How to win at the mating game
In the search for true love and life partnerships, always remember that the core counts more than the surface, writes Mark Barnes
I’m sitting in a fancy restaurant, in a fancy shopping centre, in Joburg. It’s Saturday morning, people have come out to eat and shop and meet him, see her, maybe. Masks on (until the food arrives), socially more distant than usual, but there’s lots to see if you can get through the mist of social networks. I order a fancy breakfast — smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, with cherry tomatoes, avo and cream cheese on the side, no bread — naked salmon scramble, if you like, and a freezo what-what. It’s a look, and it’s not so bad a taste.
At the table nearest and in front of me are seated two thirtysomething nerds — almost out of place in this rarefied air of show-offs and wannabes — but the happiest couple of the lot. Checked shirt meets loose dress, old watch meets no-label handbag, long socks meets sensible shoes — there isn’t a smartphone in sight — they’re here to meet each other. Breakfast is tea in a pot, shared, and some fancy, so not heart foundation-approved cake slices. They can hardly resist one another.
The rest of us are all obvious in our differences, in our associations — branded disciples of embedded messages we didn’t write, refugees of a sameness that gives us cover, that lets us gather. We’re at the Edmund Hillary Institute of Social Breakfast Climbing. Eating is optional (though clearly often indulged), being seen is obligatory.
Couples that have been together forever (a few) and couples seemingly meeting for the first time (awkward, but eager) all gather here. Everyone wears a badge. The clothes are either tight enough to inhibit circulation, or loose enough to cover any form. Everything’s OK — it’s Saturday breakfast.
I can’t help but compare the nerds (the only couple not on show) to the overdones and the underdones.
In the search for a mate, for a life partner, there are such vastly different starting points, some on display today. A few happy survivors are also there. A conservatively dressed, too smart for a Saturday picnic couple, at least in their late 50s, choose a table just to the right. With care, if not habitually, the hair always combed man pulls out the chair for his also not a hair out of place wife to sit down, as she instinctively puts his mask, car keys and cellphone into her handbag, where they belong. He calls for the menu, he orders — later he’ll pay. Relics of a bygone era, perhaps, but they’re OK with their rules.
The protest-dressers and obviously expensive dressers are there, as are the meticulously displayed “I don’t give a damn how I look!” pretenders. This fancy dress ain’t gonna tell you much about its inmates. To find out whether people are worth investing your soul into, you’re gonna have to age them, roll them forward, to try and figure out who you’ll end up with. Difficult? No, impossible. But you have to.
Not quite to old age, but certainly to that place where you finally have to start being yourself, having figured out who you are, and accepted the flaws. It turns out it has very little to do with the plumage you wore at the first showing. It has even less to do with what you — your face ’n stuff — looked like when you first met. It also turns out that to be liked initially — for your polite, if not superficial demeanour, or for the LSM bracket you wear on your sleeve — is not that important either.
You have to be nice enough at the first meeting not to be blocked from the possibility of a second, but that’s it. It’s far more important to find that people like you more the more they know you, that the core is better than the surface (and not the other way around).
Seriously, let the real you out sooner rather than later — it’ll save a lot of time, and heartache.
We all end up looking more or less the same, really we do. Look around you. But we have very different personalities — as far apart as the early-onset grumpiness granddad is from the empathy in abundance, wizened mom of many.
That result, and whether anyone will care enough to be there to share it with you, is up to you.
The measures that count so much more than the strutting does now are qualities like kindness, tolerance, empathy, understanding — real stuff like that.
A sense of humour will prove more valuable than an opinion. Vulnerability will get you further than rank. Worth will be discovered, no need to wear it on your sleeve. We often only see one side of the balance sheet, anyway. Give credit where it’s due. Celebrate the differences between us. Don’t look for your golf ball where you’d like to find it. Make sure you fill up at the right garages of life. Laugh a lot, but shout out loud against injustice. And finally, to pass on advice once given to me by a friend: don’t be the arsehole.
The nerds were holding hands when I left. They win.
Celebrate the differences between us ... and to pass on advice once given to me by a friend: don’t be the arsehole