20 First Dates

My mission for the evening is not falling. I’m teetering down the street in a pair of brand new nude heels and instead of risking certain death by whipping around to sneer at a random who shouts a lascivious “my size!”, I yank some flats out of my handbag, zip my jacket right up to my chin and turn the corner towards the Warehouse Theatre where I’m about to go on 20 dates.

The guy who yells about fitting comfortably into my holes is part of the motivation. Him and the inevitable ancestor who sidles up to me at the bar smelling like the end of marriages and life while insisting he buy me alcohol… and a quick flight to Johannesburg.

Though they’re both prominent on my list of Reasons to Go Speed Dating, my main incentive is the countless boys I have met in countless bars who have never bothered to call, text or WhatsApp with the slightest assurance of loving me interspersed with not spreading their seed as though they’re the last fertile man on Earth.

So speed dating.

Twenty dates with 20 different guys at a rate of three minutes per date.

With numbers like that, the place should be packed.

It should be bursting at the seams with a bunch of eligible bachelors, ready to talk, date and discuss crucial matters like what we’re doing for dinner but instead I walk into a red, candle lit room filled with a line of tables and chairs and think: Where the hell is everyone?

The answer is they’re outside.

And most of them have vaginas.

While logically, all our primping, preening and looking as hot as hell should earn us some late points, the women are on time while the men arrive in the kind of drizzle that would scandalise ‘The Weather Girls’.

It’s not raining men.

In fact, so few gentlemen arrive that the event starts an entire hour late and to pass the time, I chat to a comedian I’ve already met and who adds to the awkward by exhuming assorted Ghosts of Scathing Reviews Past.

Eventually, by candle light, the whole thing starts well into our next lives.

People have made calls to their male friends.

People have asked that everyone ignore the inherent loser complex that stems from the reality that the next day is Valentine’s Day and the lure of dazzlingly dressed milkshake finally brings all the boys to yard.

Where we are all issued a number, told to sit down at a table and spend three minutes with a stranger.

Though luck would give me the number three, my number is six, my table is 16 and my first date is a man I have met once before who, named after a philosopher and true to form, spends the next three minutes racing through a conversation about God.

It’s a biblical beginning. But it’s fun.

Like all the men there, the philosopher is well groomed, polite and just jumping in to see what happens.

And what happens is that everyone relaxes.

We’re all there, we all look great and we all have 20 people to gaze at eagerly with all the grace and attention in the world.

So we sip on whisky and beer.

We laugh at the fact that the roar of conversation is deafening to ears and death to throats and we lean in to hear each other better while offering up random tidbits about our lunch break swims at Olympia pool, our travels through Africa, our shunning of alcohol or the tyranny of our residency at Medi-Clinic.

Of course, the question that is inevitable, often repeated and which rubs a little shimmer off all the shine is a variation of: How can you be single?

Though I’m told time and time again that I’m so friendly, so confident, so charming, so pretty and for the first time in my life my too big lips covering my too-big mouth below eyes that disappear come together to prompt “that’s a big smile, it’s beautiful,” the question is one I can do without.

Not because I don’t have some pretty good ideas but because it seems to suggest the existence of some well concealed crazy which quickly conjures the image of initially similarly beguiled suitors raucously toasting to close calls and dodged bullets.

I meet an engineer, a doctor, an accountant, a property developer and an American guy who has quit his job, taken the road less travelled and found it leads to dates with 20 women in a dim cellar in downtown Windhoek.

Though I’m all for meeting everyone, my throat feels like sand paper from all the highlight reels and I miss a date with a hunk of a taxi driver and a comedian whose paragraph in one of my comedy reviews included the line “come back when you’re funny”.

Outside, it seems like another world entirely.