Dating is like spying

ATING in your 30s is what I imagine being a professional spy must feel like. In a romantic comedy. It’s a game of subterfuge, bars and whiskey. Each player is trying to find out something about the other player, while attempting to throw each other off their own scent.

When the game begins, you let them believe certain things about you. That you are more outgoing, more responsible, more active, and actually on a diet. You let them think you’re cool and mysterious, and that you never ever poop.

You show them how smart and adventurous and open to exciting possibilities you are, but also how adorably unavailable. Meanwhile, you’re literally becoming your parents and eating the same four or five things every day because no one told you how annoying food can be.

Another big thing that no one tells you (and let’s face it, you wouldn’t believe them anyway) is that what you think you want, how you feel, and what you say you want, are all different things that never stay the same.

So one day you promise eternal love and fidelity, and you look at this other person, and you can’t believe how lucky you are and how perfect everything is, and you “can’t wait” for your haters to see you now, because that is how you feel in that moment.

But come the morning light, you are no longer the same person.

You are grumpy and suddenly see yourself as a wild stallion running free and untamable, and this other person you just declared eternal love to, is holding a goddamn lasso because, you guessed it, we’re in the Wild West, baby.

Now you’re feeling the noose tighten. You don’t want breakfast any more, and you certainly don’t want to spoon.

But then later you forget and you feel bad, and you reduce yourself to begging for forgiveness because, oh, cr**! I think I…

But now you have a problem.

The amazing, witty, sexy and spontaneous, emotionally available version of you that hooked up last night is who the other person thinks they have found. Say it slowly with me: emotionally available.

Are you, though? Are you, really? Yeah. Didn’t think so.

And therein lies the con. We are believing in attentive, functional adult people with goals and lifeplans? Who are on the same page? Whose sex drives sync and where no one ever gets bloated? (Sexy people don’t get bloated, do they?) That’s crazy talk.

Life is not a fairy tale. So what do you do now that the ball has ended, the mask has slipped, and your date takes off faster than you can say, “Wait! your shoe.”

The “right” thing to do would be to alert the other person to the reality of you in a slow, gentle manner. Admit that you might still be insecure and needy, but you are so much better at hiding it now.

Also, you’d need two or three days apart at your discretion, plus TV choosing powers. Date me? But who does that? Instead, we go looking for someone else to fill the damn shoe the runaway pumpkin-driving love of your life left behind.

What happens? You don’t find them, you don’t see what’s in front of you, and you develop a shoe fetish.

And that, my friends, is dating in your 30s.

Its a minefield of carefully crafted lies and self-sabotage, awkward pauses and absolute inconsistency.

All while you drink a round with your friends to your fabulous life.

But the truth is, you still don’t know jack about anything, and the more you say you do, the more trouble you’re in.

You have a vague idea of what you want and it makes you kinda believe that you could be up for anything until you realise you don’t actually want anything.

What you want, is to quietly hold out hope for something better while managing to keep what you do have, just in case nothing better comes along. Classic espionage. Only thing is, you can’t see that the red laser light is pointing at you.