Suzanne Portnoy

Lastminute.com, laterooms.com, tripadvisor.com. My head is swimming from trying to find a decent hotel that isn’t going to cost us an arm and a leg and has a room free between Xmas and New Year. My boyfriend thinks Dorset might be nice or maybe Bath or somewhere near to there. I am not bothered as long as there is a log fire, a big, comfy bed, perhaps a spa with a steam room and a bathtub that seats two. Can anyone think of anywhere they have been to recently and would recommend and fits all our criteria? Answers, like usual, via comments please or you can write to me at suzanneportnoy@hotmail.co.uk and if I take you up on your suggestion, I’ll pop some lube and a Durex Twinkle in the post to you.

‘I think I’m getting the silent treatment,’ said my girlfriend to me over the phone last night. I was lying in the bath at the time. The water was hot. By the time we had finished the conversation that covered the messy state of her guy’s apartment, the fact he wouldn’t share his one bedside light when she wanted to read a book in bed alongside him, the tantrum he had thrown when she accidentally spilled water on his worn carpet, his cooking ability, his beer belly, his rather large nose, the water was freezing cold.

‘How long has it been?’ I replied.

I sent a text this morning and then again tonight.  He just texted back that he was free to talk at the weekend,’ she replied. ‘I think I’m getting dumped.’

Meanwhile, earlier in the day, another girlfriend rang me to announce that her most recent lover, a man she had known only on Skype until last weekend when they consummated their relationship, now seemed to be back on the scene after finally landing in a country with a decent internet connection. Having disappeared for three days following their meeting, she had begun to display classic female fruitcake behaviour - texting and emailing three or four times in a day in an effort to get noticed.

I’ve written about this before but it’s worth pointing out again that chicks just want consistency and they like closure. I’ve yet to work out why this is such a problem for guys because mostly I like to think I’ve got most things about guys worked out. They don’t like too much brain damage, they like to be able to do what they want when they want (within reason), they like a woman who likes sex. Lying like a dead fish is not an attractive quality in any woman, even if she looks like a supermodel and how those pouty lips that always look on the verge of giving a blowjob. Believe me, I have met enough men who have dumped supermodels and airline stewardesses and glamour girls to know the dead fish look is a passion killer.

Whereas girls I know pretty much want only one thing - they want consistency. They want a guy to ring when he says he is going to ring. They want daily communication, however brief. They want to know someone is thinking about them, even if it’s just for five minutes. They don’t want a guy who says, ‘I’ll ring you later’ and then rings two days later. They don’t want a guy who says, ‘Let’s get together on the weekend’ and just disappears. Adults are no different from children, whom I believe thrive best when they understand and are given boundaries. Let a child run around without any rules or routines and mainly they end up confused and feeling abandoned. Similarly, women like to know where they stand. And being grown-ups and women, we prefer closure to long silences. Guys, if a woman starts texting like a freak, it’s usually for a reason. If feelings aren’t reciprocated, it’s best just to say so then leave a woman hanging.

The thing is that I love my girlfriends to bits and I want them to be happy. So guys, if you’re listening, can you please just do the right thing and pick up the phone.

‘I could happily have a relationship that consists of nothing more than a few text messages a day,’ I said the other day.

What was I thinking?

It’s true. I have had so called relationships that have existed purely between mobile phones. Were they happy relationships? I’m not so sure. Looking back, I remember being happy for a week or two. I remember liking the attention. I liked being temporarily diverted from whatever I was doing. I liked thinking that someone was thinking about me. I liked not having to worry about my kids snooping in on a telephone conversation or of having to create much space in my life for someone new.

But after a few days and often weeks of nothing but texting, I remember feeling disorientated and a bit pissed off. I started to feel that I was nothing more than cheap wank fodder. That what I wanted to hear was a real voice or feel a real person’s touch, something, anything to connect me to the person at the end of the phone. In one particular relationship, when our texts and instant messaging had gone on for months, I actually deleted the guy from my phone when he couldn’t commit to a date to meet. Here was a guy that only lived an hour or two away and yet couldn’t find a space in his diary for me, even though he managed to find two hours a day to masturbate on instant messager.

I know some women find the whole text message relationship thing a big cop out. ‘It’s for guys that are lazy,’ my friend Angelika said to me last night. ‘It’s a way of avoiding real communication.’

I’m not so sure that text messaging is about avoidance, just as I’m not so sure I’m not blame when I end up in a text message relationship. Men are so bloody literal. I mean, how many guys might think that by saying that I could have entire relationships by text message that I meant that I wanted one. The truth is that I don’t want one, just as I don’t want to spend 2 hours a night on the phone either. What I would like is a bit of a balance. A phone call now and then, a shag two or three times a month, text messaging in between. Doesn’t sound too unreasonable, does it?