So....date three read the blog...

Posted by Katy Regan at 17:16 on 3 Aug 2010

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Right, now, it’s always been a bit of an issue for me – how honest CAN I be on this blog? I want to be really honest. I want to tell you the deepest darkest secrets of my soul and what I truly think of people and situations. However, I am identified, people know who I am (well, by whoever reads this blog anyway, which has got to be five people at least! ) and therefore, if I were to be truly honest; I mean no holds barred brutally honest, people could get hurt.

And I don’t want to hurt people. Not even if I were to become as famous and probably rich and DEFINITELY as lonely as Liz Jones by writing with no self-censorship whatsoever about friends who annoy her by bringing their kids to her pristine child-free house, what she truly thinks about how people look. (I mean truly).  The size of her ex-husband’s penis. His nose-picking habits, etc  etc….  

Well, I am not prepared to do that. There’s plenty of stuff to write about without ruining your life and that of other people’s. And so, that is why I ummed and ahhed about telling the truth about my dates, in fact about writing about dating at all. Picture me, I am dating at the moment, I am going (or have been, am currently on strike) on so many dates recently, that I have a ‘date face’, a sort of fixed, head cocked to the side, look of (sometimes feigned) interest. And a ‘date voice’. I like to think this is ‘upbeat’, interesting, interested, when really, inside me sometimes, I am screaming. Or groaning. And imagine they might be too. In fact the groaning is probably the worst...

Anyway, so yes, I have been on a dating frenzy lately,  I have been genuinely dating and yet, I am also a writer, a writer with a blog online. A writer who has  - and I take full responsibility for this – gone down the ‘confessional journalism’ route to some extent in her career, even if it is not at a Liz Jones level. (Now, if the Mail on Sunday would like to pay me …..oh! I’m only joking!)


 In short, I am all over the bloody Internet. If you Google me – because obviously this is something you feel compelled to do in a regular basis   -  you can pretty much find out my entire life history since about 1999! The fact I went to school with Posh, the fact I have never had my heart broken. the fact I once got pregnant by a man who wasn’t my boyfriend, bla-di-bla-di-bla. So much of it seems so in the past to me now and yet it’s there, forever on the Internet. Modern times, eh. Modern times….

Unless I want to conduct my dating in a cloak and dagger style, you know, using a pseudonym, having a ‘dating only;’ email account and calling myself Pussy Galore, or something, they are going sooner or later to know my name, find out I have a blog, am a journalist, once went naked for a week on a nudist camp….

Before Matt Black and I had so much as met for a drink, he had read the entire back catalogue of my blogs online (note to self: be particularly aware of dating very computer literate people with well-devoped hacking skills!….)  and he STILL wanted to get to know me. A brave man indeed.

Why am I telling you this? I don’t know really. One because I wanted to explain my predicament, how and why I have weighed up whether to write about dating and how much truth to give (after all, I could, one day meet someone I actually like and what if I ruined it all before it even got off the ground when he found out I was writing about him on the world wide web?)  Secondly, all this came to bite me on the bum a few days ago when I received a Facebook message from Mr Bodily Function Obsessed (date three)

“God, it wasn’t that bad was it…..?” he said

My stomach (not my tummy, I might add) hit the flooor. I felt terribly, terribly guilty. I don’t know why, he knew I was a writer, he knew I wrote a blog (he’d Googled me before we even went on a date,  course he  did, I did him too.) he’d even made jokes about how I should chronicle this dating thing, which of course I did.

I cringed as I read the message, one hand over one eye…but he took it so well!
“I guess I realised it wasn’t love at first sight” he said, “which is why I sort of gave myself free rein. Or maybe I am just a little bit odd.” Words to that effect.

I took a deep breath, hit reply and I wrote back to him:

“No, it wasn’t that bad, there was probably some slight exaggeration for comic effect (very little actually)  but a word of advice, when you’re on a date, you are trying to woo a lady, and talk of bowels are probably best left out of it. It’s funny” I wrote. “But not really attractive. Sorry.”

I waited, biting my fingernails. He wrote back: No tears shed at all, just cringed at the thought that I was over familiar! Can't have a thin skin in the dating game can you? No harm done at all I promise. Besides... at least it provioked a few responses from your dear readers (I have had 15 minutes of infamy if nothing else). Lol.

What a decent sort! I almost (almost) thought I may have been wrong about him.

I wrote back to say that I was glad there were no bad feelings and that he was clearly a very funny bloke – just possibly not the right sort of funny for me.

So there we have it. My first experience of being well and truly ‘outed’ but you know, I still don’t regret writing about it, I just have a policy – I hope I got it right. Don’t write anything, you wouldn’t say to their face, or at least their electronic face. And don’t lie. Don’t make things up, because people really do read my blog. Especially, men I have been on dates with.

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