Paris - city of love & romances

Paris - 2002

This room don’t really have a bedside table, this the room that I am going to have for the next three weeks, only enough for double size of bed, and study table for my laptop, with small telly round the corner of the room. So I only had a bedside basket that I bought from downtown Paris. It’s a hill-tribe basket that women carry on their backs. It’s cylindrical, about a metre tall, and it narrows at the top, so my books stack up and then fall off. Then they hide under the bed.

At the moment am reading simultaneously Michelle de Krestser’s The Hamilton Case and Rusty Young’s Marching Powder.

De Krestser sets her family saga in Ceylon of the 1930s and her language is so rich and luscious you could eat it. It’s languid pace is in stark contrast to Marching Powder, the story of one prisoner’s cocaine fuelled experience in Bolivia’s notorious San Pedro Prison, in La Paz.

I read in bed most nights, as always. It’s so comforting and womb-like. I particularly like it when there are no crumbs in the sheets. How long I read for depends on where I read, how much I’ve drunk before, during and after dinner. Sometimes I can do a good half – hour in the café, but sadly I have been known to watching people’s passing by with the novel still propped up in my hands. I supposed, I am still good when I read my novel in bed especially when I am alone.

So here I am, in this beautiful city that full of romances (that what they says) and am alone in this room.... Let me shared this one with you here..... (please don't says it's about dating again!)

If there was a tipping point with internet dating, it happened mid-decade. The shift was stunning. Online dating moved from cyberspace badlands occupied by desperados who couldn't buy a date in a brothel, to something growing numbers of single people (and some naughty attached people) do as a matter of course.

Few couples I knew, is no longer bother about lying that they met online. Why should they? The whole thing is so mainstream as to be banal. To meet in "real life" is becoming exotic.

Instead, this new sober, efficient approach to mating is attracting people in their millions: Fairfax-owned internet dating site Manjam.com, gay.com, fridae.com (to name a few) boasts on its home page million REAL singles and 1000 joining everyday.

Young people aged 18 to 24 are looking online in big numbers. The internet is no longer a place of last resort, but a place to start the search.

This critical mass has important implications not only for how we meet, but for how relationships are conducted.

Internet dating feels so much like shopping for a mate that it can't help but lend the pursuit of finding a partner a transactional vibe. Its terminology - browsing, surfing and box-ticking to ensure a correct match - is a far cry from "old-style" romance built on the language of chance encounters, romance, serendipity, sparks, eros and chemistry.

That online dating essentially involves looking through a massive catalogue of people that you whittle down by typing keywords into a search engine seems as distant from notions of "romance" as you can get.

The era of choice, choice, choice is a hangover from the Long Boom where more was considered better.

But I'd rather websites boasting "eight REAL singles" to make selection easier, make my expectations more realistic and less inclined to seek perfection.

The large volume of people available at the click of a mouse means it can be easier to discard a relationship that isn't working, because of a sense of abundance and possibility. Easy come, easy go. It may mean we do not stick at relationships as long as we should.

One popular website is called gay.com, which pretty much sums it up.

Another effect is more insidious: the reduction of eros in public space. You know: flirting, cracking on, loaded glances - all the mating calls we send out. With online dating at critical mass, it now acts as a catch-all clearing house "where you go for a partner".

As singles outsource their love lives to dating sites, they are less likely to be looking for a mate in the real world, dampening the signals that we almost intuitively send out like sonar. This "off-line" desexualisation is evident everywhere, from parties to pubs.

Nights at the pub can now be spent relaxing with mates rather than throwing looks at the bloke in the corner table or getting up the courage to approach the handsome stranger at the bar.

I tried internet dating two years ago. I was on holiday visiting my friend in Paris - and, in retrospect, going through a bit of a low patch.

Snowdrifts built up outside my window in a city where I had little money and few friends. That I spent much of the time wondering what language I should be speaking was a precursor to my retreat into cyberspace.

The internet gave me the illusion of connection and community so lacking in my "real life".

I would browse for two or four hours at a stretch. With high-speed broadband, I whipped through more men than I'd physically met in years. Him, him, him or him?

A flurry of beards, beanies, bald spots, those light-rimmed spectacles favoured by architects. They blurred into one. They all liked the same thing: travel, beaches at sunset, movies.

A lot them sounded like timid virgins. "I've never done this before," they wrote.

In turn, you could describe yourself but it always had the elusiveness of a hologram.

Things that can be intuited when meeting in real life were absent from the scrubbed-up profiles and sanitised pictures on the dating sites.

That this has led to a profitable business in drafting people's profiles and another touching up profile pictures is in the consumer spirit of internet dating.

Logging off I felt fretful, like I'd left a cyberspace version of myself alone on the edge of a bar floor - vulnerable somehow, unguarded.

I knew I would be subject to the same nanosecond appraisal that I had cast over thousand men a night - and that I would be found wanting, in two different senses of the word.

I left Paris and deleted my profile.

If there is a person unluckier in love than I am, I'd like to meet them.

But I'd rather be unlucky in love in the real world, taking chances, risks, trusting the randomness of life and the mysterious alchemy of serendipity than favour the clinical approach favoured by million REAL singles! casting a cool eye over photos and blurbs, shopping for a mate.


Till then, catch you soon with some more......

Have a lovely day.....