How I didn’t Meet my Guardian Soulmate

I have retired from internet dating. For the time being anyway. Not because I’ve met my one true love (or perchance I have) (more of that later) but because they wanted money. The dating site, not the men. Although sometimes I might have been tempted to pay the men. Services rendered and all that. If only any of them had. But I wouldn’t have been able to anyway. I have a lot of wonderful things, cats, daughters, (sorry the other way round), a rural idyll, dandelions and a small widget to make coffee akin to amphetamines. Money, being the root of all evil, not buying you love, and being hard to come across, I don’t have.

I could have just left my profile up but I worried that some poor fellow would see it, fall deeply and irrevocably in love with me and then find that, due to lack of funds, I could never speak to him, and that he would become deeply embittered, kill himself by throwing himself off a motorway bridge, cause a massive pile-up that included various world leaders on their way to a peace summit and so miss their chance to save the world from war, destruction, pestilence and coffee akin to amphetamines, and so we would all die of war, destruction, pestilence and coffee akin to amphetamines. Thus rendering internet dating obsolete.

Internet dating turned out to be a lot like shopping. I go into town and in the very first shop I find some shoes that are really nice. But then it’s the first shop, maybe there are better, redder, sexier more shoey shoes in the other shops. I spend a tiring day/week/year/lifetime trawling, inspecting, smelling, trying on other shoes only to decide that the very first pair of shoes was actually very nice.

And so I seem to be dating the first pair of shoes. The shoes may or may not think this is the case, as shoes are unfathomable creatures. This pair particularly so. It may be that the shoes have in fact wandered off. For how can any of us tell if shoes fancy us? I certainly can’t.

I feel for the sake of utter corniness I should make some joke here re shoes and soles and souls and soulmates. But I’ll save you from that.

PS – Shoes - if you read this the whole shoe metaphor thing was purely accidental. I do not now, nor never have, think of you as a pair of shoes. Although if you’d like me to…