On Dating Advice Columns

Walking the dog into work every morning is a wonderful opportunity to process the thoughts and experiences recently accrued into some form of ordered thought. It can also be a source of frustration when the dog wants to stop every 10 seconds, but today was a good day and I’m appreciative for Bernie’s constructive support on the way in this morning.

Recently it’s come up on my radar that single people are totally inept at talking to one another and maybe the vast majority of world issues could be solved if men and women figured things out and learned how to operate with one another. This is probably a bold statement to declare as there are ever so many people out there slogging away, trying their best to swim in the polluted waters of modern dating, and, to be perfectly honest with you, my motivations for writing this blog are purely selfish: it’s more fun to hang out with married couples now that I am married than it is with single people. Single people tend to bend the conversation around their travails and have absolutely nothing to relate back to me, as they cannot relate to my experience as they have not had it.

So then I found myself shopping for magazines for my wife as she lies in bed with the lurgy, and picked up a copy of Vogue, as you do. It’s interesting to analyse the thought process that goes into picking up a copy of Vogue in the Sainsbury’s Local, but that’s another column.

Anyway, I do have several books to read, but I do enjoy flipping through fashionable publications as I do enjoy thinking about fashion as a concept, and how the current context regurgitates old ideas dressed up with snazzy photographs in the effort to sell daft hand creams.

I won’t judge anyone’s grift though.

In the midst of very un-beautiful advertising photographs and sad write ups about interior design, was the saddest piece of them all: Vogue’s Dating Column.

I suppose the manifestation of the Vogue Dating Column is that Annie Lord, the author, is the visual avatar for the conventional reader of Vogue magazine and the reader is supposed to be able to see themselves in the copywriting and ‘relate’.

So then I found myself thinking a very good response to Annie Lord’s column on my way into work, and probably could have done with speaking it out loud as then I wouldn’t forget all of it..

But we’ll press ahead, and hopefully there will be some summation of wisdom by the end of this:

Modern Dating is Rubbish because nobody has the ability to embrace romance in their everyday activity. Annie Lord is correct in identifying dating apps as a source of trouble, as the modern landscape of dating app reduces potential partners to the same level of the meal you want to order on Just Eat, or the show you are searching for on Netflix. The infinite stream of faces creates the sense of disposability, and because there will always be a new face to swipe to next, the user will never, ever find The One.

Couple this to fashionable and daft behavioural traits in the general lives of males and females, and you have a recipe for loneliness, lack of fulfillment and a general sense of despair at the world.

I find it fascinating that in our existence we all seem terribly obsessed with finding our soul mates, yet what the world teaches us in terms of behaviour is so inefficient. We end up with cultures of fear – women are unable to ever open up to a man. They are totally dominated by novel workplace drama, that although gives them many different money tokens and lots of different objects to purchase, gets in the way of being able to develop their own character and identify where romance is and follow the scent.

Men are relegated to fearful oppressors, and indeed the most celebrated males in recent history, for example Tom Brady going by this issue of Vogue, are celebrated for having absolutely no say in the running of their family and indeed Giselle’s spread in the magazine crafted a terrifying dystopic idea of a marriage where the two contributors are unable to work together and communicate openly and clearly.

From the male perspective, if you are unable to express yourself in any natural way, and indeed your natural way of being is frowned upon as risky, you are left to pursue risque ideas and relationships as that’s the only source of adventure you can find in the world. Leading, inevitably, to a life alone, hopping between bedrooms of women who would love to be taken seriously for a change, and not just as a disposable hole to fill on a Friday night.

I would want to reassure the reader that life is much more satisfying when lived in tandem with your love, and indeed the whole point of marriage was to say that where there once were two separate people, there now exists one in union. You are able to define the dynamics of your relationship and the man is free to be masculine and the woman is free to be feminine.

I am generally left scratching my head at the state of the cultural industries, as they all pedal this dogma of ‘social progress’ and making ‘transgressive’ ideas become the norm, yet all of the people pedaling these honky-tonk ideas tend to be massively depressed and followed by a cloud of despair.

If these ideas were worth more than the back of the fag packet they were written on, then surely people would actually be happy. I thought this was the general understanding that good ideas make people happy and bad ideas make people sad. Yet we also inhabit a culture where the fashion creates a vortex of despair and if you step out of the vortex you lose all of your social clout and can no longer make a living in these decadent, idiotic and unhelpful circles of delusional dullards, which is massively frightening as you have to blow up your whole life and start again.

Which I suppose is the reason that people stick with it and live lives dominated by sadness.

To me I can’t understand why someone would want to live a life of sadness – it’s illogical on many levels, and I’ll give a brief advertisement to the alternative:

– Life lived in partnership with your love creates the ultimate romance novel and you get to write it daily.
– This romantic narrative then leads to incredible scenes and populates your world with objects that are the manifestation of your love, bringing joy to any abode that you find yourself living in.
– Not needing to think about finding your soulmate opens up massive amounts of time for you to work on collaborative projects with your spouse.
– ????? – I’m still writing my romantic novel, and each page we turn to is full of surprises and joy. Highly recommended, 5 stars.

Now, it is very simple to be able to access this type of experience, but it requires a degree of bravery in the first instance, as it’s my belief that The World rewards those who perpetuate sadness.

You will need to accept that if you want to live a life of romance, you need to embrace risk. You need to be able to take the time to stop listening to the terrible advice given out to you to be ’empowered’ ‘singular’ and all of these meaningless, hollow buzzwords of joy sucking abandon. Think about the past and how the romantic archetypes of history acted. Women were beautiful in a classical ideal, and Men were heroic in the best sense of the word. There was mutual respect, flirtation, intrigue and fun. Men would work hard to be the best they could be while acting with general good nature, with women operating the same in their own world.

Once you have found an appropriate candidate, treat them with respect and run the idea in your mind that this is the person that you could be spending the rest of your life with. Think of no one else but the person in front of you. Switch off your cellular device and improvise your date. See where the romance takes you.

Do not sleep with your prospective partner, as this is the incorrect way of doing relationships. Save it for the right moment – value it, and don’t hand it out for peanuts when it is the most valuable manifestation of love in our existence. It is far better to drive one another crazy with desire, so that you would move mountains just to be made one with your other.

The purpose of sex is the act of procreation, which is why people who tend to have lots of non-creative sex tend to be massively unfulfilled and unhappy, stuck in a rut, literally. You are more than a rutting animal and by gaining control over your desires you will be able to harness the massive energy that they provide to a body and surprise yourself with what you are able to achieve.

I guess the saying goes, if your current strategy keeps yielding the same, sad results, then why do you bother to keep doing it? What have you got to lose?

I’ve written enough about the pornographication of the world and how this damages the world at a soulful level, but if you watch porn then switch it off as it’s not real. The daft idea of a brutish man violently pounding a woman is not what anyone wants, and creates mental blockages to true romantic expression.

If your right hand is causing you pain, cut it off.

I could go on, but I think this is far too much for one blog. I write this in the hope that the reader will find joy and fulfillment and their ultimate soulmate, as it makes me feel sad to see a world filled with people who feel sad, like life is not a fantastic gift to experience, as I assure you that life is the best thing that you’ll ever do (if lived well).