Romantically Challenged

by Sami Lukis

  It was a perfectly rational solution to a really unfortunate problem. I’d paid a lot of money to fly to the other side of the world to ski on some of the most magnificent slopes in Europe. Why should my holiday be ruined when there was a simple solution at hand?

  But when I presented the proposal to John he acted like I’d asked him to cut off a fucking limb. He only reluctantly ageed to the move when he wasn’t able to offer an alternative solution. But I think his ego had been bruised.

  Because he found a way to get his revenge that night at dinner, in what I like to call ‘mash-gate’.

  Helen and I had spent a couple of weeks exploring Italy together before John and his mates met up with us. Our Italian adventure had turned into a two-week pasta odyssey. We ate as much pasta as we could, as often as we could – usually for lunch and dinner. And it was delizioso!

  I can cope with brief spurts of intense carb-loading, thanks to a pretty high metabolism, but my jeans were definitely starting to feel snug. And by the time I met up with my boyfriend, after not seeing him for a few weeks, I was feeling a little uncomfortable about the appearance of a mini-muffin top. Look, I’d probably only gone from a size eight to a size ten, so I didn’t lose any sleep over it. But I was already a little self conscious whenever I was naked around him, especially during sex. That stupid cow gravity had started forcing some of my forty-year-old body parts in a rather unflattering southerly direction and I didn’t like it. I couldn’t even recognise my own boobs anymore.

  So when all of us went out to dinner on that third night of our holiday I ordered a healthy salad. But when John’s plate of steak and mash arrived at the table, that fluffy white mound of potato and butter looked so damn good. I did what any girlfriend is well within her rights to do, and reached across towards his plate, with the intention of stealing one innocent little forkful of mash.

  Just one forkful, to taste, because I’d ordered the dumb salad.

  Well, John must have clocked what was about to happen and before my fork could get anywhere near his mash, he sprang into action and wrapped his arms all the way around his plate as if he was protecting something incredibly valuable. Then he said to me, loudly enough for everyone at the table to hear, ‘Do you really think you need that, Sam?’

  And he glanced down at my waist and raised his eyebrows and then looked back up at me as if to say, ‘The answer is no. You most definitely do not need the mash.’

  Oh yes he did. My boyfriend fucking mash-shamed me! He protected that mashed potato behind a double-arm wall, so I couldn’t get near it.

  It’s kind of weird that I can still recall that moment, from all those years ago, so vividly. But I remember feeling humiliated and belittled in front of his friends, and in complete shock that a grown man could act so childishly. Plus, come on, how could I ever forget the one and only time I’ve ever been publicly mash-shamed?

  I tried to convince myself that I’d misread it. Maybe he was just trying to be funny. At my expense. But the next night at dinner I ordered the pasta. And after I’d finished every last delicious piece of penne on my plate, John turned to me and said, ‘Geez, you polished that off, didn’t you?’ Again with the face and the snide little glance down at my muffin top.

  So it turned out my boyfriend wasn’t just a mash-nazi. He was a carb-nazi too. (Oh, and a total fuckwit.)

  I’m happy to report that his malicious little comments did not send me into an unhealthy spiral of starvation and bulimia. I just broke up with him instead.

  There were a bunch of other issues in that relationship anyway, so my fuck budget was already running pretty low. Aside from the chronic snoring (I could never have married the guy, let’s be honest), his ego was a little too inflated for my liking. Plus, we’d been arguing, a lot, about everything. And I’m pretty sure I caught him lying a few times. I was tempted to break up with him before the holiday, but it would have been way too messy to cancel everything, so I stupidly decided to ignore our problems and just go away with him, have some fun and reassess the situation when we got home.

  But when he started with the fat-shaming, I just ran out of fucks to give. About him and the relationship. Mash-gate was my out.

  When we got back to the hotel after dinner, I told him I was done. The relationship was over. It was day four of our holiday.

  We managed to mostly avoid each other for the rest of the trip and I thoroughly enjoyed my holiday without him. In fact, the very next night at après-ski, I met a smoking hot guy who made me feel like the sexiest woman alive, pasta belly, saggy boobs and all. And we embarked on a pretty intense rebound and holiday fling (combined), which helped me move on from the snoring carb-nazi pretty much immediately.

  I’m so over the whole ‘who should pay on a first date’ debate. Should the guy pay? Should you always go Dutch? Are you an anti-feminist and a traitor to all women if you let a man pay for your meal? I know Mars and Venus have been arguing about this since the dawn of time, but I’ve reached a point where I’m chemically incapable of giving a fuck about this topic any longer. The guy and his Warm Sushi Escape Clause is probably what pushed me over the edge.

  I actually know plenty of women who refuse to split the bill on a date. Ever. These women are all hard-working, independent, successful chicks, but if they’re out with a man and the bill arrives, they don’t even go for the fake wallet reach. If the guy doesn’t insist on paying, in full, they lose his number. Immediately.

  Look, I have to admit that it does impress me when a guy picks up the bill in the early stages of dating. I think it shows some old-school gentlemanly character. It indicates that he might be a good bloke in other ways – kind, considerate, courteous, generous. Those are all qualities I look for in a partner. But I don’t have an issue with going Dutch. If the fella doesn’t insist on paying, I’m not going to kick him to the kerb over it.

  It only becomes an issue if he never pays. Which seemed to be the case when I found myself on a series of unfortunate dates with a forty-something-year-old guy my friends have affectionately named ‘Neville No Pay’.

  As his moniker suggests, Neville did not like to pay. He wasn’t even fond of going halfsies. When the bill came, he would usually just fold his arms, sit back and watch me hand over my credit card. We went on a total of six dates. I paid for four of them.

  To be fair, Neville did pay for our first coffee date. The bill was around nine bucks. On our second date, I just automatically threw my credit card on the table when the bill arrived after dinner. He didn’t offer his, so I paid for it in full. I was a little surprised that he didn’t even offer to split the bill, but I just assumed it would naturally evolve into a ‘take turns’ situation from then on. Sadly, it did not. Neville let me pay. In full. On every date thereafter.

  I asked the girlfriend who set us up what the fuck was going on. Was he broke? Had his ex-wife taken him to the cleaners? How could a guy in his forties be so totally clueless?

  She was shocked. He apparently ran a very successful business and, as far as she knew, he was quite comfortable financially.

  I tried to think up excuses for his behaviour. He’d recently divorced after twenty-something years of marriage, so maybe he was confused about modern-day dating protocol. My friends quickly called bullshit on that excuse. They reminded me that the last time he’d dated, back in the dark ages, there was absolutely no confusion about who paid the bill. The man always paid.

  We all have that one friend we can count on for a brutally honest answer to any question. Anywhere. Anytime. That friend, for me, is Nicole. She’s truckloads of fun, she’s got a heart of gold and she has a more finely tuned bullshit meter than anyone else I know. She has no qualms about voicing her opinion, even if she knows it’s the one thing I really, really, really don’t want to hear. So when conversation with Nicole rolled around to the Neville No Pay dilemma, her advice was blunt.

  ‘The guy’s a tight-arse,’ she told me. ‘Get rid of him!’

  You might be thinking that my si
x dates with Neville were possibly four dates too many. But I honestly wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I do think a simple bill can give a guy mental whiplash in the financial department. If I do pay, will she think I’m a controlling misogynist? If we split the bill, will she think I’m cheap? Blah de blah blah.

  The last straw with Neville No Pay came after a meal with four other couples. It was a big, boozy dinner so it was a pretty hefty bill. It was agreed that the bill would be split evenly between the couples and all the men put their cards on the table. Except Neville. I waited a while, but he didn’t move. So eventually I added my credit card to the others so we could all pay up and go home. Neville pretended not to notice. But someone else did.

  When the waitress came to take the cards and process the bill, one of his friends reached over, removed my card from the bunch, handed it back to me and then turned to Neville and said, ‘Buddy, don’t be an idiot. Give me your fucking credit card.’

  It’s the only time a man has been forced into paying for a date with me. It was humiliating. I stopped replying to his texts and calls after that and eventually he got the hint. I never slept with Neville, or even kissed him, on any of our six dates. But I hung in there, hoping the attraction might come if I developed feelings for him. I now wonder if that was the reason he never paid. Maybe he wasn’t into me, or maybe he just wasn’t prepared to fork out until he knew he was guaranteed a return on his investment.

  I once went on a few dates with a gynaecologist. Yep. The guy looked at vajayjay, all day long.

  Thankfully, I didn’t meet the Gyno at his office. We met at mine. We got chatting at a sales event for the radio station where I was working. He seemed lovely. He was smart (obviously), successful, easy on the eye, interesting. And very, very interested.

  I accepted his invitation for a date but I couldn’t help feeling a variety of uncontrollably irrational ‘dating-a-gyno’ concerns. Like, what makes a man (a human without a vajoir) want to become a gyno in the first place? It’s clearly a very female-focused field. And how well can you really understand the ins and outs of a body part when you’re not actually in possession of one? If we were to become a couple, wouldn’t it be rather unpleasant knowing my boyfriend spent his days at the office looking at female genitalia very, very closely? Oh, and let’s remember that he wouldn’t just be looking at them. He’d be prodding them and poking them and touching them and putting things inside them and generally analysing other women’s bits for eight to ten hours each day. Before coming home to me and my bits.

  Is it reasonable to wonder if your fella’s job as a gyno could somehow ruin his passion and enthusiasm for the home vag? We’ve all heard the analogy of the chef who spends all day in the kitchen. The last thing he wants to do is come home and cook you dinner. Isn’t it same-same, but different?

  Also, what if a gorgeous supermodel comes into your boyfriend’s surgery with the prettiest little vajoir he’s ever seen? Will he feel disenchanted when he comes home to yours? We all know no two are the same, but have you ever wondered how yours compares? The Gyno could certainly tell you the cold hard truth, if you really wanted to hear it.

  A male gyno once told a friend of mine that she had a ‘beautiful’ vagina. During a pap smear! This made her incredibly uncomfortable. Not just because she was twenty at the time and her gyno was an old man who reminded her of her father, but also because that surely belongs in the category of ‘most inappropriate things you could possibly say on the job’.

  I had one other small concern about going on a date with the Gyno. Which is . . . he had sperm . . . on his business card.

  It wasn’t fresh jizz. Let me clarify that right away. It was cartoon sperm. For a fertility specialist, his name conveniently contained the letter ‘O’. So he (or someone he had probably paid way too much to come up with the idea) thought it was clever, or cute, to design a business card with drawings of wriggly little sperm swimming towards and around the ‘O’ in his name, capturing that magical moment of conception.

  Now, here’s my concern about that: just because you’re a fertility specialist, and you happen to have an ‘O’ in your name, doesn’t mean it’s okay to have sperm on your business card. Isn’t it a little flippant? I couldn’t decide if the sperm on the Gyno’s business card was clever, cute or crass. And I couldn’t decide whether or not to date him.

  Luckily, when you host your own radio show and you’re facing any of life’s big dilemmas, you can just ask your listeners for advice. It provides entertaining content for your show (✓). It fills precious air time (✓). It gives you helpful advice (✓). And it allows you to hear other perspectives that you may not have previously considered (✓).

  So I put it out there, and the listeners loved it. The segment was hugely popular and very entertaining. They were divided on the issue, though. Plenty of callers said they could never see a gyno romantically, because it would just be too weird (for precisely the same reasons as me). Others reminded me that the guy was a professional, doing his job, so there was no weirdness about it whatsoever. Quite a few callers suggested that he would probably be an amazing lover, considering he spent so much time around the female anatomy.

  In the end, I decided to overlook the dodgy business card design, be an adult about it and give the Gyno a go. I mean, how could I not? This guy might just give me the best orgasm of my life.

  For our first date, he took me to dinner at the super-fancy Icebergs restaurant in Bondi. Dinner was delightful, conversation flowed and it was a relief to be able to talk to him so openly about my own recent fertility struggles and numerous heartbreakingly painful attempts to fall pregnant. He told me he didn’t have kids but he’d love to have his own one day. He paid for dinner. He dropped me home. And he very politely asked when he could see me again. As far as first dates go, it was perfectly lovely.

  For our second date, we shared another delightful dinner at another fancy restaurant. And we talked at length about our careers. I talked about working in radio and he talked about what it was like working in the booming fertility industry and he casually mentioned that there might still be some options I could look into, if I wanted to have another crack at getting pregnant. And I was a little bit confused about whether he was suggesting this as my potential ‘Doctor’ or as my potential ‘Partner’. Either way, it all seemed a bit too much, too soon. Sure, buddy, I realise it’s your area of expertise and all, but I’d really like to get through at least two full meals with you before we start making plans with my uterus.

  We finished dinner and he dropped me home. A gut feeling told me not to kiss him. Something didn’t feel right. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. We’d enjoyed two perfectly lovely dinners and he seemed like a perfectly lovely guy. But as I lay in bed that night, thinking about our date and trying to work out what was missing, I accepted the regrettable fact that there was an obvious lack of chemistry between us. The Gyno did not make my vajoir flutter.

  Which really sucked, actually. Because I knew it would be incredibly convenient for this guy to be my Mr Happily Ever After. A smart, successful fertility expert certainly ticked all the boxes (and then some!) for this fertility challenged woman on the wrong side of forty.

  I agreed to a third date, determined to locate that missing spark. We decided on a movie and he chose Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator.

  Sadly, that movie only made our disappointing lack of chemistry even more obvious. He thought it was absolutely hysterical and he roared with laughter from start to finish. I thought it was the worst movie ever made. I didn’t laugh once. Not once!

  The Gyno dropped me home after the movie and after some not-so-subtle ghosting, I never saw him again. I possibly could have dragged it out for a few more dates and kept my fingers crossed that the spark would somehow magically ignite. But honestly, why delay the inevitable?

  Maybe I’m desperately searching for any reason to explain why I didn’t fall madly in love with the smart, successful, handsome fertility doct
or, but I would actually like Sacha Baron Cohen to accept some of the blame for this one.

  Because there are two types of people in the world. There are those who think The Dictator is pure comic genius and a witty social satire. And people (like me) who think that movie was about as funny as a terminal disease. And I really believe that these two types of people should never date. They are not, and never will be, a match.

  In the end it wasn’t even the fact that he had other women’s vajoirs in his face all day that turned me off. It was something as simple and primal as the Gyno’s sense of humour (also explained the sperm on the business card).

  Sure, laughter is the best medicine, but only when you’re laughing at the same things.

  Love me, love my dog. Or don’t waste my time.

  For most of my dog’s furry little life, it’s been just the two of us: Sam and Lolli. Two badass bestie bitches, Thelma and Louise–style. The Brad Pitts have come and gone in our story, so for the most part, it’s just me and the pooch. She’s been my one constant companion for more than eleven years. Naturally, my dog sleeps on my bed. Well, she sleeps wherever the hell she wants, to be honest. But, mostly, she likes the bed.

  Unfortunately, Lolli does not curl up in a compact fluffy ball at the end of my bed. Oh no. Most nights I find the princess stretched out, diagonally, across the middle of the mattress, taking up as much surface area as a canine possibly can. It’s as if she makes a conscious effort to lie in the most inconvenient spot she can find. So, despite the fact that I have a smallish dog and a gigantic king-sized bed, I usually find myself curling into whatever limited space I can find on the edge, like a Cirque du Soleil contortionist. If I want to let sleeping dogs lie.