Frogs and Fuckeries

Part 1

The Challenge Is Set

The German Awakening

I woke up in a German hotel next to a 70-something year-old bright orange-haired woman feeling like I’d died. Note – it wasn’t ginger it was orange. I think she was going for red though.

She told me about my antics the night before which involved me asking my new friend if he was gay (to be fair his current FwB – Friends with Benefits was quite masculine-looking), going home with a guy from the Congo and lap dancing halfway across a bar. I’d like to blame the meds and the alcohol and the birthday I’d just celebrated but let’s be honest, it was mainly alcohol and being in Germany. This was a combination I will never repeat as I just don’t like Germany. The alcohol? I can’t make any promises.

Let’s go back…

After years of attempting to date organically I was an older, wearier blogger who wrote about the things that happened in my life and assumed that someone, anyone, would read it. This was to prevent the recycling of the same old stories to the same old seven friends who worriedly asked about my life and tentatively wondered why I was still single? I had become somewhat lazy and bored of the same endings. Yet again, a man I dated or talked to wasn’t the one. Oh why couldn’t there just be a shoe that I could take around the clubs of London like in Cinderella? I mean, many men wore a wide size 12 (this could be total wishful thinking on my #sizequeen part when the average shoe size was actually a 9/10).

Blogging meant that I didn’t have to reiterate the woes of living a modern life. Yes, dramatic, but most bloggers are, right? Let’s accept and move on. I was bored of dating misadventures and wanted more than waking up next to a woman and throwing up for 24 hours with alcohol poisoning. I wanted a relationship like everyone else wanted. A companion through this shit thing called life. Prince had just died, and we were facing a referendum on Brexit, so I was feeling particularly philosophical and pessimistic at this point. What better way to distract myself than with a relationship?

Then one day, I got to thinking and realised that to be perfectly honest, bloggers probably say very little about themselves as they’re always too busy bitching about experiences, services, products and, in my case, dating frogs. Just know that I find the science of retelling my dating experiences as the cheapest form of therapy I can afford. I can’t pay someone to listen to me going through yet another optimistic attempt at meeting someone. I can’t. I won’t. I don’t have the budget.

That’s where you come in. Hello, my singirls and singuys! This is the second book in what I hope is a short series because dating is rather time consuming and tiring. I don’t want this to turn into an American version of what was a perfectly great UK TV series like they did The Office or Queer as Folk. Short and sweet is how I like it. The first book, Cupid’s Cockups was a post-divorce memoir of almost dating, dating disaster rants and is my random dating and sexual exploration across London. At the time, I was under the illusion that I would trip upon a penis and be out of the dating circus within months. This didn’t happen. It has now been years. I have slowly accepted that I may be stuck here for a while. This is now like those ’80s TV show where every episode is about escaping and yet, somehow the heroine or hero ends up in the same place by the end of the season. Was my ’season 2’ going to break the mould?

I decided that I needed to step out of passive dating and actually do something about it. This ’mizz-adventure’ sees a more mature me taking a more structured approach to dating in commemoration of ten years of post-divorce dating and knowledge. What did I learn, I hear you ask? Honestly, I learned that the internet had ruined dating and that men were still celebrating not having to pay on dates to get sex anymore. I learned that there were a lot of damaged souls out there looking for someone to project all their issues onto. I learned that society and education have failed a whole generation of men and, subsequently, women. All of this in a strictly cis – hetero-normative way of course. I’m hoping everyone else is having a much better time of things than single, Black women in London. That about sums it up. If you choose to stop reading at this spoiler alert, then I won’t be upset. I’m pretty disappointed too. However, there were some gems in the mud I must add and some glimmers of hope.

Some woeful wastemen will try to linger past their expiry date but for the purposes of this book, we will ignore any feeble attempts at a comeback. There is no space for any ’Return of the Mack’ attempts. We will not have it. This isn’t Upper Street (please google the boy band Upper Street if this reference makes no sense to you. They were an attempt to take members of previous boybands and create a super band). I’m sure you’ve realised by now that you will need the aid of the internet to read this book because I am not be a millennial and my references are safely positioned in the pre-millennial era. I sort of lost the will to bother with keeping up with modern day references after Big Brother Season 2.

Some dates were cool as in we quickly figured we did not want the same things. Like, it’s great that you’re really into Scientology but I’m not on Tinder to change my religion. I mean, not all of them were trying to be arseholes. Some were angry, others sad, a few depressed and some just going through a shit time. The dating recession clearly didn’t discriminate. The majority were really wasteman though, navigating this modern dating world like the worst of them do. I do sort of see them as angels, demons, ghosts and ghouls. So this quest to slay is apt.

What is a wasteman you ask?

A wasteman is a man who wastes your time because he’s not serious about you and/or his life. His life philosophy centers on his ’base need’ which is not to be tied down by any woman and his ’ego need’ which is to be adored and looked after by women. He is a free sexual spirit. He will give you the impression that he wants to be tamed but this draws you into a false sense of hope and feeds into your need for a potential project. It’s a lie. Don’t fall for it. No man needs a woman to coach him into maturing and getting into a relationship. You are not strong enough my singirls. He will ghost you and you will wonder why. It’s part of his DNA, and for you that means, do not answer his calls.

Generally, he’s found living at home or renting with others during his late 30s and up to his 60s before the council put him into care. And they’re not just domestic beings. The ’travelling wasteman’ also exists. He will claim to be a laptop millionaire through something called affiliate marketing but gets western unions from the Bank of Mum and Dad or the ghosts of girlfriends’ past. He just couch-surfs or finds a woman at the club who will adopt him so that he can move out of the hostel.

He’s a ’slasher’ who has time to go to the gym and look cute. Slashers tend to have five different job roles all of which make no money except the one in retail or fast food or bars. The rest are simply great slasher fillers, e.g., rapper, artist or philosopher with no real body of work or need for money. Then there are the rapper-slash-barista-slash-political activists on hash-tagged causes. He will not normally be defined by one role unless he is a musician or poet. Alternatively, he may be an overgrown student with four degrees, all pending completion or payment or work experience.

He can usually sex well because the quality of his sex determines whether he gets a home-cooked meal and a bed for nights on end when there are too many people at the house-share or Mum has church group. I call them ’hobo-sexual’ as they do whatever they need to do to maintain a roof over their heads and get fed. Another skill of his is ghosting or tagging you while keeping your ’non-relationship’ going for years on half-whispered promises and a bit of cunnilingus.

He likes to do some or all of the following: hang with the guys, drink, do drugs he didn’t buy, daydream, draw, waste people’s time, pretend he’s 15 years younger than he is and headfuck you, both literally and emotionally. Why is he a headfuck? Because you spend all of your time trying to work out why things aren’t working before you eventually realise that it’s really him and not you. But the most dangerous thing of all is that a wasteman is a parasitic being who lives to suck the life out of others while searching for the perfect home to call his own without having to do very much. Beware. This creature lurks heavy on internet dating sites and apps. And hence the fuckeries one gets from frogs.

Some may see this as one woman’s rants and ask, ’Well, what’s wrong with her?’ The answer is that, apart from some weird eating habits, a love of ’80s music and gay kindle books and a habit of giving the benefit of the doubt, I’m quite alright. Not an 8 or even a 7.7 but a strong 6.5/7 out of 10. So, dating shouldn’t be this bloody hard. But then I may have to just accept this concept of a dating recession. More on that later…

Just to clarify being single is a perfect way to explore this world. I love it. If anything, to give up one’s single status is one of the biggest decisions a woman has to make and one that shouldn’t be made lightly. That’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since Cupid’s Cockups to now, what I call Frogs and Fuckeries, though the title may lead you to believe that I haven’t learnt much.

Now truth be told, we have to consider where society is right now. We are facing political regression and societal upheaval as the internet exposes people’s insecurities and real musings. Instagram selfies are a pet peeve as I walk around London trying to avoid statues of idiots taking shots of… themselves. The COVID19 pandemic has added another layer of complexity with video dating and socially distanced walks taking the place of quick meetups. But this was before all that… before the world imploded.

Read on and see, enjoy and here’s to hoping we all live happily ever after.

Chelsea Black 2021

Dating Resolutions

So let me take you back to the very beginning…

Every year I go through the same behavioural pattern which suggests that I will get the same results, right? Not in my stuffing-filled brain. Side note: I love stuffing but only the overly processed Paxo sage and onion which I suspect doesn’t have onions in it as I detest onions. Add a little unidentified sausage meat and you’re laughing all the way to the Sunday roast dinner slumber. I digress. You’re going to have to keep me focussed, which leads me back to the purpose of this challenge.

And so I start to panic after a particularly hectic year and scribble down some fanciful but totally unachievable resolutions for the following year. Yes, my name is Chelsea Black and I’m one of those terrible people who flood social media with tales of things I’m going to do every year. Sometimes I manage about 3 of the 12. Mostly I just stop posting about it and hope that nobody notices. To be honest, nobody ever does so we’re good.

I love to plan weight loss, a new job, new love and a whole new attitude and yet find myself two weeks in back on the sugar and moaning incessantly about how shit everything is from dating to my work situation. This is going to be our year, we cry until Valentine’s Day when we realise that once again, we are spending it at a singles speed dating event in Stoke Newington wondering when everyone decided to grow a beard and hide their smiles (read smiles as lies). I hate beards almost as much as I do onions. I’m pre-hipster and millennials and BuzzFeed. To me, beard are basically vagina bushes on self-conscious, trendy guys’ faces. I much rather you bare all and I can see how pock-marked your skin is from years of neglect instead of you scratching my soft skin with that wiry beard. You know what’s a turn on for me? Knowing just how hard you have lived.

This year was different as I fell ill with flu on NYE. Not the best time as I was midway through hosting a NYE party and all I wanted to do was chuck everyone out and crawl into my soft blankets and sleep. Even my blankets felt itchy. By 2am I was over everybody, the red sequinned dress was irritating my skin and I couldn’t drink. Not in the way I wanted to see in the new year. Nobody needs to see that shit in sober. Nobody.

I only had five goals for this year. This was a massive improvement from the 12 I usually set. Yes, I know it’s not original to have one for each month, but one has to keep oneself motivated, no? So these were my five:

Married – Yes, I know that this is my goal every year and, to be clear, it’s not about a pea mint themed wedding. It’s about finding my soul mate and enjoying our pea mint themed wedding photos on a regular basis. Shit! What if he hates pea mint? Urgh! I’ll have to rethink themes. Even my resolutions were themed ’M’. This was already stressing me out.

Making babies – See married. I’m ready to ruin my body for some bundles of joy. My body wasn’t ever that much of a priority to be honest and at least I’d have someone to blame. Mrs Arthur, the P.E. teacher from 20 years ago is off the hook.

Marathon – To be honest, after the last one I only keep signing up for another as a means to staying slim. I don’t think this is the right sort of motivation, but I was determined to do another.

Master French – I chuckle writing this as I freeze whenever anyone talks to me in French and still think it’s relatively alien even with subtitles. But this year I was going to do more. Or talk about doing more again. French is hard.

Money – To be able to give up #WorkWoes and just live a life of relative bliss.

Matchmaker – To become like a Black Patti Stanger with plenty of Black love couples living happily ever after.

I was nought-for-five and then realised that there were six. Well, I did manage to match a few couples, but apart from that I got a severe case of writer’s block, my dating disasters reached peak levels of pathetic ergo, there was no baby making and I cried tears of joy when the email from London Marathon saying I hadn’t got a ballot place landed in my inbox. I was grateful to get my lie-ins back.

How Dating Has Lost Its Sparkle and Shine

So there is such a thing as not being able to get a date for love or money. I’m currently in such a ’phase’ of the dating cycle. In actual fact, it’s a dating recession.

A dating recession is a sign of the times. OK. I will stop with the references to songs by Prince but to be fair his death was such a shock and I’m still in mourning. Whilst it’s fine to