Le Meridian Hamburg; having peanuts for dinner because I can’t be bothered to wrap one of their bathrobes around my pasty white body long enough to answer the door for room service. Truth be told, it’s not the peanuts that I’m after; it’s the salt. The peanuts are simply bite-sized delivery vehicles with good mouth feel. In an ideal world I’d suck the salt off those babies and spit them out again but the concept sounds a little to risqué for my Victorian sensibilities.
In the past two weeks I have slept in my own bed for a grand total of six fitful hours. This stopover at home was due to the baffling and impenetrable mechanics of airline pricing which dictated that it was more cost effective to fly me from Copenhagen to London before sending me to Hamburg. Thus I ended up backtracking 550 miles instead of advancing 300 but I did get to play luggage roulette at Heathrow a couple more times.
I’ve been instructed by a friend of mine to a) write more and b) be more funny. It seems that my last instalment had her competing for jumping space on a nearby bridge and she felt that, given her current situation of inadvertent celibacy, stories of unrequited love might just cause her to lose her grip.
Truth be told, “inadvertent celibacy” should be changed to “self imposed celibacy” because she has no lack of opportunities. Her complaint is that the bevies of men queuing to buy her dinner are too young to bother with.
“They’re just little boys! Why would I want to go out with a 28 year old?”
“Uh, the sex?” I said.
“I don’t want sex, I want a grownup man and a relationship.”
“Wait, let’s get back to the sex. I’m a 42-year-old guy and if some twenty-something hottie asked me out I would hesitate only long enough to check the expiration date on the packet of condoms that are slowly crumbling to dust in my night table.”
“You don’t understand”
No, I don’t. I really, truly, honestly, sincerely, don’t.
I’m not exactly the kind of guy who women, even those of questionable sobriety, make a pass or even cast a passing glance at so the mere thought of someone actually fancying me enough to ask me out to dinner is enough to make my palms sweat.
My friend does not suffer from this malady. Indeed, she is as brilliant as she is lovely which is to say, amazingly so; with a dry wit delivered faster and more accurately than one of those smart bombs which cause guys in the Pentagon to get stiffies over. She has a semi-respectable career, owns her own flat and is someone you could bring home to meet the folks without having to explain away any embarrassing twitches or forehead tattoos.
Why she is still on the prowl is a mystery to me and indeed most of the above ground inhabitants of at least four of the major landmasses on this planet. It’s not that she doesn’t want some willing bloke to take a swim around in her gene pool, it’s just that she is holding out for George Clooney and at last report he only goes for blondes.
My friend from the Midlands isn’t the only attractive woman of my acquaintance who bemoans her solitary life. I have the occasional dinner with a woman who, it must be said, was designed by God on one of His better days. After a drink or two she will invariably launch into a soulful lament about the lack of available men out there. This after flirting shamelessly with the waiter, guys at the next table, the bouncer and practically every male we encounter over the course of the evening- with the exception, of course, of me.
Does she not realize that she could have her pick of any man within a 150-mile radius of her blast zone? Married, engaged, long term committed relationship; at the “I” bit in “I do” it doesn’t matter. Any man not being wheeled along with a sheet pulled over his head would abandon his wife, sell his children into slavery, torch his home and torpedo his career if she said that’s what it took to be with her. Not simply because she is heart-stoppingly beautiful (she is) or rocket-scientist smart (she is) or that men are fickle, amoral, weasels (we are) but because taken as a whole, women like her are thin on the ground. Even setting aside the fact that any man alive, straight or gay, would fuck her, we (speaking as the entire male species), in the long run, really do want the whole package. So yes, it is the sex but it’s not just the sex. Sometimes.
So why is this particular friend of mine not coupled up? I personally think that she is spoiled for choice and has lost interest in the game. Whereas people like me, average looks, poor math skills, have to settle for whoever will settle for us (and oft times fight for the privilege), my lovely friend has had so many offers that she has simply withdrawn into a shell of indifference. Her knee-jerk reaction to any guy who shows an interest is to tease a bit and then shut him down. On the rare occasion she hooks up with a bloke, he’ll be just as gorgeous as her and just as emotionally withdrawn.
Not that I’ll be loosing any more hair worrying about how empty it can be for beautiful people to fuck other beautiful people but it does illustrate the theory that no matter what we have, we always want something else. Even if we are constantly told that what we have is the best thing going.
Why is this relevant to me? Because my friend from the Midlands, the one who thinks 28 is below the legal age of majority, tells me all the time how lucky I am to be with the woman currently sharing my airspace: to have a relationship which is easy and stable and, even though it’s not the most passionate, possessing tenderness and a large laughter factor.
She tells me these things and I am caught up short. Lucky? Really? But what about all those times I’m bored and wish that the person lying next to me were reading Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Ethics rather than Good Housekeeping? And you know, a bit more sex wouldn’t go amiss either. And don’t get me started about how she can’t put anything back into the same place twice and…
But when the lights go out, the night is quiet and I’m in our bed, together again after days of being apart, when her breathing is all I can hear and she is warm and soft and pressed against me- it’s then and, truth be told, a few thousand other times during the course of every single day, when I realize that my friend is right, through no fault of my own and certainly undeservingly so, I am a lucky man.