My Life In Bad Dates

After a divorce, Candida Crewe spent the best (or worst) part of a decade on the offline middle-aged singles circuit.

I love bad dates. I’ve been on so many in my life, but never more so than in the past 10 years, since my husband and I separated and divorced, and every one of them was bad after its own fashion. I never once did internet dating of any kind. I was unwilling to put in the time. No, I was determined to meet a friend of friends. But, even so, some dates were just so awful, you could only laugh.

I think of the unwashed, unpublished poet covered in cat hair. I’m not even sure it was a date, but when two middle-aged single people agree to meet, alone, the air about them is invariably freighted with possibility. God knows how, or why, we chose a burger bar. Without saying anything, he made me feel, somehow, that ordering food would be uncool. I thought that was a bit rich considering, with his paunch, he didn’t have the look of the starving artist he supposed himself to be. He spoke about all the women he was close to – the implication being that he was having sex with some or all of them. We each had an infantilising milkshake, so I guess it can only have been a date in the loosest sense. When the bill came for £8.50, he declared that we would split it. I put a tenner down and he didn’t demur.

I am glad I experienced the bad dates, but thank God they are done with, at long bloody last, now that I have been in a happy relationship for several months. Still, I wouldn’t change the struggles and horrors, because thinking about them now makes me appreciate the present.

The date before the ‘date’ with the poet had been with a peculiar pedant who had suffered traumas at boarding school and never married. Our first ‘date’ – again, never acknowledged as such – was in a pub. He kept his bicycle clips on and talked at length about his mother, who was so miraculous, no woman could live up to her wonders.