Blanket Dating: Date Two

Posted by Katy Regan at 12:02 on 8 Jul 2010

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Right, so I was going to tell you about date two of my Blanket Dating, wasn’t I?
Before I do, I should clarify something. I was out with my little sister at the weekend and – as has become standard of late – probably boring her to tears with my tales of single woe. Anyway, it came to light, that she had read my blog (not the whole thing. She tells me she can’t read the whole thing. It’s too personal and full of stuff, she feels, that as my sister she should hear in real-life or not at all which is a stance I totally understand.)

Anyway, she was like, “sorry, but what IS blanket dating?” So for her, and those of you who do, actually, think my friend was not joking and that I have embarked on a project dating bed-linen, or that I turn up to these dates shrouded in a duvet  (believe me, a top-to-toe disguise would come in handy at times…) I will explain: Blanket Dating, as I mean it, is simply dating widely, un-prescriptively and meeting everyone – whether I liked the cut of their jib or not – who answered my shameless email.

It’s a bit like, doing ‘Blanket Applications’ for a job. You know, applying for everything rather than being too niche?  I guess my thinking was that it was un-wise to judge a book by its cover, to dismiss a man because he made a bad joke, used too many exclamation marks in his emails, insisted on calling me nick-names like ‘Kato’ people who said they were ‘prone to unpredictable risk-taking’  - something which my instincts tell me makes them about as risk-taking as my mum, which is fine but you get what I mean   - and so on and so forth. Of course, in reality, in my head I’d been put off by ALL these things before I even clapped eyes on the poor blokes! (But you do things like that too, right? Please tell me you do.  Things like mentally flinch because he has no grip on apostrophes in his emails? Readers, I’m not saying it’s right, or good, and having read back my own emails I am well-aware I often come across like a ranting mentalist -  but I’m just admitting to doing it and hope I’m not the only one!.)

Anyway, as opposed to incessant-comedy emailer, incessant-exclamation mark emailer, very, very long emailer, toilet-humour-obsessed emailer; date two emailer was a bit of an enigma. He hadn’t said anything in his email that made me think anything. It was a very beige email. Very vanilla.  I knew he was foreign (he had what I thought was an Italian name, in fact he turned out to be Venezuelan. Of course!  ) and I knew he worked in the City. That was it. He suggested somewhere to go, which was nice and meant I didn’t have to think too much and he seemed laid-back and sort of inoffensive. When I walked into the bar and spotted him though, my heart sank. It wasn’t that he was four feet ten and looked like the back end of a bus, far from it; he was tall, dark, suave, dressed in a suit. But you know when you just know that this person is not just from a different tribe to you but from a different solar system?!  It’s a feeling I really don’t enjoy – that lack of ANY familiarity, of any social cues you recognise, of any likeness. I just knew.

He was a grown up businessman who probably owned an Armani suit-carrier and used those things in his shoes that stop them from going mis-shapen . I have been known to leave the house wearing odd shoes.  

Don’t get me wrong – and this is something I have really learned during my blanket dating – he was a very nice man. Most men are very nice. He was gentlemanly, he paid for my dinner (bonus!) he walked me to the tube and he asked me questions as well as answered them interestingly but we just had zero in common. Cut from different cloth doesn’t even cut it; but if it did, he’d be an exotic shot-silk, I’d be a jay-cloth. He had worked and lived all over the world and had a masterfulness about him that unnerved me. How could someone be that together?  He had been to a Japanese Mime production at Sadler’s Wells the previous evening. I had been to Nandos then the pub with some friends. I told him I was a writer which I think he mistakenly took to mean I was some sort of literary high-brow type.  He told me how Ulysses by James Joyce was his favourite book and that he had recently re-read it and fallen in love with it all over again  as an adult (you mean to say he read it the first time when he was a child?) He told me how he’d lived in New York and Houston in Texas (I was actually fascinated by this) where he’d worked on huge oil deals and lived in hotels.  I told him how I’d lived in France for a year as part of my degree and worked on my red-wine-induced near kidney failure.

So, you get my drift? We were just SO different. When I told him my one story that I have always considered would elevate me to new heights in cultured-ness (don’t even know the actual word) in anyone’s mind; about how I’d once spent four days on a remote Scottish island where only one hundred people lived that had one pub and where everyone was called Angus and was probably inbred, he stared at me: “Wow” he said  (he had an American accent, something that only added to my feelings of being generally over-powered and a complete and utter plebeian ) that just about sounds like my worst nightmare. I can’t imagine I’d fit into a place like that at all).

I looked at his Gucci suit and his signet ring and thought, yeah, you’re probably right. I didn’t have a a bad time, I’m certainly not slagging him off, he was of a whole different calibre to me after all!  But in terms of what's right for me?  My date two made me wonder…..maybe I should be approaching this dating lark with a little more precision? Say, sticking to men who I have at least met face to face first….

But there was date three to learn from yet…..

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