Relationships

With Pride Month beginning tomorrow, how proud are you of your sexuality? As a white cis-gendered male, I am frankly a little embarrassed about mine. I mean, it’s not exactly cool to fancy the opposite sex these days, and many of us hetero-normies have become increasingly wary of appearing ‘inappropriate’ when making a move on someone we like the look of. So don't expect me to be parading my vanilla-flavoured proclivities through central London any time soon. What would I even wear to signal hetero-pride – baggy cords and a neatly tucked-in shirt? That said, you might well spot me at some of this year's shenanigans; after all, the organisers certainly know how to put on a show.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex had a rather awkward moment recently when they were caught on the ‘kiss-cam’ at a basketball game in Los Angeles. The couple, sitting in a private box (but in very public view), were faced with a decision: to kiss or not to kiss.  Harry went in for the kill (his 26th?), leaning over to his wife for a kiss. But Meghan simply laughed and patted his arm. There, there, little prince – not today. The couple haven't been shy about public displays of affection in the past, and this was somewhat of a departure from her days on camera frolicking in her role as Rachel Zane in Suits. But people change and, I suppose, that was acting.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hknSd04iBdE So what would you have done in a similar situation?

The world is home to 7.8 billion people. Roughly one in 14 of these people (530 million) are on Tinder. Badoo, the second most popular dating app, has ‘only’ 318 million users. Tinder is the most popular dating app in the world, by far. Now, though, a new challenger appears to be emerging. Unlike Badoo and other less robust dating apps, all of whom try to offer a variation of what Tinder provides, this competitor offers something completely different. You see, this new dating app, a next generation dating app, plans to inject artificial intelligence into matchmaking.

The alchemy wrought by a young man’s ability to gyrate and croon at the same time is notorious, turning shy mama’s boys from Presley to Rotten into love/hate machines. Something magical happens when someone – however unsightly – sings a song well, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when he was just walking and talking like a normie. Two words: ‘Mick’ and ‘Hucknall’. The romantic image of the modern musician as tasty but troubled troubadour roving from town to town on his lonesome (except for his bandmates, backing singers, roadies, drug dealer and manager, of course) and taking sensual solace where he may is a powerful one, long propagated by he-sluts who would be intimate with a jack-in-the-box if it looked at them the right way.

From bucket hats to Britney Spears, the 1990s and 2000s are back in vogue. Who could have predicted that the cringe-inducing baggy trousers and All Saints-esque crop tops that filled teenage wardrobes 20 years ago would be resurrected with such gusto by Gen Z? But there’s one part of turn-of-the-century culture that remains firmly consigned to the past. Unlike the clothing of the era, the romcom has proved remarkably resistant to modern reinvention – no matter how hard Hollywood tries. Last month, two romantic comedy veterans – Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher – reunited in a stoic effort to woo audiences back to the genre.

New experiences are always good. Meeting new people is always good. This is what I tell myself when my friend Rae invites me to go speed dating. At the age of 42. ‘Am I not too old?’ I ask her. She reassures me that I am not, but I have my doubts. A woman old enough to remember landlines is surely not who the eligible young gentlemen of Kent are looking to meet on a night out in a bar. But Rae is running the event as a fundraiser, so if I spend my night talking to a series of youngsters who think Miley Cyrus was the first to sing ‘Like A Prayer’, it's all in a good cause. On the train there, I suddenly realise that this isn't actually the worst thing that could happen. I might bump into someone I know.

Reading about the latest about the pathetic-sounding scuffle between Prince Harry and his older brother, I think I could tell the pair a thing or two about fraternal enmity. My older brother, another Harry, and I have not spoken to each other in more than 30 years. He was taller, blond and looked Germanic. I was shorter, brown-haired and looked Greek. He never made it at school, whereas I collected lots and lots of sporting trophies. My father named him an executive in his shipping companies, I was the odd man out. Harry had the largest house in the Hamptons and the poshest apartment in New York, whereas I sort of lived a gypsy life. Harry was not athletic, I excelled in sports and represented Greece in three of them.

I’m living in the interstices between smokes. I fill the gaps ruminating, on the unretrievable past and the foreclosed future. I can’t concentrate enough for any one of my thousands of books to be a distraction. I wake up and count the hours until I’ll be tired enough to go back to sleep (or, on the weekends, until Match of the Day). My wife is gone. She’s gone for ever. Sometimes I hear the voices of reassurance. Be grateful for the time you had with her. I’m idealising our marriage. There are other fish in the sea. Thoughts which seem momentarily plausible. Until, as C.S. Lewis writes in A Grief Observed, ‘then comes the sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “commonsense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace’.

The image of the single, childless ‘career woman’ is drawn so sharply in our minds, so deeply ingrained in culture and overused in media, it obfuscates the real story. Contrary to popular belief, most working women are not putting their careers ahead of love, marriage and motherhood. Never mind that there are no ‘career men’ – no one accuses a single, childless man of prioritising career over love and family just because he’s single and can pay the rent. But women are made to wear this label – though I have yet to meet a woman who has declined a date with a guy she’s interested in because she’d rather be on a Zoom call.

On a recent trip from London to New Delhi, I found out that an acquaintance I see once or twice a year had pulled out of her wedding just 24 hours before the ceremony. An almighty row? Infidelity? Good old-fashioned cold feet? No – her family had simply decided they weren’t happy with the groom and decided to pull the plug. Welcome to the world of arranged marriages. As a woman who was born and grew up in India, arranged marriages – those planned and agreed by the families of the couple, rather than due to the romantic inclinations of the couple themselves – have never made sense to me. But they remain the norm in many South Asian communities. In a 2018 survey of more than 160,000 Indian households, 93 per cent of married couples said theirs was an arranged marriage.

Toyboys are back, apparently. Over the past few months there has been a flurry of middle-aged women crowing about the joy of dating younger men. One author in her mid-forties extolled the virtues of having not one but three lovers half her age. In a piece explaining that ‘younger men are having a cultural moment’, a thirty-something writer described a first date apologising for his scruffy appearance because he’d ‘cycled straight from school’. These women claim it’s liberating, empowering, confidence-boosting and a lot of fun, and even brag about younger men being far better in bed than their older counterparts. And presumably all of this works both ways – so why are we less understanding when men choose younger partners?

In the early 2000s my husband, a diplomat for the EU, was posted to Kazakhstan, a vast empty steppeland next to Siberia. It was winter and the place was covered with thick snow. My family were in England, my husband was mostly in the office; I was 61 and I didn’t know a soul. Our previous posting had been to Damascus and I had occupied myself by writing a book about the old palaces there, but here there were no old buildings as the Kazakhs had been nomads. I had nothing to do. Everyone spoke Russian – I didn’t. As my husband was a senior diplomat we qualified for a cook, but she and I could only communicate using animal noises: chicken was cluck-cluck, beef was moo and lamb was baa. The main foods available seemed to be cabbage, onion and potatoes.