Notes On Dating No. 30

Is music the food of love? Apparently not. A friend of mine recently broke it off with a girl he was dating for two months on the grounds that her music taste was, as he put it, “decidedly rubbish”. This seems a common - and in my view deeply unfair - complaint among men today. “She’s into all that happy stuff,” he explained. What could he possibly mean?
“You know, house and garage. R&B. Stuff like Ciara and Kelis. Sexy music,” he added with a grimace. I probably don't need to point out that he is into cultishly cool, “good taste” bands like Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse and whichever indie outfit is currently the NME’s flavour of the nanosecond. Whereas she wanted to lose mind under the strobes in West End nitespots, he preferred shoegazing at introspective gigs in Highbury and searching for the meaning of life through a bottle of Stella. Their budding relationship bit the dust for the most pointless of reasons – “musical differences.” More’s the pity, because she was a looker and now my pal now has nothing but his beard and Bob Dylan rarities to stroke at night.
I mention this because I feel like I’ve learnt my own lesson where music’s place in the courtship ritual is concerned. I was deeply into The Smiths as a teenager, but I today hold Morrissey personally responsible for the fact that I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 18. Under the influence of the great indie poet, I spent my youth mooning around in a threadbare cardigan, declaiming Wordsworth to disinterested girls and trying to appear poetic and misunderstood while the Guns & Roses and NWA fans were getting busy behind the bike sheds.
I confess that I still struggle to shake off the great indie poet’s influence, and on more than one occasion have unwittingly sabotaged an attempt at seduction by coming over all deep and meaningful when what the moment demanded was a little less conversation and a lot more action. To this day I wish I'd got into Iron Maiden, Marillion or even Bon Jovi - anything, in fact, with a pulse and some guts instead of the limp and bloodless Smiths.
Hence I believe “taste” in music is a defunct concept today, and especially within the context of dating. Once upon a time, fandom in one or other genre of music was a badge of identity, a method of guaranteeing to the person you were chatting up that you shared some of their interests. But in the downloading era of where every band, singer and song from any age is available, relevant and in all probability making a chart comeback, the only people who should be using music – particularly the tyrannously cool indie cult - as an off-the-peg personality are those who are too unimaginative to have dreamt up an identity of their own. No surprises that it's an almost exclusively male tendency.
My solution to this is simple. As a recovering music writer, I renounced all critical interest in music a while ago and solved the relationship obstacle of “musical differences” by no longer having absolutely any taste in music whatsoever. So long as it has a beat and some words, I like it or will find a way to enjoy it. In fact, the more Sharon & Tracey the music is, the more shamelessly throwaway, charty and melodious the music is, the more I like it these days.
Life’s too short for shoegazing, but what it really comes down to is this – how many Sharons and Traceys are you going to meet at a My Chemical Romance gig compared with a Saturday night on the floor at The End? Exactly.
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Kevin Braddock
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Published in The London Paper

Notes On Dating No. 29

There is one surefire method of judging whether you really, really fancy someone: you start bricking it. Your become anxious, confused and tensed-up. You can become paralysed by fear as your mind reels with strategies, ideas and fevered thinking on What To Do About It. Or as my friend Barton, a committed lothario who has a penchant for six-foot something models, put it the other day: “I like to feel scared. It makes me feel like I’m alive.” (if you think I am a masochist, wait till you meet Barton).
His profound aperçu came as we speculatively trawled around the bars and green spaces of Clapham during last weekend’s mini-heatwave. Seemingly every attractive female in London had descended the Northern Line in gigantic sunglasses and the minimum legal requirement of clothes with the sole intention of recreating Woodstock on the Common, or reimagining this fag-end of Zone Two as some kind of Ibiza-on-Thames.
While the sun causes many people to relax, chill out and skin up, blazing weather has the effect of making me feel unbelievably tense. Add to this about 5,000 scantily-clad, stunningly beautiful chillagers parading past like a neverending Fashion Week and, well - suffice to say our attempts to carouse in sunny Clapham met with less than spectacular success.
Wracked by a combination of heat and lust, I came out with some of the duffest lines of my seduction career to date. To the Eurasian girl we ran into at sundown in Souk, for instance, I lamely announced, ‘Can I just say I like your hair - it's really nice-looking hair.’ And nor did the line I fed to a pair of blonde Chelsea lawyers sunning themselves on the terrace of the Falcon get us very far: “My name’s Kevin,’ I declared. “But people usually call me Kevin.” Equally, the way I approached Salina from Tulse Hill outside The Windmill wasn’t destined to win any literary awards: “What's a nice place like this doing in a girl like you?”
While it's all very well feeling “alive” in the presence of someone - okay, hundreds of people - you deeply fancy, the problem is that anxiety has the capacity to torpedo whichever opening gambit you dream up. In the time it takes to think of some remark, entrée or preamble, walk five paces across the bar and actually deliver it, the smoothest, cleverest line can get scrambled into some knock-kneed, garbled whimpering delivered with all the force and confidence of a bout of hiccups.
And equally, while preparation in the game of seduction may be everything, thought can also be the enemy of action: overthinking your moves, lines and tactics can lead to prevarication, and it's safe to say women can sense prevarication a mile off. It displays a desperation to impress and a nerdy desire for approval, rather than a solid sense of confidence and self-worth, because the fear described above is really a fear of rejection.
So from now I’ve decided that on it's time to flip the shades down, unbutton the shirt and apply some factor-zero cool rather than get spurred into anxious action by the presence of someone I wouldn’t kick out of bed. Look, it’s summer already. Relax. Hang. Be cool.
Failing all that, perhaps it's time to move to Iceland.
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Kevin Braddock
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Published in The London Paper

Notes On Dating No.28

Money Talks
Last week debate raged last week in these pages as to whether men should pay for the first date. Chaps: get real. Wise up. Open your wallet, because money talks in the dating game. While most women like a man with a few quid to lubricate the evening, few of them are searching for the chartered accountant of their dreams. Debuting a relationship on a scrimping, transactional basis is the safest guarantee of no second date.
Laying down some serious bread on the first date displays thought and effort, and in this monetaristic age throwing cash at the situation is nature’s way of showing you care. We may be living in an egalitarian, post-feminist age, but whingeing that women don’t offer to pay is like complaining when your date shows up in high heels and a black dress instead of a pair or Camper shoes and dungarees. And finally, you have the rest of your life to argue about finances. It’s what marriage is all about.
But all this is missing the point about money. What the issue hides is a conversation about class and the sniping one-upmanship of the middle-classes in which everyone is desperate to flaunt their wealth and independence (by paying) or prove their cleverness (by getting the other person to pay). If you really want a relationship in which money doesn’t figure, the solution is simple: go out with someone unspeakably posh.
Being a shameless social mountaineer, not so long ago I went out with a beautiful heiress who prefered to socialise in London’s grimiest pubs with bohemian types. She was electrified by the rock & roll lifestyle, and it’s safe to say she wasn’t interested in me for my wealth, prospects and breeding – I don't have any. She was infinitely less wowed by expensive dinners than by my ability to get us on the guest list at sordid East End clubs. The reason this pauper & princess relationship ended had nothing to do with cash - I just wasn’t enough of a rock & roll delinquent riding the highway to Hell to keep her excited.
In the aftermath of this relationship I summarised ways to seduce posh girls should the opportunity arise again. The rules are these:
Firstly, have absolutely no ambitions in life and no money at all. It is an advantage if you have dreads – especially if you are white – or long hair, you enjoy smoking cannabis, never work and show precisely zero interest in property, cars, entitlement and the other tokens of wealth. If you live in a squat, barge or shed, so much the better. Equally, you must not be phased by weekend trips to stay at houses so big you’d normally need National Trust membership to get into them. Finally, be entertaining - play the guitar, or perhaps be a struggling actor or a romantic poet, thus guaranteeing you have no future earning potential whatsoever. If you are a villain, drug addict and all-round reprobate, even better. The further up the rungs of wealth and privilege you go, the more these guidelines apply. Adhere to them fully, and Lady Penelope will be yours. How else did Pete Doherty pull Kate Moss, one of the world’s wealthiest and most attractive women?
I have recently adjusted my attempts at class-based seduction and started fancying a girl I keep bumping into at my local Costcutter on the edge of a massive council estate. She closely resembles Lady Sovereign and refers to me a ‘bruv’. I’m considering asking her out for dinner to somewhere upmarket – Nando’s maybe - that also welcomes punters in Reeboks and fake Juicy Couture.
Like I say, money talks. As long as it's talking to the right person.
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Published in The London Paper
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Kevin Braddock

Notes On Dating no.27

This week, my birthday is looming over the horizon like a supertanker with a cargo of pipes and slippers, and apparently, I am “over the hill”. According to a female friend, I am also “on the shelf”. “Any bloke over the age of of 33 should avoided like the plague,” she sensitively observed the other day. “He’s probably got pyschological issues”. Rather than sink into deep depression about all this, it spurred me into formulating a new idea for a Channel 4 TV Show - “Ten Years Older”.
Nicky Hambleton-Jones, I firmly believe, has got it all wrong. While her ‘Ten Years Younger’ show may work miracles in making women look thinner and prettier – and who could possibly object to that? - it goes disastrously awry when she turns her attention to men. Typically, she will pick on some poor chap, surgically remove his rugged, lived-in sense of self - precisely the thing that makes him attractive – and then metrosexualise him into some pompadoured, insecure wannabe teenager in achingly hip threads and a try-hard haircut, a process akin to transforming Oliver Reed into Li’l Chris.
The fact is Ms Hambleton-Jones needs to be offering a service which is the exact opposite, because the sexual markplace of London, older men have the guile and experience that younger men do not. Meanwhile, they also possess everything that women claim to crave: self-esteem, better taste in shoes and endurance (by which I mean something thilling than more marathon running). Put it this way – CD sales show that the gnarled grandads of Take That are only just entering their peak popularity.
Personally I used to agonise over the ageing process and about not hitting the traditional “life-plan” targets, deadlines and milestones – cohabition, marriage, kid, more kids - by a certain birthdays. It used to bug me that friends in couples would peel off into wedlock two-by two, renounce anything more bracing than Jamie Oliver recipes and begin acting like their grandparents, leaving me marrooned on a lonely low tide of solo socialising.
When I abruptly found myself single at the age of 28 after a long relationship, I decided it was time deal with my commitmentphobia once and for all and begin acting my age. I then did what all rational men do and started acting half my age, throwing myself into the mindless hedonism, inconsquential sex and emotional turmoil that pave the way to some kind of elightenment.
When I got to 30 when I realised that age in a man is an achievement rather than a loss, meaning there is no hurry to cram everything into your twenties. Indeed, in other eras it was considered foolhardy for a man to throw it all in before he hit 40, let alone 30. Either way, when you’re north of your twenties, all those self-made rules and anxieties above disappear into a big puff of “whatever” - a good thing because deadlines are often exactly what doom new relationships to failure.
Admittedly, the ageing process is kinder to men than to women, because blokes aren't in a race against their own fertility from the moment they first get funny feelings about Blue Peter presenters. But the real defence of growing old disgracefully is that age in a man actually increases, rather than reduces his pool of potential dates and partners. Thirty eight-year-old women can miraculously seem as attractive as 22-year-olds (I have examined this issue in great detail).
At the risk of sounding like to sounds like an emotional retard suffering from arrested development, I believe that nothing prematurely ages a man so much as acting his own age and that in the end, you’re only as old as the person you feel.
Ideally, someone ten years younger than you are.
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Kevin Braddock
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Published in The London Paper

Notes On Dating No. 26

“I want to know what love is,” I sung to the blonde in the Pucci dress as I caressed her shoulders. “I want you to show me.” A minute later, I looked into her eyes and told her, “I’ve been waiting for a girl like you – to come into my life.” And shortly after that, I held her tightly and crooned, “Move closer/Move your body real close/Until we feel like we’re really making love.” But then the DJ played AC/DC’s “Back In Black” and our brief encounter in the wedding disco “Erection Section” ended there.
Weddings may seem like a tedious and costly obligation, but the fact is that for single men they represent a brilliant opportunity to cop off, show off and show up your mates by dancing with their wives and girlfriends in that libidinous way that only single men can. All at the same time, with a free bar. What’s not to like?
My first of the year was a couple of weeks ago, and I made full use of it. Weddings are designed to celebrate unionm, and for many single people the matrimonial season can mean a string of miserable encounters with their own singleness. Personally speaking, the cake, the speeches, the outpouring of repressed emotion and the entire forced British cheesiness of it all somehow makes me feel great about being single.
I love the fact that women make 900 per cent more effort in dressing up than their partners, and I love that men in long-term relationships are genetically incapable of dancing, meaning you only have to show up in a nice tie and throw a few jive shapes to instantly become the most attractive fellow in the building. It is everty bachelors duty to throw himself into the slowies, when the DJ takes a break from playing wedding standards like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.” by Dolly Parton, and spins tunes “for all the lovers in the house.” I make a point of dancing with as many women as possible while their partners glower at me in silent rage. If you make a knob of yourself – as I have on several throusand occasions - indiscretions can easily be explained away as a bout of drunken romanticism.
Without wishing to sound any more mercenary than normal, the fact that weddings are infinitely more challenging to single women than to single men also has other advantages. The day reminds the single man he’s off the hook for a bit longer, whereas for single women it inevitably serves too highlight that fact that she is not the one with the dress, the ring, the honeymoon and all the other romantic clichés she’s been drilled with since she was two.
What better moment to move in than when the bride’s bouquet is tossed and the Bridget Jones Brigade begin elbowing each other in the face in a bid to grab this symbol of future matrimony? I sometimes wonder whether this charade was solely devised to enable bachelors to assess the going form before the reception gets fully underway.
That’s the theory, at least. I put all this into practice last year at a wedding where I was asked to play some records, and managed to perform the feat of DJing at the same time as dancing with a bridesmaid I’d been plonked with for lunch. Nature took its course once I had relinquished responsibilities to the groom’s 13-year-old brother, who played drum & bass anthems, and I fell in love with her to the tune of ‘Six Million Ways To Die’ by the Ganja Kru.
I learnt the other day that she is living with rich advertising guy in Holland park and is getting hitched in July. I’m absolutely gutted. No matter good weddings appear to be for single men, I steering clear of them for the time being.
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Kevin Braddock
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Published in The London Paper

Notes On Dating No. 25

To survive in the dating sharkpool today, you have to know what you want. You can scan a million profiles online and find a thousand fantasy partners, but this is not knowing what you want. You can travel the tube for an eternity mentally assessing the girls on the opposite escalator thus: ‘no, no, would, no, maybe, no, definitely’. But this is not knowing what you want either.
And it is clear to me where I have been going wrong all this time: I don't know what I want. I mean, beyond the basics - no facial tattoos, preferably semi-alive, millionairess would be nice, that kind of thing. This Eureka moment came to me when I was in conversation with the chief matchmaker of Elect, a new dating startup, who patiently interrogated me into a confession the other day.
‘What kind of girl do you go for,’ she asked. I fell at the first hurdle. ‘You know,’ I prevaricated, ‘Feminine, pretty, funny, that kind of thing.’ She gazed at me nonplussed ‘Think of ten words to describe her. All I could think of was ‘blooming’ and ‘resplendent’. ‘OK, who does she look like?’ she persevered. ‘Penelope Cruz,’ I said after about ten minutes. ‘Or perhaps Scarlett Johansson’ (you’ve got to aim high, right?).
‘Hair?’ she probed. ‘Great!’ I replied, without perceiving the clever nuance of her question. ‘I mean what colour?’ I was decisive on this: ‘Brunette. Maybe blonde. I love redheads.’ Realising that I was sounding more like some woolly Lib Dem candidate than a dynamic eligible bachelor, I became firm. ‘She absolutely must not drive a Peugeot,’ I announced, to a hushed silence. And so it went on in a hopelessly muddled way.
Eventually she was able compile a profile that sounded mysteriously like a ‘Greatest Hits’ of all my previous girlfriends, flings and trysts. I realised I had also just described someone I met the other day. Either way, I was staggered at my fuzzy thinking and inability to express what I wanted, and I don’t think I’m the only man to feel that way.
Far be it from me to suggest that women are a bit fussy today, but any single girl will have a razor-sharp idea of her prospective Mr Right’s size, shape, colour, job, aspirations, education, shoe size, income, no-claims bonus years, taste in music, habits, star sign, postcode and his mystical ‘X’ factor. Female friends of mine could cause an international paper-supply crisis with their lists of must-haves, must-bes and must-nots.
Men, it's safe to say, rarely think in such depth. It could be an effect of the endless availability of dates that when faced with unlimited choice, men lapse into confusion and inertia. Equally, it could be that rationalising preferences would only limit his chances of exploring as many beds as possible. But the fact is that most men rarely define much more than the bluntest of requirements. As a newly single friend of mine put it the other day: ‘she must be blonde, really petite and have huge knockers.’
I could only admire his honesty, so I’ve decide to be brutally honest with myself about what I want: I want a resplendent GSOH non Peugeot-driving Penelope/Scarlett lookalike type of bloomingly redheaded brunette, if that’s not too much to ask.
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Kevin Braddock
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Published in The London Paper