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.