How To Find Your Mr Right (And Keep Him)

Now and then I shall be offering on this blog some free advice to (possibly single) women on the topic, 'How To Find Your Mr Right (And Keep Him)', today's post being the first instalment in this series. Having said that, I must reply at the outset to a possible vitriolic objection : 'What the hell! Is he going to pull us back to the Middle Ages all over again? Is he an illiterate dumbo or something? Has he never heard of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Mary Daly, Luce Irigaray, and Donna Haraway? How can he be so paternalising, and so patronising (a long series of most dreadful P-words follows thereafter, too terrible to be repeated here)?' And to this, I shall reply as follows : 'My lovely dears, if it is a matter of ploughing through your arcane prose, I should like to state, but only for the sake of the record, that I have not only done my bit of reading but have also, if the pun be allowed, internalised what you have written. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that even as I type these words there are millions, millions, and millions of women out there who are just dying to meet their Mr Right. Now if it so happens that you do not belong to these millions, you are most welcome to stop reading this post right N-O-W and close this webpage AT ONCE. There, you see : you didn't do that, did you? And that means that for all your disclaimers you do, after all, harbour a secret wish to know how to find your Mr Right. So then, read on.'

Very well. Now that we have settled this rather nasty business, one disclaimer from my side this time : I shall not aim at any sort of comprehensiveness in this matter, picking up those topics that I believe you need to grasp properly if you are to be successful in your search for your Mr Right.

(A) ADVICE : Never, ever try to give advice to your man when it comes to important public matters. Indeed, if he comes to you asking for advice in these matters, pick up that cell-phone at once and call his psychoanalyst immediately. A man who needs such advice is in urgent need of psychiatric care. However, you are more than welcome to offer him sound advice relating to private concerns such as that random coffee stain on his blue tie, the specks of dust on his black shoe, and booking that summer holiday to Cyprus well in advance.

(B) SPORTS : Try to develop a taste for sports, the most common of these being cricket, football, golf, baseball and basketball. Now this does not mean that you have to know the precise difference between a square-cut and a straight-drive in cricket, or a penalty and a foul in football. In most cases, it is enough that you know that Jemima Khan has moved on in life, that Victoria Beckham was almost about to move on in life, and that Wayne Rooney is yet to find a life.

(C) HUMOUR : Be careful on this rather sensitive point. Most men become extremely serious when they are told that they do not have a good sense of humour (GSH). However, if you are lucky enough to have found a man who does have a GSH don't let him know this, for that will save him the agony of having to come up with some one-liner everytime you drop your hat.

(D) IN-LAWS : Now we are moving into dangerous terrain, and my beautiful dears, please, I beg you, give me your undivided attention. I shall start with his mother, that is, your mother-in-law, and in this respect there is one thing that you must completely internalise. It is this : no matter who you are, no matter how many university degrees you have, no matter how many offices you have worked at, no matter how many times you go to the gym, no matter how beautifully you can smile, and no matter how many grandchildren you are going to give your mother-in-law to repay your social debt to Maternity, in her opinion you always were and will always remain a little piece of shit until you reach your grave. Now, now, don't try to run away from this gospel truth with replies like : 'Oh, how mean of you to generalise this way! You should just come and see my mother-in-law. She really is so different from all others, she loves me just like her own daughter!' No, my dear, please trust me when I tell you that is the first step on the road towards sure disaster. The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions. There is not a single mother on this planet who can forget the fact that her daughter-in-law is the secret interloper who came in the silence of the night and stole away her son from her side. Anyway, enough of mothers-in-law, a rather pitiable breed of women. As for his father, that is, your father-in-law, ah well, he is an innocent lamb compared to your mother-in-law, a breath of fresh spring air in a fusty room. This formula usually works with fathers-in-law : Pick up a thick book from his shelf, pretend to read the first page of it very carefully, close your eyes for a minute, and then meditate on what you have (supposedly) read. Then look at him carefully with shimmering eyes and say : 'Oh, now I know why Mark has so much class. He must have got it from you! You have given him such a wonderful education!' A hundred years ago, the standard response used to be : 'Oh, Mark has got your beautiful eyes!', but in these post-Freudian times that we live in, I must warn you that this reply might be just a bit too risque a slip.

(E) ARGUMENTS : Make sure that you know exactly what your man means when the word 'Argument' is flashed on a white screen in front of him. From an anthropo-logical point of view, men can usually be grouped into three categories in this respect. Use this table to find out what sort of a man yours is.

Category 1 : If you were to argue with a man who belongs to this category, be prepared to see a --- 'What? Women know how to argue?' --- look written all over his face. Such men believe that women are illiterate folk who barely managed to scrape through school, and their first reaction to a woman who argues with them is one of utter shock.

Category 2 : In contrast to the above men, those who are in this group believe that the basic problem with women is not that they argue too little but that they argue too much.

Category 3 : This is a rather charming category of men who believe that the only people who quarrel are those who do not, in fact, know how to argue. For them, their entire existence is one long never-ending argument which can take various twists and turns into unknown alleys but somehow always returns, even if battered and bruised, to the high street. A Health Warning, however : such men should be carefully avoided by women who are low on patience and are seeking ready-made solutions.

(F) COOKING : Face this fact : in spite of women's liberation and all that nonsense going on, you will have to cook (or even be forced to learn how to cook) at some point or the other in the future. Now there used to be prevalent in the dark days of yore a barbaric system called arranged marriages when the only slogan that wives had was this one : 'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach'. Which was quite ironic given the fact that most of these men were, in fact, heartless, so that what these wives actually managed to reach through their husband's stomachs is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, now that we have all become enlightened people and are living in the glorious light of the system of free-market marriage, there are two major problems with that slogan.

Problem 1 : There is always that odd (possibly intellectual) fellow out there who will respond in the following way to your cooking overtures : 'Be gone from my sight, O seductress of a Woman! Do you not know that there are higher things in life than cooking and eating food? I eat to live, not live to eat.' Which is clearly not a reply that you can stomach.

Problem 2 : It may so happen that your man belongs to the opposite group so that the problem with him is not that he knows too little about food but that he knows too much about it. He could be, for example, a chef in a French restaurant who will never be satisfied with anything you cook, no matter how much of your heart you put into it.

Solution : Here is a solution if you, my patient dears, find yourself having to tackle with either of the above problems. Adopt the slogan : 'The way to a man's heart is through his mind.' Once again, however, I must caution you that there are three problems with this reply.

Problem 1 : There will always be that weird (possibly homeless) Romantic who will reply to this slogan as : 'The heart has its reasons which the mind knows not of', so that the more heartless he becomes, the more mindless you will feel.

Problem 2 : Your man might be a materialist ('materialist' = 'a person who believes that the only things that exist are strings of DNA'), in which case he will spend his entire life trying to prove to you that the mind, his as well as yours, do not, as a matter of fact, exist.

Problem 3 : This, however, is the biggest problem. When you were a young teenage girl planning to join Che Guevera's army, subvert the Establishment and fight side by side with your men comrades, your mother must have shouted at you at least once : 'It is very rare for men to think with their minds.' Precisely so, for I will be damned if she has not learnt her lesson yet! It is, in fact, so remarkable what difference it can make to a woman which side of the wall she is standing on. As a mother, she is Wisdom incarnate, but as a mother-in-law she becomes Satan incarnate overnight.

(G) BABIES : In the good old days, marrying a man was the same as earning a sure passport to motherhood. But in these weird times of ours, there are always a few 'existential' ones out there who have the strangest notions about why having babies is unethical, immoral, and all sorts of dreadful things. So once again, my lovely dears, please come out clean on this matter, and let your man know where you stand (or wish to stand) on the matter of babies, lest every time you go ga-ga about babies he goes boo-boo.

(H) SARCASM : Avoid like a serpent a man who passes sarcastic comments on a third person in his/her absence. For all you know, that third person could be you when you are absent.

(I) MUSIC : Be sure that you know well in advance what your man's tastes in music are like. Most men suffer from an Alterity Syndrome when it comes to music, that is, they believe that musical choices are a simplistic question of Either/Or. Either they like Beethoven or Bhangra, either Bartok or the Beatles, either Mozart or Madonna, and the list never ends. It never enters their tiny minds that music should be a case of Both/And. Therefore, place all your cards on the table in the beginning so that you do not have to spend the rest of your life facing his music.

(J) FEMINISM : Now, now the tricky F-spot. Once again, from an anthropo-logical perspective, men can be readily grouped into three categories. (If you are getting the feeling that men are so predictable, well, my wonderful dears, trust me when I say that this is just the beginning.)

Category 1 : These men have not the faintest clue what Feminism stands for. These are a very rare species of men who do not, in fact, need to know the complexities of feminist theory for they are, as we say, feminists before feminism.

Category 2 : These men have not the faintest clue what Feminism stands for, but this is because they keep themselves at an arm's length from a social practice which they fear will take away their womenfolk from under their control and will lead to widespread social disharmony, political chaos, and moral disorder.

Category 3 : This, in fact, is the most dangerous category of men so far as Feminism is concerned. These men have learnt the nuances of French prose, and have patiently read through the entire feminist canon under the midnight lamp. And yet they remain blissfully unaware that their sister is being forced into an arranged marriage she would rather not enter, that women in his own office are being discriminated against, and that his female secretary gets paid less than his male valet.

(K) COMPLAINTS : Whenever you complain, make sure that you have, so to speak, covered your flanks properly. Here is one standard example : you complain to your man that he has been watching the telly for the last three hours, but he does not move an inch. He even refuses to acknowledge that you exist. But why should he? Why should he when being the smart fellow that he is he knows that the reason why you want him out of the living room is so that you can hog the telephone for the next four hours? In such cases, avoid this unnecessary cycle of complaints and counter-complaints : just buy a cell-phone which can have a genuinely cathartic effect on you.

(L) MR PERFECT : If you keep on waiting much too long, it might be possible that you believe that He has to be not only your Mr Right but also your Mr Perfect. Now you obviously have a little bit of serious thinking to do on this matter, don't you? It may be possible that the man you are waiting for is so Perfect that he is, in fact, a saint dressed in immaculate white. Not that I have anything personal against saints, don't get me wrong on this now, especially with Easter coming up and all that. It is just that there is only one problem with your wishing to marry a saint : most saints are misogynists. So the next time you go on dissecting the man who comes along your way, take pause to think for a moment : the fact that you have a compulsive habit of dissecting every man may have something uncomfortable to say not about him but about yourself.