Dear Mary…
Q. I am a 22-year-old man and I recently left university. While I had thought that I would at least be engaged to be married by now, the truth is that I find it almost impossible to date girls. It seems to me that girls of my age adopt a herd-like strategy when they go out, making it terrifying or threatening for boys to approach them individually. When you do so, if you talk to one girl, the others in the herd all stare expectantly or titter. On top of this, every time I pass a news-stand, I see girls’ magazines shouting out ‘demand four orgasms a night from your man’ and similar. The girls all seem so confident, yet most of my male friends feel as reticent as I do. What should we do, Mary?
M.G.B., Boars Hill, Oxford
A. The truth is that, despite appearances, the girls in question are also very far from confident and move in phalanxes for bodyguard-provision purposes. The main problem is that they, too, have no experience of even the first physical manoeuvres of romantic love, having been media-led into believing that full barnyard mating is the norm on first encounters. Therefore they dread taking the first step. To break this impasse, a social service you and your friends could usefully perform would be to throw a party, billed as ‘ironic’ to cover charges of nerdiness, at which, instead of vertical binge-drinking, old-fashioned kissing games are played.
Start with a version of Postman’s Knock wherein the ‘postman’ hands round a sack of ‘letters’ to the girls and the girl who picks out the ‘gas bill’, for example, has to go behind a screen and kiss him. Then a postwoman does the same.
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