Today I have a guest post. It’s from a male friend of mine who prefers to remain anonymous but I was really thrilled when he offered to write it for me, partly because I love his writing but also because I thought it would be interesting to get a man’s perspective of dating. I may not be throwing myself back on the market any soon but it’s still all useful research.

He did suggest that I might like to split it into two posts but honestly it’s so easy to read that I thought you would prefer it all in one go. Enjoy!

Dating for men

After planning our ‘big day’ investing time, care and – yes – money into an endeavour that now seems faintly ludicrous; I found myself spat out of the other end of the relationship sausage machine; shrink wrapped with a ‘Divorced…’ red sticker slapped across my cellophane. View Post

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I am something of a paradox when it comes to trust. In general, I tend to believe if not quite that all men are lying, cheating bastards,  that they all at least have the capacity to be deceitful, and are quite likely to stray should the opportunity present itself.

I can’t help this and I apologise to all the men who have never ever lied to their partners.

However, whilst my world view may be a little depressing, I still have a bizarre naivety when it comes to individual relationships, and will basically believe anything anyone tells me. You’d think you’d have to be an idiot to accept  any one of the following lies, yet in previous relationships, accept them I have, without, at the time, doubting them at all:

“Oh this black eye? Oh yes, I got that dancing over-enthusiastically.”

“Yes it is weird that it took me two and a half hours to get home from work even though it’s only ten minutes away. Yeah, the traffic was a bit bad.”

“My wife?? No, I’m definitely not having sex with her.”

You get my drift.

The thing is that I really want to trust people, and just can’t help but see the best in someone and give them the benefit of the doubt. I also believe that a relationship has to be built on trust. Whatever my opinion of men in general might be, I have to believe that my partner is different, otherwise what’s the point?

I was reading today about a recent study that revealed that a quarter of men have a secret email account that their partner doesn’t know about. A quarter of men! My first reaction was shock, but then I was confused. Why do people need a separate account? Aren’t emails private and personal anyway? I would never read a partner’s email, just like I would never open their post, so why the need to be secretive?

It’s not that I wouldn’t want a partner to read my emails, but it just wouldn’t occur to me to share. It would be a bit like being on the phone and someone picking up the other line to listen in. Just weird.

The survey also discovered that:

  • One in ten men deliberately set up a separate account because they wanted to hide an affair or money problems
  • One in twenty men have a second secret mobile phone
  • Nearly 20% of men store pictures of an ex-partner
  • 77% of men delete text messages in case their partners look at them
  • A quarter of men had emails they said they wouldn’t want their partner to see and a third of these said they had flirty emails stored secretly.

It kind of cancels out the joy of Santa and his stuck beard doesn’t it?

What I want to know though, all this man-hating aside, is do you read your partner’s emails and/or text messages? If so, do they know about it, or do you do it in secret? Am I the unusual one in not openly sharing emails or at least sneaking a peek behind my partner’s back?

Or, if you’re a man, do you do any of the things in this survey? I’d love to know…

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I read an article in Grazia this week that made me mad.

It was written by an anonymous male journalist, who was claiming that being cheated on is basically much harder for a man than a woman. He was empathising with the recently wronged Robert Pattinson. “Believe me,” he said, “it’s so much worse when a woman cheats on a man.”

Of course it is.

Just like it’s always worse when a man gets a cold?

(Did you detect my oh-so-subtle sarcasm?)

He goes on about how much harder it is for men to be cheated on, because it leads them to doubt themselves and their sexual prowess and makes them wonder what they were lacking as a man that made their partner stray. “When women have their hearts broken,” he whines on, “they get endless counselling sessions from friends until they feel better.”

Seriously, does it get much more patronising than that?

Firstly, anonymous male journalist, I would like to point out that just because we don’t have penises, doesn’t mean we are immune to worrying about our sexual performance. Newsflash for you – women occasionally experience self-doubt! Gasp! We also like to think outside the bedroom too, so our trampled self-esteem will affect lots of other areas of our lives as well. (This is similar to multi-tasking. It’s that thing women do when they think about more than one thing at once*.)

Also, this sweeping statement about women finding comfort in their friends makes several very basic and not always correct assumptions. It assumes that all women have friends that they feel comfortable confiding in, and it assumes we want to bang on and on to them about our problems. Neither of these are necessarily true. Heartbreak is often a very personal and private thing, and although men may have this image of women gathering in packs, necking Chardonnay, proclaiming all men to be bastards and immediately ‘feeling better’, it’s simply not true.

The fact is that being deceived by someone you love and trust is gutting, whether you’re a man or a woman, 18 or 80. Just because women might be more inclined to vent their emotions with friends sometimes, doesn’t mean the pain cuts any less deep.

If anonymous male journalist is still wondering what it is that he lacks as a man, perhaps he should focus less on the contents of his trousers, and more on his understanding on how women think and feel.

*Said in an anonymous male writer style patronising tone

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Today I have great pleasure in hosting a guest post from one of my readers, a lovely lady by the name of Beth.

Beth first commented on my blog on a post last summer called Once Upon a Time, a story about the one and only time in my life when I have had my heart truly broken. Most of the time my blog is fairly frivolous, but this post and Beth’s comment have stuck in my mind ever since, as the one time where I’ve felt like something I’ve written may have actually made a tiny difference in someone’s life.

This week Beth responded to a post I wrote about orgasms, commenting on her ex-partner’s rather selfish attitude in the bedroom, and I invited Beth to vent her frustrations in a formal letter of a complaint, in the hope that it would help her to lay to rest these ghosts of boyfriend past.

Beth took up the challenge, and here she is! Please make her very welcome…

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Today is International Women’s Day. The 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day no less.

*fanfare*

More importantly, as New Boyfriend helpfully pointed out this morning, whilst encouraging me to enjoy my day ‘being independent and thinking about voting and what-not’, it is also British Pie Week. Excellent. I can kill two birds with one stone and celebrate my release from the constraints of the kitchen by making a nice pie.

I do actually feel like I have done my bit for IWD this year, not least with my campaign for equal rights to orgasms. You may remember a couple of weeks ago I had a bit of a rant about my local arts centre’s plans for the day – a celebration of the social, economic and political achievements of women in the form of knitting, foot reading and a spot of afternoon yoga. All very lovely in its place, but it hardly felt inspirational – “that’s right ladies, reach for the sky! You can do it! Fantastic… That’s right, now bend down and touch your toes…” Hmmm… View Post

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Today I have been thinking about orgasms.

According to New Boyfriend, the natural ratio of male to female orgasms – ‘me time’ and sex toys aside – is five to one, three to one if you’re lucky. Apparently this is Nature’s Way. Something to do with cavemen and childbirth.

I’m pretty sure he is just saying this to wind me up, which seems to be the case with 95% of the things he says, but it did make me wonder.

“Ask anyone,” he said, “it’s just a fact.”

“Rubbish,” I countered, “women are definitely supposed to have more. How about I ask some of your friends next week?”

“Go on then…” he challenged.

“Fine, I will,” I said, easily wound up as I am. “You know it’s the kind of thing I would ask…”

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Last night I had one of those dreams about being in love.

When I was younger I used to have them about piles of pound coins, huge mountains of them that I would discover behind the sofa and run my hands through greedily. Now I have them about men.

The man in question is normally someone I have never met before, never seen before (although it was recently Peter Jones from Dragons Den), but I always just KNOW. He is The One.

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I was talking to a male friend at the weekend about infidelity and he came out with a rather shocking statement.

He said that the only thing that stopped men from cheating on their partners was the possibility of getting caught. He reckoned that if there was a guarantee that the wives and girlfriends would never find out, that ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of men would cheat.

I will say that again just in case you didn’t hear me properly – ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.

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I’m a sucker for a decent chick flick, and I really enjoyed the film version of ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’, so when I saw a copy of the book at a boot sale at the weekend for 20p – well, what could I do? We know I need all the dating help I can get.

The premise is this – if a man wants to ask you out, he will ask you out.

That’s it really. (I never said it was complicated). The authors claim that if a guy really likes you, he will find a way to get in touch, he will call when he says he will, he will want to have sex with you and he will ultimately want to marry you. If he fails to come good on any of these points, ever, then you face the facts – he’s just not that into you.

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