Recent news stories sparked a lengthy and in depth discussion around dinner table about the term mistress and whether there was a male alternative. Some googling informed us that the official definition of a mistress is “a woman (other than the man's wife) having a sexual relationship with a married man”. But what if a married woman is having an affair with an unmarried man? There isn’t a word for that. Well, there is according to Urban Dictionary – “Manstress” but the fact that this term only seems to appear in Urban Dictionary says all you need to know about the extent to which the term has caught on. I was appalled by this finding and couldn’t believe that I hadn’t considered it before. I vowed to stop using the word “Mistress”, not that it was one that cropped up a lot in my day to day life anyway and would either refer to people as lovers or as having affairs.
Fear not, this isn’t an entire blog post dedicated to the sexist etymology of the English language, as happy as I would be to write such a post. It did get me thinking though about just how many words there are around dating and relationships and how blooming confusing it all is. Is kissing the same as snogging, smooching or pulling? Is pulling the same as getting with? What is the difference between dating someone, seeing someone and going out with someone and where does sleeping with someone fall into that (don’t get too excited, I haven’t slept with someone, I’m just looking into the semantics)? For that matter, if two people are described as sleeping together, does that also mean they’re seeing each other? Are they going out? Are they boyfriend and girlfriend? If you asked my mother she would say yes to all of the above. As far as her generation are concerned, if someone takes you out for dinner they are your boyfriend and you can have multiple boyfriends at once but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sleeping with any of them. She was getting as confused about all the terminology as I was. The concept of just sleeping with someone seems to be a relatively new phenomenon though and so to make this concept as simple as possible for Wing Mam, I suggested we use the term “slam piglet”. Example: “No, they’re not going out, they’re just slam piglets”. She loved it as a term but there still seemed to be some confusion around when and where to use it. My sister’s boyfriend is staying with us during lock down and now, when asking for my sister’s thoughts on something, Wing Mam suggests she asks her slam piglet, quite often whilst he is in ear shot. I only seem to have muddied the waters further.
One differentiation I have been able to clarify the more I ponder the topic, however, is the difference between fancying someone and liking someone. I haven’t Googled this one so you may all wholeheartedly disagree with my opinion but for me, fancying someone is far more transient than liking someone. You can fancy someone you’ve never met. For example: along with every other woman in the UK and possibly globally, I wholeheartedly fancy Paul Mescal, the actor who plays Connell in Normal People. I am actively attracted to him but do I like him? I haven’t the foggiest, I have absolutely no idea what he is like as a human being. I think fancying is a largely physical attraction and can be achieved either from a distance of through minimal interaction and meetings. Liking someone happens when you are both physically and emotionally attracted to them, when you spend enough time with them that you know their opinions, habits and preferences as well as their jawline and silver chain. In my eyes, at the most basic level, there are three tiers: fancying, liking, loving.
Where am I going with all of this though? I do have a point, I promise. In my previous post I said that I was a one guy kinda gal, that if I fancy someone I immediately stop fancying everyone else (at least in terms of people I actually encounter, fancying Paul Mescal carries on regardless of whether I’m fancying, liking or loving anyone). I lose interest in apps and the prospect of dating until I have worked out whether this fancy will level up to liking them or level back down to indifference. The part where I think the difference between the three tiers becomes the clearest is in the recovery time. In a very rudimentary equation, the longer you are with someone the higher tier you reach and the higher the tier the longer the recovery time is if and when things end. I think I’ve just cracked the E=MC2 of dating.
Basically what I am trying to say is that when I do fall for someone, I fall pretty hard and pretty fast but fancying someone is a fairly erratic emotion. It’s kind of like a rubber ball, the harder and faster you fall, the quicker you bounce back. Arguably some pretty questionable science there but it’s made me feel better about my approach to dating. All in all this is a clunky analogy and very long winded way of saying I very quickly moved on from fancying Bryn and arranged a date with a bloke called Tom.
Tom was a lawyer. I went on a date with a lawyer once before, many moons ago, when The Dater Analyst was in its infancy. The Original Lawyer Bae had moved from London up to Newcastle and had rather a high opinion of himself, his knowledge of wine and black labradors. Tom’s background was the exact opposite, having spent the last four years working for a firm in Newcastle he had now transferred to their London office. In the hope that his trajectory would continue in a reassuringly opposite direction of the last Lawyer Bae, I agreed to meet him for a drink. He suggested we meet at the bar in the National Theatre on Southbank. In hindsight, this seems like a slightly random location given that we had no intention of going to see a play but I assume the thinking behind it was that it was easily accessible from work for both of us. I was on my way there when I got a message from Tom saying “Just arrived. Sat out the front – the guy sat on his own!”. Not quite as informative as Bryn’s directions had been but appreciated nonetheless. Given that this date was pre-lockdown and actually took place in mid February, it was pretty damn chilly so I wasn’t expecting a large crowd to chose from in the outside seating area. I arrived to see a man sitting on his own by the entrance to the bar facing away from me so without a second thought went straight up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Tom?”. The man who turned around had a shaved head, full beard, was Spanish and was rather taken aback to be accosted whilst halfway through the crossword. I apologised and looked around me, seeing a blonde haired man sitting on his own in a suit and overcoat two tables away who much more closely resembled Tom’s Bumble pictures. Luckily he had not witnessed this performance but I had still had the giggles by the time I reached his table and had to explain what had happened. At least it got the date off to a light-hearted start.
We headed inside but the bar proved rather busy, clearly this was a more popular date location than I had thought, so we were forced to get our drinks and retreat back into the cold. I spotted one of those trendy and thoughtful baskets of blankets on my way out so grabbed a couple. Tom declined the one I offered him, a rookie error as it was blooming freezing, so I proceeded to cocoon myself in both of them, creating a look that I imagine wasn’t entirely dissimilar to mid-winter Mother Teresa. I hoped Tom found elderly nuns sexy.
We settled in and got down to the usual chat of what we did and where we grew up. I learnt that Tom was originally from Nottingham but having gone to uni in Newcastle he was offered a job at a law firm up there and decided to stay. My knowledge of Northumbrian law firms is limited to one but in a bid to sound both intelligent and engaged I asked Tom which firm he worked for. Miraculously it was the only firm I know. The reason I know it is because a good friend of mine’s stepfather is a partner there. I asked Tom if he had come across one of the partners called John before he moved down to their London office. “Ahhhh”, he exclaimed, “John’s meat trolley!” This was not the response I had expected. Apparently every Friday afternoon John would wheel a trolley through the office stacked high with steaks and cuts of beef. He would wander around the desks, selling his bovine wares to his colleagues. I mean, imagine if someone did that in London, sauntered through the office hawking mounds of bloody flesh. The vegans would go wild, it would be an absolute HR disaster. That was not the case in the Toon though and apparently it was very well received. Having been lucky enough to taste the steaks produced by John’s prize winning herd of long-horn cattle on more than one occasion, I was not surprised by this and was under no doubt that we were definitely talking about the same John.
We moved on from steak to our shared love of food in general. Tom was keen on eating out and since moving to London claimed he was yet to eat in the same restaurant twice. A bold claim but as an active member of a supper club (when Corona allows) which meets once a month to sample a new restaurant, I was impressed. Talking of which, he asked if I was hungry and wanted to head for dinner. He said there was a place nearby that he had heard really good things about and was keen to try. I agreed so we finished our pints and off we headed. What happened next would have been an amazing surprise if Tom hadn’t led me down the same back alleys and onto the same street made up entirely of two story, terraced, brick houses with sash windows, brightly coloured doors and vintage cars that Chicken Bae had taken me down exactly a week before.
Don’t get me wrong, I would still absolutely recommend a stroll down Roupell Street and dinner at the King’s Arms as a fantastic date but twice in seven days was a little bit too much of a good thai thing. Obviously I didn’t say as much to Tom. I mumbled something about having been here once before a while ago with a friend and how much of a fan of it I was – I didn’t want him to think I was some serial dater or anything… Luckily there were no disco jitters this time round and the wait in the bar for a table gave us plenty more opportunity to keep chatting. We moved on from John’s meat selection to try and find other mutual interests. There seems to be a bit of a theme forming - the subject of literature seems to come up on the majority of my dates and this one was no different. I am a self-confessed geek when it comes to books and the regularity with which I talk about them is making me wonder if I’m a bit of a bore on the topic but I promise on this occasion it was Tom who brought it up as he confessed he was also an avid reader. This boded well, having navigated the turbulent waters that are a first date we had managed to land on a piece of common ground but the relief was short lived. Tom’s interests lay in non-fiction and more specifically in late 21st century military history. I have no doubt that this is an absolutely fascinating genre but it is one that I know quite literally nothing about, I didn’t even know how to start asking vaguely intelligent sounding questions on the topic. We were plunged back into the current and left floundering for another overhanging branch of commonality to cling on to.
Somewhat bizarrely this came in the form of meditation. As ever, I tentatively mentioned that I am a proud upstanding millennial and dutifully do my meditation every morning. It turned out Tom was big into meditation as well but chose to do it in the bath every evening. I hadn’t even thought of this, genius! This was definitely a practice that I could get on board with. Realistically though, I’m not sure that lying in a bath with your eyes closed can really count as a hobby. A love of John’s steak and bathing seemed like fairly ropey foundations for a relationship. We were clearly starting to clutch at conversational straws.
This was confirmed as dinner progressed. I have started to notice when a date is going badly and it’s when I begin talking more. I try and fill the silences and seem as interesting as possible, as if the responsibility lies entirely with me to make a date successful. I haven’t worked out what the deep-rooted subconscious psychological reasoning is for this but by the time we had finished dinner we had covered hitchhiking with a truck driver in Australia, looking for blood feuds in Albania and temporarily misplacing a friend in the Chilean dessert. Things weren’t looking good. I was exhausted from my monolog and he must have thought I was a boastful gap yah wanker. As we left the restaurant and headed for the tube station I had fears that the Groundhog Day date would continue and I would face another excruciatingly awkward on-tube farewell. It was a relief when we arrived and realised we were heading in separate directions. There was a civilised farewell hug and we embarked on our respective lines. Two dates down at The King’s Arms and two lawyers dated but no luck on either fronts. Fingers crossed it will be third time lucky, although I think I need a bit of a breather before facing a third pad thai.