually holding hands, gazing into each other's eyes. He remembered
the last time he frolicked with anyone, in a green quad in Oxford. It
had seemed very easy back then, she was at his college. They had met in
Freshers' week. They had got drunk and kissed and been happy for a long
time. And then it stopped, and it hadn't been that easy since.

Simon went back to his office and emailed JP. It was a short
message.

From: Simon French [simon.french@angelpress.co.uk]
To: JP [jpaul@parallaxpictures.com]
Subject: Londoner's Guide

OK I read it and I think it's saleable. Needs research and fleshing
out, but I think you might be onto something. We should talk about how
to take it forward"

Simon

JP's response was immediate:

From: JP [jpaul@parallaxpictures.com]
To: Simon (work) [simon.french@angelpress.co.uk]

Subject: Re: Londoner's Guide

S -

The research is the point. We start immediately.

JP