Success comes after a fall

Success comes after a fall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday, December 29, 2012
Section: Opinion

Failure is not my friend, but I’ve got used to its company over the years.  It has been shadowing me at a quiet distance since I was a kid, biding its time until I tripped up or blundered, then gleefully trumpeting my wrong turns and dead-end decisions. Failure has made a fool of me on plenty of occasions and brought me to my knees on others.

Most people like to measure themselves by their successes, but it’s their failings that are far more illuminating. I like to look back on mine as faint imprints on the stepping stones I’ve used to go places. They signal turning points in my life – those humiliating times when I made an ass of myself, or was blind-sided by hubris. Minor defeats were annoying reminders of why I needed to try harder, or get smarter. In truth, my career began with a succession of failures.

It took me years to get into journalism in the 80’s, long before there was a university degree of the same name to carry under my arm to job interviews. Back then knocking on doors was an acceptable entry route, but few bosses saw any potential in me. I was too naïve, too unsure of myself. I don’t really know what I ‘wasn’t,’ I was just wet behind the ears, I suppose. I never thought to trade favours on my father’s newspaper pedigree – that would have involved the shame of having to explain why I didn’t know my absent dad, so a career in print was not an option.

Instead, I got part-time jobs writing the funnies for breakfast radio and being the ditzy barrel girl (scatterbrained required no acting at 20) until finally, the news editor got fed up being harassed on the way to the loo and let me join the newsroom. I loved the business of writing hourly bulletins on the run,  dashing from the printer to the tiny sound-proofed booth to read the news, chasing tip-offs and ambulances, but it was telling stories with moving pictures that I really hankered after.

Trying to make the transition from radio to television meant getting rejected in newer and more painful ways. I spent a year working for peanuts, making cups of tea, doing the photocopying. News directors would sigh and give me another weary: “Nah, nothin’ going.” Or better still: “Come back when someone else has given you a crack.” Every knockback throbbed for a few days until I resolved to test my bruised ego again, each time that little bit more desperate to get noticed. When the ABC finally took a punt on me, I was 23, and tenacity had become my middle name.

TV is a fickle business – if you’re in front of the camera you live and die at the whim of executives who decide if you’re watchable. (Whatever that means.) Management faces change as often as rating seasons and those new to the job of hiring and firing like to make their mark by axing programmes, boning has-beens or elevating no-ones into some-ones. It’s a cruel business for wannabes and also-rans, but a favourite Chief of Staff once told me: “You haven’t made it in television until you’ve been sacked at least once.”

Once was all it took – age 31 – I was fired from my hosting job three weeks after having my first baby. No-one ever said why, but getting shafted on maternity leave meant hiring lawyers and going into battle, if only to preserve what shreds remained of my dignity. There was an out of court cash settlement, but psychologically, I was devastated (post-natal and devastated.) It was a terrible start to motherhood.

That sacking taught me how ruthless and disloyal people could be, and the identity crisis that followed floored me with self-doubts. I found out who my real friends were, and who was dining out on my misfortune. But I learnt why the greatest weakness is in giving up. I sat at home for six months adoring my new baby and acknowledged my shortcomings. Rock bottom isn’t a bad place to be when you realise there’s nowhere lower to go. The thing I feared most had happened to me, but I had survived my fall from grace and discovered strengths I didn’t know I had. So I dusted myself off and spent the next 12 years on other programmes, taking on tougher roles than I ever imagined myself capable.

I know my children need to taste failure sooner or later, the eldest one especially. But that’s a politically incorrect thing to say when many parents today prefer to clear the obstacles in their children’s path. I see it in my own parenting sometimes, that tendency to want to spare my children the pain of failure. And I remind myself to step back and let them fall.

Maybe it’s persistence I need to teach my children. I see them wanting to give up at the first sign of struggle, or trying to bow out as soon as they realize they’re not a natural at something new. I wonder if failure is often about arrogance too, because the smart set like to imagine that hard work and doggedness are for upstarts who aren’t gifted by birth. Show ponies expect to wake up one day and be an overnight success. (Actually, they’ve got it half right, because invariably, they will wake up.)

I checked with my bloke about his failures: “Haven’t had any.”

“Don’t be silly, what about failed relationships?”

“Haven’t had any.” (Perhaps self-delusion can be as rewarding as conceit.)

Stupidly, I pressed him further: “Well, what have my failures been?” That got him going: “Failure to get the message, failure to do what you’re told.”

Society now considers failure as some sort of deficiency. “Failure is not an option” is the new mantra for mavericks and up-and-comings. I subscribe to JK Rowling’s thoughts on defeat, as she reflected on a time when her marriage was over and her wizard Harry Potter had been rejected by a dozen publishers: “It’s impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

I don’t know many people who readily accept that the breakdown of their marriage was a failure of their own making – it’s usually the wicked spouse who’s blamed. That’s the escape clause we use so often to excuse our failures:  watering down the facts and re-telling our histories gets us off the hook – and offloads the burden of responsibility.

Agreeing to write this column was my biggest risk in several years: not least because it’d be my first foray into newspapers. The editor told me: “Your brief is to write of an ordinary life at home.” I set out to write a column from a woman’s perspective that a man would want to read. I worried that you would think less of me the more I wrote, that your dismissal would be like a rejection of my take on life: an awful prospect. But whether you desert me next week, or stick by me with your lovely emails and encouragement, I will keep trying to be fearless and honest. I may later regret some of the things I’ve written, but at least the regretter will be an older and wiser version of myself. I’m a veteran of failure, but I’ll take a risk on your tolerance.

Getting in a bind over a fix

Getting in a bind over a fix
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 22, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am not the person you call on to get something fixed. Unless it’s a missing button, a sandwich or a broken heart. Year 8 home economics and the empathy gene have served me well, but not well enough to be trusted with important things like dishwashers that don’t, taps that drip like nightly water torture and new digital tellies that refuse to play ball when the tennis starts.

Every household needs someone who has patience, logic and the ability to read an instruction manual.  Apparently I have none of these skills. Actually, I know I have none of these skills because I switch off the minute the man of the house starts lecturing me about why domestic life might be easier if I kept my cool, attempted some rational thought and located the darn instruction manual.

I’ve already learnt one of the most important lessons for marital harmony: decide which one of you is going to play the helpless role, and which of you is going to pretend they know what they’re doing. I don’t like to tread on my husband’s area of expertise – self delusion – because he prides himself on his masterful tool-work.

Our garage, depending on your point of view, is either an obsessive-compulsive’s shrine to hoarding or a spider-pit of uselessness. Countless bits of sawn-off skirting boards have been stacked on the rafters, all manner of timber off-cuts festoon the walls, some rusted gardening tools first used to topiary the gardens of Versailles are propped behind the door and a there’s a kayak whose bottom has been wet just the once. (By the sprinkler.) Trying to coax a hoarder into sending scraps of wood to the tip is like asking a kid to give up Christmas. I get a staunch refusal backed up by some pithy remark: “If I ever got some time to myself on a weekend I’d be oar in hand down the river right now.” Little does he know that over the years, I’ve portered trunkfuls of his prized junk across town to friends’ verges, awaiting their council ‘bring out your dead.’

When my jack-of-all-trades is fed up with his squabbling progeny interrupting the cricket on weekends, he grabs his car keys and calls to me over his shoulder: “I’m just popping down to Bunnings, do you need anything?” I like to yell back: ‘I’d like a new set of knockers please, wooden ones if they have them, they feel nice.” “Oh, and an all purpose spreader.” In case he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I add: “And some lawn fertilizer to put in it.” Then I sit back and make a cup of tea knowing he’ll be gone for hours because Bunnings is his Aladdin’s cave.

I’m sure the place is also a cult. Customers in Bunnings look disconcertingly happy – like they’re high on the sheer spectacle of a million bits-and-bobs with easy reach. (Of a fork-lift.) I notice there’s a lot of waiting around at the paint counter, but everybody is calm – people making small talk with each other while they finger the silky new paintbrushes. I see their eyes glaze over as they fantasise about new colour swatches and virgin rollers and trays, all fluffy soft and inviting. No-one does their lolly there, even when it takes fifteen minutes to locate the plumbing expert and the queue at the cash register is a dozen deep.

My right-hand man uses trips to Bunnings as a rite of passage for our five year old. Together, man and boy drive off in the ute and vanish for half the afternoon, signalling their return with a flurry of excited shouts “Hey, I got a really big tool box, some new drill bits, a hot dog and a piece of special wood.” And then I turn to my small son and say “And what did you get darling?”

I know there might be just as many women as men who love fixing things. But I doubt it. Though I do have several girlfriends who have been forced into the role of household trouble-shooter by necessity. Like me, there are men out there who won’t read instruction manuals – believe it or not. They’re usually the ones who  have ‘tool tempers’ that erupt while hanging (their wives’) paintings – where the air turns blue from their constant stream of invective and the hallway is littered with hooks and screws thrown down from the ladder in disgust. Those kind of tinkerers need to accept their limitations, hand the drill and plugs to the missus and dish out instructions instead.

To me, a washing machine is as complex as a space shuttle, so when I’m left alone in a house with a malfunctioning appliance, I feel uncomfortable. Last month our toilet threatened to block because our two-year-old thinks ‘toilet training’ is teaching the bog to swallow an entire roll of poo-tickets. Having fished reams of sodden paper out of the bowl, my bloke fiddled around with the flush mechanism and pronounced it ‘fixed.’

As he left the house for work the next morning, I was given strict instructions to gently press the button until the water subsided. Gentle pressing I did, but when the water started rising – fast – I did what any level-headed woman would do and started frantically bashing the button. It worked a treat. Until the button stopped being a button and got stuck in the hole. I thought I might sort it out if I lifted the cistern lid off and had a play around but some valve popped out of alignment and then I couldn’t get the lid back on. Knowing I was faced with certain disgrace, I rang three plumbers before one agreed to call by, fixed it in 30 seconds and charged me $90 for the pleasure. Frankly, it was a small price to pay for saving my bacon.

Domestic life is not just divided into do-it-yourself-ers and incompetents. It’s about who kills the cockroaches, especially the summer ones that rocket into the house with their Boeing wingspans. It’s about which half of a partnership likes spiders enough to slide them out the back door on a piece of newspaper without histrionics. And it’s which person wakes up fast enough to make a flying leap from bed when there are scary noises in the middle of the night. It’s never a burglar, always middle son falling out of bed. His father usually gets the trailing foot tangled up in the sheet and traumatises all three children with howls of shock and pain as he crashes to the floor.

Misbehaving computers, however, are a burden to be shared equally. When they go on the blink, or blank, I yell for my 46-year-old technology wizard, who tells me (much too gleefully):  “Isn’t it time you learnt to fix it yourself?”

“Help!” I then plead to eldest son, who calls back: ‘You’re such a noob Mum, you can’t even find your own Word document – Epic Fail.’ I tell him to lower his voice so my cover’s not blown – really, I have no idea how to retrieve any documents from the Microsoft cloud, but hey – I don’t need that telegraphed.

I don’t believe anyone should be facetious about maintenance matters. When the dishwasher improves to washing 80-percent of the dishes and sodden husband finally emerges from inside it, I hand him a glass of wine to reward his genius and remark: “Thanks honey, you’re quite a catch.” (Dishwashers are not all he can get going.)

Last law of marital harmony: appreciate the effort, not the result. (Then get a professional in first thing Monday.)

60 and too old to register

60 and too old to register
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 15, 2012
Section: Opinion

Three years ago, my local supermarket made a very smart decision. It hired an Italian blonde bombshell called Nella as a check-out chick. I use the term ‘chick’ loosely, because this bella donna was 57 and came with an accent like Sophia Loren: “Everything you see darlink, I owe to spaghetti.” She fast became a charismatic addition to the 12-items-or-less aisle, so much so that a great many of the 60-something bachelors in my suburb started favoring her express lane.

I got to know Nella because she was the friendliest  face I’d seen in the service industry in quite some time. She quickly learnt my children’s names: “Buon giorno piccolini!” and they squealed “Ciao Nella!” when they spotted her behind her cash register. In no time, she knew lots of her customers’ names, and she and I had running gags about noticing each other’s hairstyles when no-one else did. (“Darlink, ‘e’s not looking at your hair, you know.”) For me, she was just the happy fix I needed after collecting yet another trolleyfull of nappies and Cornflakes; all with a headstrong toddler hell-bent on her own shopping expedition.

I tell you this because 2 months ago, Nella was told to go. No reasons given. Coincidentally, a bank of do-it-yourself checkouts arrived soon after, confounding us all with their bleeps-ings and ding-ings. My children still scan the cash registers for Nella, but there’s just the usual teenagers learning the hard way why you pack eggs on top. Buying milk and bread is no fun anymore – I miss Nella’s motherly banter.

I’ve bumped into her near school and at the train station. Each time she recounts for me her latest  rejection:  “You’re not quite what we’re after.” Or “Sorry, you don’t fit the job description.”  She can’t understand why her years of experience in the service industry count for nothing. I notice she has shed a bit of her sparkle – she’s agitated about money, glum about her dwindling job prospects.  I can see her self-confidence waning.

I am astounded that someone who is ‘goodwill personified’ cannot find a job in retail –  it’s because Nella is now 60 – hardly old, but positively ancient when out job-hunting.  Goodness knows, she could teach those snippy young shop-girls a thing or two about being warm, efficient and polite. She’d cost the same to hire as any 21-year-old, be markedly more reliable and give to her customers that lovely reach of human kindness. When shop owners call for someone ‘dynamic’ and ‘creative,’ Nella is their perfect candidate, except those descriptives are now code for ‘young.’

Nella now inhabits society’s never-land – too old to be considered an asset, too young to be cast out as unproductive and dispensable. Is it because she is seen as a greater health and safety risk? Or that someone her age is automatically regarded as less efficient, or unwilling to learn today’s technologies? I’d imagine there are plenty of 20-somethings showing the same tendencies (especially on Mondays.)

When I was a kid, we knew all our shopkeepers’ names . As it happened, our butcher’s name was  ‘Alan Butcher’ (the perfect marriage of occupation and identity.) He wore a blue and white striped apron, had one knuckle missing and always had blood on his hands. I used to scare myself imagining him de-boning his finger but was placated by the slice of polony he always handed me over the counter. Our family and his were bonded by chops and rissoles for a decade, part of an affectionate familiarity between customer and proprietor, the kind that breeds long loyalties.

If competition between businesses is fiercer than ever, you’d think longevity in a job – the wealth of accumulated experience – would be prized. But the great swathe of baby boomers now hitting their 50’s and 60’s are discovering workplace ageism is now turning its prejudice towards them. Funding retirement is a scary prospect if there’s little job security in middle age. How have we allowed people at the peak of their working lives to be stripped of their responsibilities, their status and once cast out as dead wood, their dignity.

I hear stories from my mum and her girlfriends, now well into their 70’s, about how they are made to feel invisible:  how shop assistants and service providers look through them, past them, as though younger customers are more important. Last week, a lovely neighbour of mine in her late 60’s recounted how in the queue at her favourite deli, she feels pressured to let the younger set go ahead of her, because, of course, she has nothing better to do. Out shopping, or at the bank or the post office, my mum says she now makes a point of being polite, but assertive. What really annoys her is when seniors (in her book, anyone fifteen years older than her) have their requests ignored until there’s no-one else left to serve. Society needs to re-learn how to appreciate its oldies.

I’ve already had my first taste of ageism. Ten years ago, at the decrepit age of 35, I tried to get income protection insurance to safeguard my reporting position on one of Kerry Packer’s national current affairs programmes. Even then, during the golden days of Kerry’s empire, I was told that no-one would insure a woman of 35 working in television. Indeed, I’d be lucky if I was still in front of the camera much past 40. I was horrified. TV presenting is no country for old women.

I don’t like what I see as a culture against ageing in this country, where younger workers are prized for their risk-taking and submissiveness and gray-haired ones are being encouraged to surrender their independence well before 65.

At my favourite bra and knickers shop, one of the sales assistants would have to be 75 not out. I seek her out and spend a fortune there because she is the doyenne of bra fitters: the old school kind who demands I lean over to ensure my cup does not runneth over. She is also the bosom lady who flicks her tape measure from around her neck and whips it around my chest so she can tut-tut: “Yes, you’re up another cup size, but it’s because your back is getting wider.” Good grief. I can take it on the chin from  her, but I don’t want that kind of bad news delivered by some perky A-cup bra-girl reminding me why three children are bad for your assets. I want a matron. And she is brilliant at her job.

Noone wants to be forced into early retirement. I’d rather keel over from exhaustion than boredom. My friend Nella is not ready nor willing to be a pensioner – she wants to stay employed, play that cash register like a piano and feel good about being needed. Turning 60 should be no impediment. And if you happen to be in the market for a part-time shop hand, Nella might just be your gal.

Saved by the Sisterhood

Saved by the sisterhood
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 8, 2012
Section: Opinion

The sisterhood is one of my most precious possessions. After children and the love of a husband.   (Though sometimes my girlfriends understand me in ways he couldn’t imagine.)

It’s not just about the X chromosome. My metaphorical sisters have been my lifelong companions, a good handful of them since I was 15. They have been in and around my life, often daily, for thirty years or more and rarely have we had a cross word. We have been through awful boys and lovely ones, broken hearts and narrow escapes, white weddings, the blackness of divorce, grand achievements and career stalls, the trauma of death, exhilarating births and the terrible trials of the tracksuit years – those seemingly endless days when babies and small children left you with no fashion sense save for the trackie dacks you thought hid all the sins of procreation, but didn’t.

The sisterhood has been created for all women to dip into whenever and wherever they need it. Some are quite self sufficient and only need a couple of its members on occasion, others like a whole tribe, in constant communication. Some you keep at arm’s length, and some are your bosom buddies for life. You can never be too giving. But you can be too demanding. Sometimes, the truest marker of a friendship is seeing how much it can withstand.

I have one who reads this column, before you do, just to make sure I’m not making a fool of myself. That could test a friendship, but she dishes out constructive criticism like expensive perfume – it packs a punch but then drifts to a soft finish. Our friendship has reached new levels of trust.

Do men have this intensity of friendship? I hope my husband does, though the evidence is sparse, and couched in rhyming slang and blokey deadpans. I’m not clear if it gets much deeper than that. Who knows how many men discuss the things (we hope) are most important to them – the state of their relationships, worries about children, careers, whether their wives are pulling their weight around the house. On nights out I ask him: ‘What did you talk about?’ and he’ll reply: ‘football, Ricky Ponting throwing in the towel, man-opause’ and I’ll reply: ‘How’s such-and-such’s wife? And children?’ And he’ll say: ‘Dunno. Didn’t ask’.

Male friendships are the unthinkable female ones – the kind that if you didn’t ask about someone’s husband or children, or how their job was going, you’d never be invited out to a girl’s lunch again. Perhaps men just don’t want to waste time weaving over and under the same emotionally fraught subject until someone finally breaks the deadlock and says: ‘Okay, it’s settled. Wear the red one’.

Is the much celebrated tradition of Australian mateship, with its ribald humour and jocular put-downs as alive and well and living in the suburbs as it was for the diggers, and drovers, the shearers and bushrangers? When men yarned over a pint in the pub, or spent a larrikin’s Saturday helping a mate move house, or worse, building one. I think mateship is as ship-shape as ever, it’s just that the business and busy-ness of mens’ lives got in the way.

I think for that reason, men’s friendships are about escapism. Of being freed from work and responsibilities to have a belly laugh with mates who keep their angst to themselves and enjoy the process of looking outwards onto the world. I think I envy them. They don’t obsess like we do. Women often churn inwards, needing to share experiences in mind blowing detail in the safety of the cone of silence. There really are few secrets left amongst us. Men are much more careful about thinking out loud.

My most cherished witch’s coven (as the man of the house lovingly refers to us) likes to get together every so often, the three of us, for what we call ‘committee meetings.’ At these, we discuss  the order of the day, usually a crisis for one of us needing three heads, wine and speaking in tongues. By hour’s end, and divination, we have usually solved most of the world’s curses (like teenagers, and g-strings) and why husband A prefers not to have deep-and-meaningfuls about his marriage at three am in the morning? Why not, we argue? It’s quiet, the kids are asleep. And what does he mean: ‘She’s a succubus’? (I had to look it up, too.)

Those girls, and the lovely others I have collected over the years, have been my saviours so many times over, they are the sisters I never had. I don’t know if life would be as rich and varied without them. Certainly I have laughed with them so hard and so often that they are like endorphins. I crave their company.

A true female friendship can withstand as many ongoing conversations as there are participants. You can be in earnest discussion with one, whilst keeping an ear on another and be able to make insightful interjections into a third. We are talented in so many ways. A man has a conversation in as few words as possible. And you’re a best mate if you can keep quiet and nod in sympathetic silence.

Women need their friends because men don’t appreciate the sheer effort required to keep a conversation going at warp speed. Brain and mouth at full pelt, no filter required. I have left girls’ lunches satiated but exhausted from the mental gymnastics of trying to get through everyone’s news in under a lunch hour. I hope that men appreciate the sisterhood for taking the pressure off  their ears.

My mother has a precious collection of her own, a circle of girl(ish) seventy somethings, who  through thick and thin have stuck by each other for near on six decades, and are as close as ever. Rarely grumpy, always empathetic, generous of spirit, they have looked after each other in sickness and in health, and the vows of friendship have stuck fast through the terrible times and more often than not, the joys of a well lived life. My mum has reminded me more than once that my girlfriends will be there for me even when the men in my life aren’t. And so right she has been.

The sisterhood inspires because it is as varied as its members are clever, and funny, and breathtakingly gorgeous, inside, where it counts. And I feel about them the way I feel when separated from my children. Like I’m missing a body part. Legless. They’re good for that too.

In pursuit of love and Lindt

In pursuit of love and Lindt
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 1, 2012
Section: Opinion

Who’s not a sucker for limerence? – that electrifying but dangerously unpredictable state of being in love.  The term limerence might be unfamiliar, for good reason, because it only arrived in the dictionary in 1979. Before that we just talked about infatuation, or having acrush. No matter, because I’ve always lived for its heart palpitations (and sudden weight loss) having realized that being in love is the most exquisite yet fleeting phase of the human condition.

My pursuit of limerence has taken up a quite considerable chunk of my life. In my 20’s, finding a mate was about being in the right place at the right time (any pub on a Friday night) and spotting someone who had that indefinable ‘something’ (usually a bourbon and coke and a packet of Benson & Hedges.)

Go back a few more years and my girlfriends and I were ‘getting the hots’ and hanging around at the bus stop aged 16 hoping the boys we liked hadn’t decided to ride their bikes to school. As one of our nannas used to remind us – boys are like buses – there’ll always be another one along in a minute. On weekends, we’d go to a ‘show’ at someone’s house, and if we were lucky, we’d ‘get lucky’ on the front lawn. (I never did Mum, I’m just generalizing.)

A decade before I was born, lovers would be necking in their Hillman Hunters and Morris 1100’s all over Kings Park on a Saturday night. If a boy was sweet on a girl and ‘had it real bad,’ he’d get down on one knee, they’d get hitched, settle down and raise a couple of nippers. (‘Sprogs’ if they were accidents.)

Now, I’m discovering via my friend’s teenagers, or anyone too young to remember the drive-ins,  that the internet has changed dating forever. The home phone is obsolete now that you ‘hook up’ with people on Facebook, and break up with them via text (I was shamefully way ahead of my time on that one.)

What next? Breeding for the baby bonus? Whatever happened to flirting in person? Or making eyes at someone? Or being (pretend) shy and coquettish?  Or laughing at a boy’s dumb jokes because ‘he’s a God,’ as we used to say, and all of God’s jokes are hilarious. Especially the withdrawal method.  And the wonder bra.

How many hours did I spend hogging the phone with girlfriends dissecting the subtle nuances of the 20-second call I’d had with my teenage heartthrob, Andy, who’d rung to say: ‘Hello?’  followed by ‘Will you go round with me? followed by ‘Great. Bye.’

At 16 I would sit on the beach all afternoon watching him surf. He was always so far out I couldn’t tell which one was him – sometimes I wondered if he’d caught a wave in behind the groyne and gone home. I wasn’t even that interested in boys’ groins then, I just wanted the adrenalin-fuelled charge of being smitten.

At university, a lovely Greek boy would pass me little notes in the library and take me to candlelit dinners in restaurants where surf ‘n turf was new fangled and cool. (Now it’s even more hip and they call it reef ‘n’ beef.) I used to write him gushing love letters on perfumed paper and post them with those sticky little squares we used to know as stamps.

Later on, in another time warp, I wrote poetry and swooned over my French tutor, until I discovered he wasn’t really Parisien but the enfant terrible of Midland. No more kissing frogs, but I remained a sucker for an accent, so I took up with a Norwegian one, thinking I knew it all, age 23.

These days science tells us the smell of our armpits, the symmetry of our faces, and the distance between our waists and our hips all factor in our unconscious attraction to certain members of the opposite sex.

I’m a big believer in Schopenhauer’s theory of attraction. He was the 19thcentury philosopher who believed we unwittingly seek out our ‘physical’ complement, because, in evolutionary terms, the search for a mate is really about the continuation of our particular gene pool. Unconsciously, we are drawn to that individual who might balance out our shortcomings  in the next generation –  the one person whose long legs might cancel out our stumpy ones, or whose petite ears might be given precedence over a set of wingnuts.

Unfortunately Schopenhauer’s theory ends bleakly, because he then tells us, invariably, our most suitable physical complement is not usually our most suitable life-long complement. Long term happiness and creating robust children are like two radical, but mutually exclusive science projects . I wonder if that’s what happened in my first marriage, because the product of it has been a (mostly) delightful child, while his father and I became a disaster. I blame Schopenhauer. And Norwegian accents.

Second time round, I’ve gone for the one bloke who makes my heart thump but who clearly has my short legs and no hope of cancelling out my histrionic gene with his calm, rational one. He is without accent, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of war history, in case I ever need it, and is quite a dab hand at writing a love letter, though come to think of it, I haven’t seen one of those in a while. He can also shoot a dugite with one bullet from a shotgun, at point blank range, and has ironed every shirt he’s ever worn, since telling me in 2005 I was doing it wrong, and you have to start with the sleeves first.

I get the feeling romance is no longer a high priority in our house because only once in the last six months has that lovely man I live with remembered his (loose) commitment to affairs of the heart. Last week he announced: ‘I’m ready for date night, blossom – but let’s have it at home – I’ve rented Downfall, that great Hitler movie’.

No wonder speed dating is held in such high esteem these days. Weed out the dud candidates in two minutes and you’re left with a pool of genuine romantic possibility. I just wonder if hunting in the wild is a more dependable outcome, even if it takes the best part of your mating season to find who you’re looking for. Those matchmakers are in a rut – packaging and controlling the rules of attraction takes half the fun out too. I’d rather drop a line in the ocean and hope some buck-wild specimen chooses my bait, than cast out in an artificial lake full of pre-selected exhibits. I’m not after small fry, I want Moby Dick.

My lifetime lothario knows a thing or two about hosing down my romantic tendencies, seeing he brings home a box of my favourite Lindt balls on a Friday night, and then eats all the blue and red ones. I don’t much like the white ones, but I appreciate that he leaves me any at all. Then he makes me a cup of tea and we settle in on ‘date night’ to watch Hitler’s last days in his bunker. I’m already looking forward to next date night. I think he’s pencilled it in for September 2013.