The Tyranny of Distance...

Back in the days when I was actively looking to meet men, I advertised in the personals in the newspaper, once in 1999 and again in 2004.

This was in the day that you would run an ad over 2 weeks, and record a brief message which guys would hear when they rang the code provided, and then they could leave a message for you with their contact details. Both times I received about 100 responses, not unusual, I'm told, there are always more men doing the personals things then there are women!

So, in the month or so after each ad ran I made a lot of phone calls! Usually saying Hi, you responded to my personals ad and I'm just calling you back. Both times, I never asked any specific questions, usually asking something along the lines of "So, tell me about you?" or "Is there anything you'd like to know about me?".

Invariably, either the first or second question asked of me was "Where do you live?". And then when I replied, the response would often be "Oh, that's not too far!" It got to be so common that I started saying "Really? Just out of interest, how far is too far?"

The responses were varied, but covered the basic premise which one guy happily elaborated on "She would have to be pretty special to travel for more than 45 minutes on a weeknight to see".

This would often then lead into a whole other lot of questions from me. "Why do you need to travel to see her - why can't you meet her halfway?" "Why can't she travel to see you?"

Usually they'd fluff around a bit... remember, we haven't met each other, so they were behaving reasonably well at that point, so I'd get umm's and aah's and vague responses... sometimes I'd leave it at that... sometimes, I'd push a bit further, if the guy was forthcoming and we were already into the banter thing.

Finally, one night a guy said - "I don't care where she lives if we're going out to dinner, but I'm only going out to dinner to meet someone to have sex with, and if she lives too far away, having sex regularly is too hard. Meeting half way's pointless, unless you're going to have sex in the car (little did he know I have a sex/car fetish) and I don't want her coming to my place, at least at first, cause I don't want her to stay. So, you find out where they live first off, and if it's too far away, you might meet her, but she's already got a mark against her". As stated before, men tell me the most amazing things, and then they wonder sometimes why I don't want to go out with them!

I used to think it was really funny and a bit sad... that men would be so practical about this... how many wonderful women did they exclude simply because of geography.

Until I met P through rsvp, who lived about an hour away by car. It wasn't just the distance that made things difficult, he had sole custody of 5 kids, and worked nights... he was getting up around the time I went to bed... so there were lots of late night phone calls as I was drifting off to sleep, and early morning (like 4.00am) phone calls when he got home from work. As I'm told I give great "phone" I don't think the fact that we rarely saw each other worried him as much as it worried me, and the combination of our clash in work time, his family commitments and the distance made things difficult and ultimately impossible... and I started to realise that maybe it's not such a stupid idea to stick closer to home.

So, the next time I did a search on rsvp I deliberately focused on men who lived within a 15klm radius... and discovered one of the guys I talked to actually lived at the other end of my street...and the policeman I met through my brief experiment with aff lived 5 minutes away(that's a whole other story, and yes, Virginia, men's bits do come in different shapes and sizes, as the photos in those profiles proved - never saw many faces but gee I saw an awful lot of peni...)

Sorry, 5 minutes away is way too close! In the same way that I don't want my Mother to be able to drive by on a daily basis to see if I'm home, or if I've got mail delivered, I don't really want to date someone who lives within walking distance.

So... is it so very wrong of me, to say I want to meet someone whose prepared to travel whatever distance is required to be with me... Literally, looking for someone who will make "500 miles" his theme song... not that I want him to be 500 miles away, but someone prepared to say:

But I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walked 1,000 miles
To fall down at your door

On that note, a bit of stuff and nonsense from The Family Guy: