A final farewell to the dating game in New York

The wedding of the author’s wing-woman

The HBO drama Sex and the City arrived on our shores in 1999. Prior to that television show, it would be fair to say, British women (and, for that matter, men) were fairly clueless when it came to matters of grown-up ‘dating’. Sex and the City offered a stylish and contemporary guide to social and sexual mores in the Big Apple, teaching a generation about such concepts as exclusive dating and non-exclusive dating, A-list nights and B-list nights, and the three-day rule (as in the ‘always wait three days after the date to phone him otherwise you come across as too keen’ rule).

Unfortunately for me I moved to New York before Sex and the City had aired in the UK and was consequently a total ‘dating dunce’, as one of my co-workers so kindly put it. It took me a couple of months to realise that good old-fashioned British-style binge-drinking and alcohol-fuelled leeriness (even if the afore-mentioned alcohol was expensive, freshly made cocktails) just did not go down so well with New Yorkers, of either sex.

That is where Alison came in. She was my first real American friend and also became my dating wing-woman. Like a military wing-man, she was always there at my side. In times of dating trouble, she helped me to avoid turbulent danger zones and alerted me when it was time to bail out from a messy relationship.

So it was with mixed emotions that I opened her wedding invitation last week. Weddings are wonderful, but there are some that seem to take on deeper significance than others and some that make you a little pensive. Since moving back to London in 2005, and now married, I think that I have probably been living vicariously through Alison’s NYC dating dilemmas. I am not quite ready for the mundanity of a life where all friends either seem to be married or in committed relationships.