The Oxford Male
Clutching my phone in my sweaty palms I tapped out the message: “Will you text me in the morning?” It was three minutes since I stepped uncertainly onto the nightbus. Fifteen minutes since I stumbled out of the club. Twenty minutes since the goodnight kiss, which had slightly more tongue and groping than the romantic archetype. Looking back on it, this text was horrendous and cringeworthy, but the drunken logic behind it still seems quite reasonable to me.
There is a brief window in the early stages of a relationship where no boundaries have been set. The old fashioned notion of stating one’s intentions has long since passed away and so we all experience this fuzzy state where every text message is laden with intrigue. Surely, the time for acting coy has passed by the times matters have gone below the belt? But drunkenness and alcohol-fuelled intimacy mean that I have been known to pull people who I would much rather never see again.
Somehow, asking “what do you want from this night?” makes us even more vulnerable than the actual squelchy physical communication which replaces the verbal. Whether we are secretly hoping for the start of something beautiful or ten to twelve minutes of fun, expressing our desires with words means trusting a stranger, and that is something I can never quite bring myself to do.
We learn the physicality of sex thanks to the torrent of hormones which pump around our bodies as teenagers, and we learn the rudiments of dating and the settled and comfortable balance of a mature relationship from watching our peers and movies. What I have found a lot harder to pick up are the awkward bits which come between each of those stages.
Personally, I blame the montage, television’s notorious storytelling device which neatly avoids the need to write a script for those bits of life which are awkward and thorny. And so, my crude seven word text message was my first attempt at scripting one of these bridges that crop up so frequently during the early stages of meeting and getting to know people.
Ideally, those moments would happen organically, and I would travel happily between first date and second knowing exactly how both he and I felt. Realistically, these moments are forced, awkward affairs. Those split seconds at the end of a date when one person tilts their face in for a kiss and the other leaves it a moment too long. Luckily, this time, my phone vibrated with a swift drunken reply of “definitely”. So maybe my tactic of needy bluntness has some merit.
The only myth I hope to destroy this week is that playing it cool makes you more desirable. Everyone likes to be liked and whispered mumblings of “I really fancy you” can be far more powerful than the physicality we usually hope gets the same message across. Embrace the potential for awkward moments. Or just do as I did, use your onehundred- and-sixty letters of text to blurt your insecurities out into the ether, instantly regret it and mindlessly hope for the best.
18th May 2006