Suzanne Portnoy

At the moment I’m reading two books. The first, The Complete Book of Rules, is all about how to snare ‘Mr. Right’ and get the ring. My agent as food for thought gave it to me. He wondered if perhaps I should start at square one giving my predilection for breaking all the rules.

The other, given to me by my friend Ms. Robinson is, ‘The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage - a thoughtful collection of essays told in first person. The latter is interesting in that primarily it shows that there is really no Mr. Right. Most relationships are really about compromising and coming to an understanding, constant negotiation and renegotiation and that for much of the time the men we choose fall far short of our ideal.

Between the two of them and a dating workshop I attended a few weeks ago (again for research), it’s hard to know what to believe and it’s easy to understand why we’re all confused.

The dating coach I saw the other week suggested to the women in the group that they make the first move and ask for a guy’s number if they fancy them. The Rules says never to ask for a guy’s number and the Bitch in the House would suggest that whether or not you get the guy’s number is pretty immaterial – he’ll end up disappointing you at the end of the day anyway.

The Rules says never to shag on the first date and to basically play hard to get for as long as possible until the ring is in sight. The dating coach said that basically everyone goes to a singles event to get laid anyway and the more successful ones bag a shag that night. The Bitch in the House says that the first shag is always going to be the most exciting anyway and after that it’s pretty much all downhill unless you have affairs or take other partners into the relationship or basically do stuff after a year or two to keep the fire burning.

The Rules says that pretending to be this unobtainable, desirable person is what it’s all about. It’s all about getting the ring, making dating sound just like extended foreplay until one reaches the door of Tiffanys. The dating coach said be happy with who you are and people will like you. The Bitch in the House says that very often we turn into dislikeable people when we marry, even when that is seemingly what we desire.

Just reading all the conflicting viewpoints is making me tired. It all seems so prescriptive; so try this or that and it will all work out OK. Whatever that happens to be. Meanwhile my rational brain believes that the right person comes along when the right person is meant to come along and no amount of pretending, fucking or not fucking on the first date, calling or not calling is really going to change that. Sure, I can see that a slightly unavailable woman is more attractive than the stalker who texts a hundred times a day but this is just common sense. Just as I can completely understand Valerie’s stern comment on one of my recent posts that ‘if he doesn’t ring, he’s just not interested.’

Despite all of this, I’m thinking, purely as an experiment you understand, to try The Rules thing and see what happens. Not fucking on the first date would be a novelty for me. Never picking up the phone would be a real challenge. The book suggests pretending to be someone that you are not so I could pretend to be my long lost virginal twin who has only slept with a handful of guys and doesn’t know how to give a blowjob. I could pretend that I’m not a bestselling author of erotica but a lowly publicist who, in my spare time, runs a small knitting circle with a bunch of other spinsters. Of course, in order to do this, I would have to ensure that my suitors never visit my house, see my drawer full of sex toys or any of my lingerie. Who knows, it could be fun and as my kids’ free time is almost upon me, I’ll have plenty of spare time. Taking a summer holiday from being me could be just the kind of break I need.

First things first. My new podcast is up and this week I’m joined by the absolutely fabulicious Angelika Jinx of Naive London Girl fame. We talk about sex blogging, dating and lots of other girly stuff. We may even talk about shoes…

As is my want, every four months or so I upload my profile on some dating website to see if any new fish have entered the very small pond I normally swim in. As is my want, the day after I upload my profile I pull it down again, when the thought of going through 50+ responses becomes too much to bear. I look at my kids’ free weekends, realise that I don’t have any until the end of the summer and wonder why I bothered with any of it.

The other day, a little bored, I went onto GirlsGoFree.com because someone told me it was a freebie site for chicks and, well, being Jewish, I hate paying for something I can get for nothing. I posted up my profile, mentioned that I had some swinging experience, very little free time, a penchant for threesomes, the usual nonsense in other words. The site had a blogging section and so I posted a few times on that too, mentioning my holiday to France, having sex three days in a row, eating pussy for the first time in a long while. More nonsense. And, as usual, lots of guys started writing to me, none of whom I was particularly that keen to meet although a couple looked like they might be quite fun. Sometimes it’s just nice to feel wanted and I suppose that was why I posted in the first place - just for some validation.

It was good to know that despite not having any free time and being a single, workaholic mum, that there were a whole group of guys who wanted to get to know me. Not that I don’t get that from writing here but it was nice to get it from guys who didn’t know anything more about me other than what they saw on the site and not from what they summised from reading about me in a book or on this blog.

I checked onto the site for a couple of days until yesterday when, without warning, I suddenly disappeared. I logged in a few times just to check I had the right password, even got the site to resend my password again but it appeared that I had been bumped off the site. When I wrote to them to ask why I received no response. It was the not first time I had been barred from a dating site. Once I was invited to join a site called gorgeous people or simply gorgeous or something like that. They bumped me off after I wrote ‘I like big cocks’ in the WHAT I LIKE section and ‘I don’t like small cocks’ in the WHAT I DON’T LIKE section. They said sexual talk wasn’t allowed on the site and I wondered why as I thought that’s why most people went on dating sites… to get laid.

This morning I met up with a girlfriend for lunch and explained that I had been barred from GirlsGoFree.com.

‘Has this happened to you before?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Once before.’

‘Maybe you should go around all the dating sites and see how many will kick you out,’ she said.

‘That would be too easy,’ I said.

Nevertheless the experience made me realise that when it comes to dating dos and don’ts I am so out of practise that even if you pointed to the floodlit landing strip, guided me down from the tower and had a co-pilot by my side, I stll couldn’t find it. I don’t need a roadmap to negotiate the rules of dating so much as a specially tuned GPS. Realising this, I did what any girl would do and went straight back to one of my tried-and-tested swinging sites where noone bats an eyelid at the fact I have a preference for anal over oral, threesomes over 1-on-1 and blindfolds over nipple clamps. Within five minutes I had ten responses, most of them from quite intelligent sounding guys who have similar preferences to my own. No doubt tomorrow I’ll pull the ad down again but at least it will be me pressing the delete button and not some prudish webmaster. Like everyone else, I hate rejection, even dating site rejection.