My Hirsute Lover (From The Argus)

My Hirsute Lover

12:00pm Wednesday 13th May 2009

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By Jennie Wallace - the dating dilemma »

I saw ‘The Yeti’ this morning. I was on my bike and he was walking along the pavement. I looked like road kill. My hair swept back under the band of my big red headphones, mascara steadily making its way down my face as I pedalled into the wind, as fast as I could, away from ‘The Yeti’.

I don’t want to alarm anyone at this point. There isn’t an actual Yeti living in Hove, just a rather hirsute but very pretty man who I went on a date with, once upon a time.

I met The Yeti on a dating site. The first thing that I will say about online dating in Brighton is that we live in a very small city and bumping into people that you have been ‘checking out’ online, in your local pub, supermarket or gym is inevitable and at times thoroughly embarrassing.

I would like to point out that I am not some socially inept women, incapable of meeting people in the ‘regular’ way. Quite the contrary, but these days dating taboos don’t really exist and I am more than happy to give anything a go once.

Anyway, back to ‘The Yeti’. After a few emails, things fizzled out but in typical style, that was not to be the end of that. A couple of weeks later I was out with friends. We had consumed what only can be described as an inordinate amount of wine and as we were leaving the pub (stumbling) there was The Yeti, sat right by the door. There was no escaping him. I had to say hello. He was just as lovely in real life as he was in his emails and in the weeks that followed I bumped into him in Tescos, in another pub and finally as I was leaving Audio. On this occasion he was quite worse for wear but very complimentary and when he asked for my number I went red and typed it into his phone.

We had one date and although I thought that we got on really well, I ‘may’ have come across as a complete nut job. I had a terrible flat mate at the time who was the bane of my existence (snapped floor boards, took my clothes, broke my belongings and denied all knowledge – we have all had one of those at some stage) and I think that I may have been a little over zealous when describing my feelings towards her. I may have also, had a few too many glasses of wine, which didn’t help matters or the increasingly dramatic impressions that I did of her. Needless to say after the standard ‘yeah, let’s do this again’ and ‘I’ll be in touch’, I never heard from him again. Not my greatest hour, but you live and learn.

Since that night we still bump into each other (the frequency of which has increased since I moved) but I always do the mature thing and completely ignore him, wondering what might have been if I had just exerted a little bit of decorum.