Destination Dating

My first 2 years in London were mainly spent on aeroplanes and cities other then London. Paris, Munich, Prague, Budapest, Athens, Istanbul, Zagreb, Brussels, Dubai...I could go on, but I shant. I developed a penchant for what I termed "Destination Dating." The men I was meeting at the time (the oh so wrong for me men) rarely lived in or around London. Typically we would meet when I was somewhere on business, or leisure in a few cases. We would go to dinner or have drinks the next time I was in town for business, or on that same trip if time permitted, and then we would meet up in a city for a weekend. Sometimes it was London, sometimes where they lived and other times it was a random city we would both agree on. Aside from the obvious dangers that DD can hold, it is mine field of unexpected circumstances that one must always have an exit strategy for. Why go through the trouble, you may be asking? Trust you me, it was this or commit myself to a monastery and accept my fate as a permanent spinster. Also I have to admit, at first it sounded very romantic and in fact for my friends, hearing the stories never lost its appeal.

So off I went on my weekend dates with, as it mostly turned out, men I couldn't have spent 2.5 hours in a West End production with, much less 3 days and 2 nights. On 2 occasions I fled the city early with no note, no warning and no looking back. Lucky for me the airlines always allowed me to change my ticket upon turning up at the airport. On one occasion, I fained illness and also pretended to be sleeping as often as possible. It didn't stop the boy from tapping me on the shoulder and in a voice that escalated from a whisper to a full on shout, ask "Girl, Girl, Girl GIRL...is it sleeping that you are doing? You see the other challenge tended to be language. We rarely had a common one that we both spoke fluently. Once, on what would have otherwise been a terribly romantic weekend in Amsterdam, an entire dinner was spent with the 2 of us trying to communicate our education levels. Another weekend ended in a row over me not properly converting the local currency to Euros/GBP and ordering a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. C'est la Vie, said I. Adios, said he.

The moral of the story is, no matter how bad the date, be glad it's only one evening.