Middy slip dress? For a black tie event? Ground breaking - diary and links 01/10/23

well behaved women blah blah blah

Which one are you gonna go for?

Well, the dark one is the intelligent one. The ginger is just tall.

I agree, you have to ask downstairs Stella who she fancies more.

Hmmm

This weekend I attended a friend’s birthday party in his parent’s farm estate in Spain. I am currently sitting at the Seville airport typing away this post while waiting to board my Ryanair flight to Manchester for Tory conference. I am landing just shy of midnight and speaking at a roundtable event at 8am in the morning. I am locked out of my emails because I did not notify my work’s IT department I’d be abroad and I cannot remember what the event is on or who with. It’s going to be a surprise!

But first, I need to write how my weekend unfolded, before I forget the details and send my dress off to the dry cleaners. I hope blood stains can be removed from silk. Don’t ask, just read on.

I had drafted an interesting enough post about the rest of my week but last night was poetic, and keeping those details to myself would be artistic cowardice.

My friend did a stunning job with the sitting plan of the main event of his party, a black tie dinner. He did not shy away from tapping into my fetishes when he chose who to place next to me.

The man on my right I had met before, he was tall and ginger and I had matched with him on hinge many years ago. We never dated then because after a manic texting session he told me my strong jaw and cheekbones make me look manly. I believe the kids call this negging. It doesn’t work on women who wink at their own reflection. I knew he would be there and I had arrived intent on trolling/seducing him. At uni he was the president of Durham’s Conservative Association, how entirely appropriate that I’d test my power on him. He started the night strong. He waltzed towards me as soon as I arrived and performed my favourite act: the shy, awkward, posh English man who can’t hide his repressed hornyness.

The boy on my left was dark and witty. Within the first ten minutes he told me he volunteered for the Bernie Sanders campaign and for the Labour Party. I thought someone must have told him about my background and he was hitting on me (I was an organiser on the 2016 Bernie campaign). The event, being black tie and in a sprawling Spanish estate, was not exactly bursting with comrades. He is studying for an MBA and is an effective altruist. He was more socially adept than the tall ginger, taking his time to build rapport and showing off he can read. He studied classics and submitted a script to the BBC based on Ancient Greek mythology. He said there is no Roman Empire without Ancient Greece. Before I knew it, I had turned my back to the man I thought I was going to seduce captivated by these politics in that accent.

At this point, I know what you are thinking, ‘omg Stella aren’t you worried they will read this?!’.

No. I am not.

Men don’t read.

Most men’s interest in me starts and stops on my surface, I don’t delude myself otherwise. But hey, if you are one, and you read this far, you are probably more flattered than offended. I know from painting portraits of all my high school flames, men love being weaved into my art.

To my extreme amusement, the two men went to the same prep school but never saw eye to eye. They made that clear to me separately. The smart dark one in particular pointed out repeatedly how right wing the tall ginger is, hoping I’d be put off. Hehe.

Either man on his own had enough of my favourite characteristics to entertain me, but the two together? My friend really spoiled me. The tall ginger had cold climate autism. The dark smart one was on the borderline spectrum. They both went into deranged monologues about marrying me before the evening had even reached the point of swapping my heels for flats. If anyone was handing out illicit goods, I wouldn’t have cared for any. I had all the drugs I needed.

During a smoking break, the tall ginger asked me when we are having babies. I recalled his hinge profile mentioned wanting a prenup. I told him since he is so concerned about protecting his fortune, I would have an illicit ginger baby with him that night and sue for child maintenance. After enriching myself at his family’s expense, I’d ghost him, marry his dark classmate and have 3-4 sexy tan babies who will grow up to bully his pasty ginger bastard for the rest of his life. A normal guy would make his excuses and back away. He charged. Ladies, don’t try this at home.

After the dinner we moved to the dancing hall for flamingo and naughties bangers. I am far from a player and won’t pretend I am toxic to add to the ridiculousness of this piece. I hate making anyone jealous, men or women. It does not boost my confidence, it makes me feel sick. People’s feelings are precious to me, I am a safe pair of hands for anyone’s heart.

Having said that, my optimised fitness regime means I have the libido of a teenage boy. I am also a spiritual romantic and believed that night, I needed to act as the olive branch between the two old boys. I would give them something besides their background to have in common, like an STD.

Like untrained feral cats the two boys chased me around all night trying to mark their territory. Despite the fact that they were the same age as me I found myself missing dating a man in his 40s. Young men get boner brain very easily and soon enough the lively conversation I enjoyed during the dinner was replaced by “omggg you are so hotepow kojewsfnkjf”.

As I was wiping foreign sweat and saliva from my neck I realised I was missing a pearl earring. One of these two hooligans must have bitten it off my ear. I grabbed the suspect by the collar and demanded he follows me back into the woods to retrieve it. As I was starting to make peace with having lost my mother’s graduation gift he pulled through and found it.

To be fair, the same activity that resulted in me missing an earring tore his tux revealing his Labour red boxers. Like a trooper he stayed the night, with his exposed bottom against the wall, watching me dance with his high school nemesis.

I don’t know if and how difficult this situation was for either one of them. Were they women and I a straight man, this would be death penalty worthy behaviour. But young men have a lightness in their romantic liaisons. They both incessantly quizzed me about whether I had kissed the other. They wanted a winner. There was a winner: for once, it was me.

I am glad they were British and chinless because a similar scene in Greece would have ended less generously.

In the most poignant scene of the night, the party crew burst into an impromptu a cappella session of Mr Brightside, jealousy turning saints into the sea. My two cavalieros had taken their place on my either side - protecting me from a third poacher. Without warning, the fleeting rivals locked eyes and like old pub mates watching England lose the Euro cup semis swung their arms open and hugged… each other.

A big, warm, bear hug.

After hours of trying to temper their attention towards me, I was momentarily invisible.

I’d like to ask them what that was about but I doubt either has the emotional insight to tell me. I think this scene would be better left to my own, feminine, highly therapised, interpretation. They respected each other’s game and despite the burn enjoyed the honourable sportsmanship of courtship.

In the early hours of the morning, I went to my hotel room as God intended me: alone. In the privacy of my room, I could finally indulge in my favourite self-pleasure: scrolling through instagram, rewatching my stories, amused at my own brilliance and blinded by my own beauty. The two men found my instagram at around 4:00am, followed me, and in their first act of restrain liked just one post each. I did not follow them back till the next morning to prevent them from disturbing my solitary peace.

If I had to fuck, marry, kill, I’d fuck both and kill myself rather than marry either.

Link(s)

Loneliness isn't paradoxical, People with more money do more stuff and have more friends By Mathew Iglesias

“One is conflating loneliness — a lack of emotional closeness with other human beings — with the idea of being physically alone. And the other is making assertions about trends over time that just aren’t supported by the data. If loneliness were aloneness and if loneliness were clearly increasing over time, then the fact that we’ve come to occupy more square feet per person would be a good explanation for the rise in loneliness. But neither of those things is true.”

Matthew taps on something I have long thought was missing from the loneliness epidemic discourse. I often see the claim that it is increasing wealth and the technological innovation that follows it that drives loneliness. Being richer means being able to afford separate homes from relatives, to not meet people in real life as we can contact them on our screens. There is a difference between being alone, physically, and feeling lonely. In Spain this week I felt completely peaceful walking around by myself, having half pints of lagger and tapas on a bar stool without talking to anyone. I felt intensely alone when at the dinner table surrounded by friendly people someone mentioned their parents and a personal family problem rose in my mind and I had no one I felt close enough to share it with.

Another issue with the loneliness epidemic being described as a ‘rich people’ problem is that so much socialising requires money- and I say this typing from abroad where I flew for a friends 100+ attendees black tie birthday party. Activities require money. Being able to afford to live close to your friends and family requires money. I often wonder if as I grow older and stubbornly continue in my chosen career and the salaries of my friends' working in the private sector multiply whether our future lifestyles will be incompatible.

Matthew includes this heartbreaking graph which shows Greece to be one of the loneliest western countries:

I hope this graph, being self-reported, is more of a reflection of how easily Greeks perceive loneliness. The Greek lifestyle demands long coffee dates with your friends and dinners that stretch into the early hours of the morning. In the summer when I go home I will often spend multiple hours in a coffee shop nursing the same frappe with my dad while we look at the crowds come and go. ‘Peratzada’ - watching people passing by, is becoming a lost art. Who can afford to sit next to a friend (or a dad) and watch people pass by for hours? At the very least you’d listen to a self-help podcast about optimising your sleep or dial in on a Teams call with your overseas colleagues.