May 22, 2012 § 34 Comments
From yesterday’s Times and rather disappointingly similar to a recent post about a date with a married man, for which apologies all round and please forgive me…? Not quite sure how it happened. Anyway here goes :-
I have a date with a married man. Shock horror!
He is a happily married man and neither of us has any untoward intentions. He and his wife are my friends. She can’t go. Spare ticket. Spare person (me). I got the call up. Logical.
I have been longing to go to something with a male friend, but it never normally happens because they are almost all married so their first choices are, naturally enough, their wives. And because it is potentially odd, even though in reality it isn’t with me because there’s an orange light on my head beside the one shouting “Desperate Reject”, which flashes, “For Hire but not to Married Men”.
My mother always used to talk about walkers. “So and So is Diana Cooper’s walker”, she used to say, and because it was during the days when I was still young and had a certain amount of active – how shall I say? – turnover, I always thought, callously, “Pah! Walkers? They’re for old ladies. The lover’s the thing.”
“But it’s nice to go out with men to the theatre sometimes as friends, and not sleep with them,” my mother insisted. Really? I could not grasp it, then. These days, potential lovers all mealy-mouthed and runaway, I think, “Walker? Luxury! How lovely it would be to have such a thing.” How circumstances have changed.
I am lucky because I have enough girlfriends with whom regularly to go to the movies or theatre if I could afford it and so wished. But girls’ girl that I may be, I also love the company of men. I used to relish going to a play or film or exhibition with my husband and talking about it for hours afterwards; his take on things so enlightening. I miss that. It is why I am looking forward to tomorrow night. I shall have my very own walker.
At dinner we will discuss, as is our wont, marriage and romance (or lack of it in my case) and life and the universe, because one of the greatest discoveries of my divorced years is that my men friends seem to love talking about all this stuff more than I ever supposed. I am open about my situation in a way that I never was in my twenties, pre-marriage and children, and goppingly single and fizzing with the humiliation of it all. But, more honest and brazen now, I find men, just as much as women, seem to love having their opinions and advice sought on all the emotional matters I happily throw at them. There is no agenda, just a frank and funny exchange between the genders.
Call me an old crone, but these days I am completely alive to the joys of walkers.