Singled out

I met up with a very good, very kinky friend for lunch yesterday and we ended up, head in our hands, mildly depressed, over coffee. There are certain stereotypes that I have always thought a myth and that of the single woman, bemoaning her status to other, single friends is seemingly not one of them. I felt depressingly Sex in the City, and hated myself a little for it.

There comes a point in every life when you can look across the room and see a host of couples - if you are a pervert you will also see a host of other sorts of relationships, but fundamentally, togetherness. People who you like, people who are your friends, people who right now you really, really don't want to be anywhere near. Because you do not have that special someone and you are starting to feel like a leper. Furthermore, you can look at the pool of other single people within that room and realise that you have either fucked, played with or are incompatible with all of them. And then you feel a bit stuck.

We tried to work out what was going wrong, as we often do when things are not ideal, we look inwards, to ourselves, to what we might be lacking (aside from a primary partner who practically explodes with desire to have kinky sex with us right now). Now, I have faults. I have many. I have cultivated them over the years and some are good friends. But there is nothing basically wrong with me. I'm a good catch. I'm smart, attractive, funny have all my own teeth, make a mean banoffee pie and am frankly, amazing in bed. The same with my friend, although I'm not sure about the pie. She does make great cookies. We are not crazy wedding obsessed women running around in white dresses screaming "commit, commit!" We just want a nice, kinky chap to spend some quality, perverted time with.

And, annoyingly, the problem is with the men available. Or unavailable. Sorry to be sexist, chaps, but there are a lot more good looking women on the scene who have wide and exciting tastes in kink. Add to that the girls are just a lot better at expressing what they want, going for it and actually delivering the goods. Without being an arrogant prick, though I am an arrogant prick, I have a number of beautiful, interesting and amazing women who want play dates. And I want to play with them. So I play mostly with women these days and go on a lot of first dates with men that go nowhere. Or worse, they stagnate in a kind of circling no-place of unanswered messages. For the moment I've sent out some rather blunt messages to a few people, including Technophile regarding their level of interest.

Perhaps, we wondered, it was the kink thing. We're both very kinky. Sometimes that makes people nervous. Would it be easier if we were vanilla? At least the dating pool would be bigger, and we wouldn't know what we were missing, because we wouldn't want it. Sex would be sex rather than an entire lifestyle, which, wonderful as it is does become a very high bar if you feel like you are just not reaching it. But we are not vanilla. Any more so that lesbians are straight or tall girls are short.

When you boil it down, we are single for a very dull, very simple set of reasons. The people we want can't give us what we need. The people who want us we don't want. And it's very rarely anyone's fault. It just happened like that. We can hardly change ourselves, or change the people that we want. Conversely, we can't expect others to change or to change what they want - because then everybody would be going around pretending to be who they were not and pretending to like what they didn't like. Which is madness. Some things are just part of you, bone deep and trying to be anything other than what you are is a lie you will always come to regret.

More and more I become clearer and clearer on what I want. I had a terrible realisation last night that perhaps this was the problem. My dreadful clarity. This leads me to reject any number of people who could be, might be, if you sort of turn a little and squint almost not quite what I wanted. Then I realised that would be a complete cop out and an utter compromise. So fuck that noise. I want what I want and there's nothing wrong with that. If that means being a little sad and a little lonely for a little while, then so be it.