‘What time is it?’ A simple question that everyone understands. Ask it to your colleague and they’ll tell you… ‘quarter past three.’
Ask the marketing department and they will of course say, ‘We’re delighted to announce that it’s a twenty five percent improvement on three.’
IT will tell you ‘Sorry, we won’t be able to get to you till half past, in the meantime have you tried switching it off and then on again.
Finance won’t be interested in what time it is until the end of the quarter, HR will explain the company’s time policy and how equal weight must be given to different time zones and finally, your boss will expect a detailed plan outlining your strategy for telling the time in the next five years.
We are all different – that’s what makes life so interesting. And nowhere are these differences more apparent than at work, where most of us spend most of our time. I still find it weird that we spend more time and effort convincing a potential employer that we can hand out burgers to drunken nightclubbers than we actually spent in the night club itself trying to find a partner with whom we’d spend the rest of our lives.
Maybe it’s different these days, maybe internet dating has become like Linkedin for lovers. Back in the 1980s your ability to balance alcohol intake, dancing prowess, coherence of chat-up lines and still (hopefully) perform like a Deutsche porno-plumber when the moment came, was a skill that took more practice than most of us were ever lucky enough to get.
I for one would have been a lot happier if the ladies in West Yorkshire’s finest heavy rock club had announced they were holding interviews for the vacant position of long-haired-lovehunter-from-Liversedge’ and applicants were encouraged to enclose a CV including details of their current package.
Despite all the odds, some very dodgy dancing (now there’s a movie) and a few too many chicken-in-a-baskets at Ma Peels and The Turks Head, we made it. Most of us found a person we loved (still do) to share our adventures and bring up the next generation of even-weirder examples.
Because for all the simplicity that internet dating brings and all the awkwardness-of-asking that it removes, the fact is that human beings are prone to do daft things, like finding themselves attracted to people who are nothing like them. Those Mills and Boon ladies, magnetically attracted to the bad boys on their BSA Bantams would have struggled with Bumble because humans find attraction and desire in the strangest places. How many couples do you know who are complete opposites and function all the better for it? And how often is it that very friction that not only brings out the best in those people but their offspring too?
Life is crazy and sometimes, maybe we should just remember that we are only animals and having a thumb and a frontal lobe merely gives us an advantage, but not a right to make up the rules of existence. Do other species have this variety? Was that first fish that first came on land just a crazy rebellious teenager doing the piscean version of dumb adolescence because cigarettes were yet to be invented. ‘Plenty more dudes in the sea, but out here, it’s just me and you fishface.’
Watching my ‘getting-close-to-30’ stepson go through this recently was fascinating. His last few relationships, found through dating apps were with women who seemed lovely to us as parents getting ever-more-broody for grandkids. When he told us a few summers back that his latest partner was lovely, but somehow not quite ‘the one’ we were sad, but sympathetic. I knew how he felt because 24 years ago I had exactly the same moment shortly before I met his mother, that caused me to split with a woman who seemed perfectly suited to who I was. And I still remember the moment not long afterwards when I met Julie, who was so very different to all the others, but absolutely the right person to allow me to be who I wanted to be. Thankfully, she saw the same in me, but there isn’t an algorithm written that would have put us together on a dating website.
My stepson met a new partner shortly afterwards, through a friend, not a website and, funnily enough, he’s absolutely besotted.
The point here is that, most of us can be happy with most of the rest of us, but to be really and truly in love, we might just need to look out for something we never thought would work. If we start off in a relationship with someone very different, then the worst that could happen is that we get more alike. If your criteria for love are about being with someone similar you’re heading for disappointment as you inevitably grow apart. What makes the difference is us and a willingness to understand our partners, admire their differences and be inspired, not frustrated at the challenge. Relationships start off simply and then get harder. 25 years into my one I know a lot about what I do that drives my partner mad. It’s then when I realise that, even though we were different to start with, we’ve both changed a huge amount (because you’d be very weird and very disappointed to be still the same soppy, feckless halfwit you were in your 20s) but some of that change is precisely because I spent the last 25 years with that person. In some ways I’ve tried to become the person she’s tried to make me into. On balance I’d say it hasn’t worked, but the love and admiration and persistence is still strong enough to survive it.
The correct response is to be thankful and seize the opportunity to enjoy being the new you and wonder what the next phase will look like. Don’t forget to thank them for helping you get there and maybe even include them in the plan for the next 25 years.
