Dating In Ireland

Dating In Ireland

I am a sexually liberated woman from the United States.

This does not mean that I am a slut, it does not mean that I am incapable of monogamy, and it does not mean that because I’ve been with others sexually, I’m comparing performances like a movie reviewer. But, for some reason, previous experience makes a lot of Irish men nervous, along with the fact that I refuse to hate (most of) my previous partners, even more so. Not that I really care, but I am sceptical enough to be a ruthless observer of the neuroses that seem to orbit the act of dating in Ireland.

What single Irish men my age seem to expect, on principle, from a sexually liberated American woman, appears most often to be one of two things. Either they act terrified of emotional commitment for some unknown reason (which I can only assume consists of past experiences with Irish women,) or, when faced with the words “I’m dating”, they too often assume I’m a sex-mad slut who is incapable of commitment at all. This causes many of them to immediately begin internally questioning their sexual prowess, and start telling me their self-validating carnal adventures. In my search for a relationship, I would rather not hear a male bragging that he’s capable of mating; most of them who are not physically or mentally handicapped usually are. So he just comes off as both redundant and annoying, and it becomes self-evident half an hour into the first dinner date that he will quite probably not get any action from my end.

By my mid-30’s, I don’t care what a man has done in his former relationship/s, as long as he at least has had them. Preferably on a semi-long-term basis, which simply didn’t work out in the end, and without too much nuclear hate on either side. Near-virginity in one’s mid-30s, especially for men, is simply a great way of screaming “I’m lacking interpersonal skills!”, so I would much rather the man I date be anything but a virgin. Virginity on either side is overrated. But if there’s a normal man here in Ireland who sees me as a human being who’s just dating, in the normal ‘dating’ sense of the word, then 99 times out of 100, he’s married.

I’m a woman who has had many adventures and is looking to settle down in my mid-30s, after figuring out what I really want in life. Living in Ireland is one of them, for better or worse. But here, trying to date, I often get left with the infantile, alcoholic dregs of…what? Not bachelorhoods enjoyed, but rather a cascade of sob stories- marriages gone septically awry, and virginities horrifically prolonged. If I want to adhere to my strict personal policy of not interfering with other people’s marriages, then, in the 30something dating pool of the Emerald Isle, the dysfunction brigade seems to be the most prevalent option.

I’ve also had the misfortune of temporarily meeting men who admit to obsessively propositioning Ireland’s trafficked non-locals, men who have gotten so used to dysfunctional sex that they think prostitutes are normal women. Fortunately, it keeps the length of the date down to about forty-five seconds. It goes almost literally: …hello, -hello, I wasn’t really expecting someone like you, …why? -you don’t look like the sort of woman I date, …why, -because I like sexy gear on women but I can tell you probably don’t party and I don’t know how much we will have in common, …that’s okay I’ve made my decision and we definitely don’t, so goodbye. …The date is over, and I didn’t even sit down.

Culture of Excess

Can we have some middle ground, please? Can addictive extremes possibly be avoided at some point? As far as minor vices go, I’ll admit liking Internet porn, but it does eventually get boring after a while. For several months, I was desensitised to intimacy after using porn (in order to spitefully avoid the dating fiasco). My increasing cynicism, over what seems a mere appetite for gratification, was threatening to destroy my belief that there is such a thing as lovemaking. Sex was relegated to something as mundane as eating a hamburger when hungry. Not that I’m validating the religious arguments against porn; I think they’re nonsense and I like porn, but like any vice, there’s a point at which you push yourself back from the table and say, enough.

…Yeah, like that’s a well-practised habit in Ireland. Sorry if you think I’m generalising, but you have to admit you’re a rare, sterling catch in Ireland if you know the meaning of self-control, and that’s even if you have cystic acne and chronic halitosis.

I guess it’s caused by this culture of passive rebellion against dogma, guilt, obligation, family reputation, proprieties and rules being barked at you all your life. Thank goodness things are changing, but coming from a more laid back, typical, American suburban upbringing, I find bipolar excess to be pretty darn annoying, and when I have to deal with it, I end up being fairly terse and incapable of empathy.
Regardless of what the weepy nuns at the rehabs tell you, excess is not a disease. It’s a deliberate choice you make within your own visceral, subliminal psychology. It’s caused by naturally wishing to assert your personal space and freedom in a mental world of imposed limitations…and choosing to try and satisfy the people or situations limiting you, for the sake of harmony and conformity. By my definition, that’s called cowardice. And, unfortunately, I don’t have much sympathy.

If your brain’s stuck skipping back to the same dumb habit, it’s you that keeps kicking the record player. And I use that definition on myself every time I feel the urge to act the cynical writer, and pick up a cigarette. But at least it’s not a drink, and I can put a lid on the porn, and I don’t ride the cocaine train like a lot of idiots have started doing here. If, for any reason, because I’m greedy. If I had that kind of money, I’d rather have top-class furnishings, top of the line toys, maid service and extended holidays. Not a habit which fizzles all of those luxuries to the wind, and permits some savvy, sober dealer or landlord to surround himself with luxuries that thousands of addicts choose to disdain, out of some pseudo-noble sense of Celtic community poverty. Years ago it was the expense of drink that kept families poor. Now tons of you have a pile of money, and still have to pretend to be working-class, so old Ireland has graduated to coke. Bravo to you, cokeheads.

At the Tiger end of a socialist culture, people here still find it difficult to enjoy their own luxury, and spend their excess cash on something that can’t be visibly begrudged. I find it amazing that here, if you show visible success, people often find reason to humiliate or ostracise you. In the States, you’d have to quarantine yourself to keep people from kissing your ass; it makes a lot of fake friends, I’ll admit, and feeds a culture of hero worship. But in comparison, it’s better than getting the cold shoulder for the sin of showing visible luxury, and having to publicly mea-culpa at twice the volume to dispel the local grumbles. It’s baggage from being a poor nation for so long, and being afraid of being disowned by the community for being “The Snooty Toff on the Hill”. Nobody can begrudge your holiday home far away in Spain that you tell nobody about, or 50 grand getting tooted up your nose, so you stay looking working-class in your little council row.

But it’s all a lie.

It’s better to have bling than a coke habit, I say. But the working-class illusion is so ingrained, that in coastal communities, which feed the tourist industry with a veneer of bucolic innocence, drugs come in on fishing vessels almost daily. Many town locals in the bar scene will have 200 Euros worth of blow in a handbag, but have never seen the inside of the local health club or bought themselves a proper Thai massage. It’s all about priorities. I obviously leave the family locals out of that scene, as the responsible family types squeeze out messers pretty fast. But the curse of being single is that I have to deal with people in the pubs who live the crazy life, who are that way due to being irresponsible and dysfunctional rather than free.

A culture of excess is not normality. People in the US don’t usually barf on the sidewalk. If they do, they’re homeless and mental, and they eliminate other fluids on the sidewalk as well. But here in Dublin, walking at night, I’m playing splatscotch. Call me self-righteous, but hey, there are some things I bring with me that this nation needs, and my friendly brand of realistic ruthlessness, is one of them. And perhaps it’s sadistic of me, but whenever some well-dressed shlub toots coke up their nose in a 50 Euro note, I can’t help but wonder if they mind that jail or bankruptcy is at the end of the yellow brick road…and afford myself a private chuckle.

It doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of compassion, which my nation is lacking in many areas at the moment, and your nation for its imperfections, has on some definite level. But one imperfection consists of the, heh, charming old-school Irish habit of eventually turning all healthy pleasures into compulsive vices, to be condemned during the day, indulged anonymously at night, and denied to the end of creation. And if it, especially through sexuality, even requires the denial of human beings to do so, men over 40 seem to specialise in it. There’s something psychotically infuriating about a man treating me like gold, everything going swimmingly well (or so I think), and then suddenly he starts trash-talking me during sex and blows out the door after the shag. This has happened on a number of occasions. If that happens to me again, I will be guilty of aggravated assault, because the falcon punch to his balls will happen in microseconds, and leave him explaining a swollen nutsack bobbling on his lap, bigger on him than squirrel balls on a squirrel, to the wife he lied to me about.

It’s as if the moment he splats, I stop being a person, because everything that has been shouted into his little kid mind says that I’m filth bound straight for hell. It’s a complete shutdown of the acknowledgment of my humanity. And that, dear friends, is the biggest reason why I’m not dating anyone in Ireland over 35, ever, ever, again. I think I’m finally accepting the fact that I may not have to rob the cradle to find a similar viewpoint, but I’ll definitely have to start frequenting younger venues. The Pope’s children have a far more realistic and cosmopolitan viewpoint, including the heretical and revolutionary notion that women are people.

So, even though I used to be extremely attracted to older men, the expectation here for me on their part, to be a prudish sex-hater who’s into compulsive housecleaning, is not at all what I call positive feminine virtues. I’m an artist, a writer, and a musician. Being able to use a whole bottle of Dettol in one day, and tut-tutting other people’s personal life choices, does not define my sense of self-worth. I could care less about what other people are doing unless it’s making them happy, and then I encourage them.

Personally, as for me, I don’t need to live a double life overindulging in forbidden vices, caused by an obsessive, shallow, and pointless concern with personal and family reputation, and a daytime life full of a heavy sense of obligation. Where I’m from, it’s not part of the accepted culture. It’s a support group called A.C.O.A., a pattern of dysfunction, and a therapy issue. But then, I’m from a different country, and we’re all different.

As for the wide-eyed Irish play of angelic, innocent naiveté, by adult men, it tends through my experience of this lovely nation, to bang hollowly against my observant scepticism and my burned-out emotions. Being susceptible to it, getting used, and finding out that I’m just a gullible side dish, has cost my heart dearly. As much as I love Ireland, I do not love that. Which is why I turned to porn for a while.
As for me, I like porn. But to stop myself from feeling the need to turn indulgence into vice, I ditched the porn habit. I keep a few standard movies on hand from the auld Ann Summers and have re-taught myself to revert to imagination. I actually feel like a normal person again after no Internet for a month. …Hey, I’ll admit to anything I’ve actually done; being a rambunctious woman in my mid-30s is one of them. Being a woman in Ireland and shocking the nation by admitting to being human and horny, however, is not a license for Irish men to leap on me as some sort of available sex-mad harlot. All women are horny, it’s just that we control who gets the goods; the definition of liberation is that a woman controls her own choices, no matter what.

Dissing the Ex

The first year I was here, after the break-up with my Dublinian ex (the only living ex I actually dislike), I dated constantly.

The ex got my footprint on his rear end, because although he said “I love you” incessantly, he never found it appropriate to introduce me to his family, and treated me like a secret slut. He thought I liked it; I thought it was just a bedroom game until he started treating me like crap in real life. I faced the situation American style (directly addressing and discussing issues, which many Irish apparently find frightening and confrontational), and that way seems to be a lot less subtle than the Irish way of doing things (passive-aggressive, weepy, manipulative guilt trips). He scarpered and stayed away, and I made the conclusion that not only was he emotionally retarded, but also stunted and permanently damaged. He waited for me to come grovelling.

I’m not exactly sure what was going through his head to treat me the way he did, or what was going wrong. Perhaps I was being too nice and loving during the relationship, and he wanted an equally sharp-edged Irish female whom he would be able to treat like crap and not feel bad about it. Maybe it was just because I enjoyed sex, and he had something hammered into his skull at an early age about women who enjoy sex. But he didn’t expect my Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation after months of my low-lying tolerance, handing him my heart to use as a doormat. I bit his head off in text with a snazzy, blunt, American pummelling, and then proceeded to pointedly ignore him and break out onto what Ireland calls a Dating Scene.

Subsequently, this can only be called a comedy of errors. I don’t date actively/cohabitably married men, which in my experience, apparently means that I’m left with some very dysfunctional options indeed.

Nearly two years later, he still finds some reason to send me text messages on a near-monthly basis, to somehow passively indicate to me that he isn’t dating anyone. At which point, I will eventually get annoyed after a brief exchange, and passively remind him as to why he isn’t dating anyone: because all women on earth are obviously smarter than I was. And then, another 2 months of silence until he thinks I’ll like some episode of Podge and Rodge that’s currently on, and texts me, and as the King of Siam says, etcetera, etcetera.

Where I come from, The End means credits roll and lights go up, get your coat, hide the popcorn bucket to annoy a pimply porter, and go home in the late-night chill. Not here, apparently. But I’m not buying it; if I ever relent, it’s back to the same old nonsense. I have learned that no self-respecting woman in Ireland ever, ever relents. If I do, that’s a reason for him not to change his bad habits.

He believes himself to be God’s Own Faultless Child, because his Irish mother raised him that way. I think he’s still waiting on my apology, but he’s going to have to wait for the Rapture and the Second Coming as well. Which will definitely happen first. Meanwhile, on the rebound from a thoroughly gutted heart, I proceeded to dust off my Shag License and use it with gusto, until I got fed up with the prospects. As for him, he doesn’t have any prospects, no property, his ex-wife took everything and his grown kids ignore the hell out of him. In the States, the game would be very different. But after 2 years in Ireland, my sceptical eyes know a ‘dead end’ when they see one, time to do a U-turn and go back. And that sign seems to be hammered to the head of every man here who is older than me, and who is irreparably twisted and programmed by a bunch of Italian dicks in red dresses who won’t ordain a set of tits into their paedo club. If you think I’m going to hell for saying that, enjoy a life dictated and defined, out of fear and cowardice, by everyone else but yourself.

‘Devotion Under Review’

I think I like being an Irish woman now. It’s good for my self-esteem. Irish men know that if they have to beg for forgiveness, the probationary period will last a very long time, if they are lucky enough to have the chance. This is something that Irish women apparently love to do, and I call it ‘devotion under review’. It means, that you could be a saint, you could be a model father, have handed her all your money for 20 years and not touched a drink in your life, but if you leave the toilet seat up once when she’s got PMS, suddenly the bed goes to 0 degrees and you’re jerking the lizard to Internet pr0n for the next year, unless you figure out some way to donate her your left kidney even if she doesn’t need it. Not that I’m the sort of woman who would use it, but it’s entertaining having the right to do so, and seeing how terrified a lot of guys are of it. It’s another cultural side effect of the A.C.O.A. I mentioned earlier.

But if ‘devotion under review’ is used on me, I turn into a ruthless, vicious monster. My ex landlady said my ‘character was under question’ when some paint was lost due to damp in the bath, and I wanted my security deposit back, after EUR 22,000 in rent was paid in full, and I was cajoled and insulted into giving it a sale-standard military cleaning on the day my mother had cancer surgery. (She actually was having cancer surgery that day. Luckily for both my mother and my ex-landlady, things worked out well. I think the landlady actually thought it was a sympathy lie, like ‘the dog ate my homework’, but it lit a fire under me that turned me into Oppenheimer and gave me the moral altitude of the Enola Gay.) Not only was I angry, I was transcendentally angry; I was folding spacetime into wormholes with my eyeballs. Cu Chulainn’s battle spasms were Buddhist Nirvana compared to my definition of angry. I threatened a historic lawsuit from the nether regions of hell, intended to bankrupt her and entertain me. I got the deposit back and was informed that I am an awful person who, in essence, makes the Baby Jesus cry. Boo hoo. Now she’s lost over 30 grand in value from the market slump.

I guess Irish people normally act like psycho dumbshits over rent and property; apparently it’s a historical thing. Eh, I’ve seen “The Field”. I have no sympathy for her whatsoever; I am a landlord myself and did myself the favour of buying low. If most of you ‘investors’ who bought after 2003 had put your dough in mutual funds when valuation was too high the past 5 years, instead of buying property, you wouldn’t be crying right now- and I wouldn’t be laughing when some little twit tries to act the English landlord, and assert her laughable landlordian pseudo-authority on a salty old Yank who knows that property is just business, loss and work. With that humbling fact in mind, I pointedly give my tenants human dignity. And her…she’s panic-selling at a loss with a mortgage that’s rocketing with the interest rates.

Wow, between the cocaine and the badly built, overvalued condos, and the coming Reality Check, it looks like Ireland is finally experiencing the 80s. I never took the Tiger too seriously anyhow; when I looked at him, I saw the cheesy Miami Vice wardrobe and knew what you were in for.

The one flaw in ‘devotion under review’ is the tendency to value being right more than any love or common respect for a human being. It doesn’t give any ground whatsoever, but since the history of giving any relationship ground to either oppressor landlords or alcoholic spouses is a bad one, I guess old cultural habits die hard. I thought the common Irish habit of valuation of reputation and public image was something that had an ending point, a practical point at which you stop being an asshole and start seeing reason. But if that’s your value set, I am incorrect. Now, some woman character on one of your soap operas is shunning her adult son, who has cancer and six weeks left to live, for being in love with his adopted sister, and Mom’s actually flipping out and having hissy fits about it, and rejecting him, when he’s got six weeks left to live. I watched one episode, and concluded that whoever sees and understands her character’s point of view is utterly bonkers and not worth knowing in real life. I am American. This does not compute. Not at all, and never will, ever. I hope his character dies in his lover’s arms, and Mom’s left with so much guilt for valuing her reputation more than her son, that she does something monumentally dramatic, self-destructive, and stupid. Because, like the dramas of alcoholics, for me it’s like watching a puppet show with all the strings being yanked by the puppets. And if nobody listens to reason, and does not choose a healthier route, I will settle for grabbing a lawn chair and sitting down for the wacky entertainment. And I’m not talking about soap operas, I’m talking about real life.

As for ‘devotion under review’ turned on me, that is not what I like about the Irish woman’s right to put anyone on probation for any reason. I fight it tooth and nail if I think it’s misused. But, it’s a right that has its uses in the proper context, and serving a genuine plonker his just desserts is one of them. But it’s a passive-aggressive tool, and is therefore completely contrary to my own personal preference for just whooping ass.

A Fat Chick In Fairyland

The problem of dating in Ireland is compounded by the fact that I’m a large woman, (ogre large, not circus large) and some men here approach with the assumption that on those grounds I must be desperate. Desperate enough that, if they can somehow magnanimously forgive me for being big, I will graciously tolerate alcoholism and dysfunction on the basis that they’re the only man out there who will provide stud service. Where that logic comes from, I don’t know. Funny enough, it’s the same logic that sent the 9-11 conspirators to the US under orders to marry the fattest, homeliest, most desperate woman they could find, (which, unfortunately, they did), get the visa to stay, secure a housekeeper and personal slave, and then go about planning jihad. But in the case of some dysfunctional Irish men, it would just be to secure a guilt-ridden, co-dependent commiserater who likes being the star of a personal tragedy, and then going about slow cirrhosis, as self-improvement requires a little too much effort. Airplanes and skyscrapers are just a bit bold, even for the young Martin McGuinness, and the numbers of Irish men unfortunate enough to be alcoholic tend to follow the path of least resistance, as opposed to most. But, where genuine respect is concerned, dysfunctional or healthy, they also admire the woman who provides the most resistance, and I have learned through a number of surprising experiences that the worst way to get rid of an Irish man is to tell him to go away.

As for the plonkers, I regret to inform the men in Ireland who operate a definition of dating on desperate-cow logic, that lots of men here, based on the nature of the women of Ireland to hold out the goods, will quite readily go for any port in a storm, and the emotional attachment is not too long in coming after. In other words, desperation is a projected state of emotion, and me shagging him means a long haul of pleasantly making-myself-scarce if I’m unimpressed, because suddenly it goes from one bad shag, to proposing cohabitation.

All those trad songs that start with a drink and end with a wedding, in one day, are true.

When I’m dating, sometimes I’ll try the goods, but whether I decide that I care for them or not, if I shag anyone in Ireland at all, I usually can’t get rid of them, and have a hell of a time trying to gently shake the clingy mucker off of my emotional wellies without scarring him for life. Which is now why I am thankfully single, celibate for nearly a year, and have just dropped 10 kilos in the last 2 months of workouts, out of sheer spite for the situation as it stands. I am still going, and have subsequently stopped dating in order to further my own self-esteem. Who knew that not dating would make me feel so much better about myself? Irish men, that’s who. No wonder it’s ‘any port in a storm’ for so many of them.

I’m from America, where being fat (functionally, not morbidly) is, by practicality, far more forgivable than being an alcoholic. In America, fat people can still show up for work and support their family. They can still raise well-adjusted kids and keep their promises. There is not nearly as excellent a welfare system in the US, which, although it’s socially Darwinist and has its faults for being so, also means you usually can’t afford to drink to stupid levels. Food is a far more forgivable vice in the States than drugs or alcohol, because we have to grab high-fat crappy fast food between working our two jobs just to pay the mortgage.

On a curious side note as an American, I do notice a higher body mass index in the protestant communities in the north, and in my ventures up north I find far less tendency for young people to gawk or show disgust at my size while I’m in them. Personally, I think that there, just as in the US, the religious and cultural disavowal of alcohol amongst the conservative fringe has manifested in replacing it with the pleasure of a second helping. Not exactly a solution, but perhaps it’s a more practically functional replacement within the human tendency to seek pleasure to some slight excess, and the too-often Irish tendency to tip the scales between excess and abstinence to a bipolar extreme.

Before anyone internally argues the virtues of eating versus drinking, remember it takes ten drams of grain to make one dram of whiskey, so it’s actually much more forgivable on world starvation/consumer terms to be fat than it is to be a skinny drinker. And not only that; I chose to be carbon-free and don’t drive, and haven’t flown anywhere in 2 years, so there’s loads of digested biomass right there which would make a skinny self-righteous Irish person realise that, on a consumption scale, they’re well fatter than that guy in Mexico who tipped the scales at 130 stone. Not that I’ll stop being bumped into by old ladies in twenty-foot wide, empty grocery isles at Tesco, just so they can try to make a guilt-inducing and passive point that I have a lot of cheek to take up so much space. I’m not Irish, nor am I Catholic; the whole guilt thing doesn’t work. But I’m not joining services of overweight, sweaty, conservative Pentecostals in East Belfast anytime soon. I do not raise my arms in the air like I just don’t care, and gibber for Jeebus. I escaped the South in the US for precisely that reason. I’m liberal, and I do like having a beer on occasion. Sometimes, even a whole pint of it.

Being big is no picnic in the park. Somewhere back in Irish myth is some guy called the Dagda, but at this point I think he’s definitely a myth. At my twice-weekly cardio workouts and weight training, men who saunter in looking ripped and sweaty and wearing fingerless lifting gloves, have gone behind me on the same machine at the same setting, done 3 reps, and ended the last rep with an explosion of breath and a monstrous clang of the weight plates dropping. And there’s me, Princess Fiona ogrified on the ab cruncher. This is not boasting; most women do not want to look like me at all. I don’t want to look like me, at all. I’d rather look like Marilyn Monroe, and even she was a size 16. (Wouldn’t that be nice? I’ll get there, eventually.) I just have to accept it and work with it. My genes are programmed to give me the ability to effectively slap a 1,500-pound walrus with a kayak oar if it gives me any guff, and suckle Hercules whilst doing it. The problem is, there is little precedence in Ireland’s genetic makeup for the barrel build of a woman like me, so they think I’m eating cream buns and Cadbury’s morning and night. I’m a half-Native American ogre lined with Inuit love blubber, living in Ireland, the land of sylphlike waistlines, pigeon chests, blue skin, teeny tiny titties, and a sweet tooth which would have me in a size 30 and jabbing myself with insulin, within six months of trying to keep up.

The Loser Parade

In thinking of some of the losers who tried to adhere themselves to my femme-beefcake self under the desperate-cow delusion, and got stomped (figuratively), I’ve had to recall delivering some historic dismissals of male advances on several occasions, the most memorable here in Ireland. The best was where I went straight to the man’s family and gave them what-for after he had told all his friends that he was in love with me, (ugh.) and I was an American millionaire who was going to ‘take care’ of him (??? First time I knew about it.) Aside from being wrong on both counts, (with the ‘millionaire’ bit having me nearly in stitches and raging at the same time; trying to conduct myself with some class does not mean I’m rich), I had also not touched him sexually, and his family had not had the ability to warn me that he had a habit of leeching onto women in guise of friendship and becoming a fast-growing tumour. Apparently, I had failed to communicate to him, as I cluelessly and dismissively brushed aside his badly acted terms of endearment, that the usual requirements for a gigolo are youth and health. Alcoholism of his calibre, combined with age, would make a gigolo’s assets rather flaccid.

After some laughable alcoholic drama, ending with me putting my foot down faster than I, as a Southern American woman, could stomp on a brown recluse spider, (which is astonishingly fast), he then got bustled into rehab on orders of indefinite voluntary incarceration. At my weight, putting my foot down causes an avalanche. I got an apology from an upstanding, business-owning, politically active member of the family, which was completely unnecessary as he ended up being someone I liked and respected almost instantly, because he emanated loads of natural charisma. I saw no reason for him to apologise for his cousin being a complete idiot; I would only do that to reiterate that it is their nonsense and not a habit of the family’s to raise bullsh!t artists. Which, I suspect, given the Irish obsession for maintaining sterling reputation and family standing, was purely the motivation to do it in the first place.

I just wish the Irish had the ability to openly and unashamedly admit when their motives are based on vanity, self-preservation or greed. It would save me a lot of digging here for people’s motives, and save me getting shmoozed by liars, both goofy and legit. Vanity keeps us hygienic and out of destructive social groups, self-preservation is practical, and greed keeps the family fed. Like a small amount of flu becomes a vaccine, life requires a portion of those virtues to be acknowledged truthfully in order to stop them being vices. And politicians here would spend a lot less time pretending that they’re egalitarian baby-kissers having tea with old church ladies, crying for someone else’s plight. And at least I would be able to tell when their compassion was actually genuine.


No Excuses

I love the close-knit nature of family here in Ireland, but apologising for an alcoholic brat who turns out to be the one Billy Carter in a family of Jimmys, is a little silly and self-conscious. Black sheep are part of life. I should know; I’m one of them. By precedent I should have been a land developer, doctor or lawyer; but behind the airs and graces spouted by the more geriatric members of my extended family, they all had a habit of being greedy landlords, crooked lawyers and drunk doctors, who kept amphetamine diet pills in a candy jar and whose office the local junkie would sneak into to beg doc to take the edge off with a half-grain of morphine.

Maybe I’m just being utterly ruthless with what would be called a respectable family over here. Mine is an infamous Southern family made good on building central Florida’s first major industry after Reconstruction in 1865, and what’s left is a history of addled eccentrics with flaming tempers, and a few dregs of property, the final sales of which finance my rice-and-beans dream in Dublin on a literal shoestring to try and call myself a writer. And it’s a sober one at that; I can’t afford to have any bad habits, because I would be broke within months.

But here, at least, I can pretend to be a dry-witted poet and writer in Dublin, Ireland, because this nation and city, of all of them, can forgive me for being infuriatingly derisive- as long as I have love for it in my heart. Which I do, don’t ask me why, as Ireland quite often makes me want to smack it upside the head. But it’s the love of a light-hearted, wilful and moody partner who likes to push my emotional buttons, and remind me that I’m a human being with feelings, as opposed to me being dominated and oppressed by the bureaucratic federal demagogue I left.

I am in love with Ireland; and it’s much easier to love this place because it is almost a person. This does not stop me from ripping its institutions to shreds if they annoy my practical senses, however. Nor does it stop me from using my ‘I’m A Bold American’ excuse to denounce hypocrisy with a bullhorn. Or, bemoaning the fact that Ireland never had the 60’s, and is floating somewhere between square dancing and a techie rave, and the women here have never found historic occasion to shave their heads and set fire to a brassiere. Except for Sinéad O’Connor, who is apparently treated like nuclear waste, and back home would be a loved and celebrated figure if she found a reason to live in Haight-Ashbury or Sedona. She belongs next to Joan Baez and gets treated here like a goofball. Good thing I’m here, she needs backup.

But the problem for me is, when it comes to relationships, normal men don’t exactly go for abnormal women. My own relationship history of finding either extreme losers or number-crunching supercomputers who think in C and can solve quadratic equations in their heads, illustrates that to perfection. I’m embarrassed by one, and easily bored with the other.

The Moral of the Story

As for dating motives of the men I’ve met, anyone trying to attach to a large woman in the assumption of her being emotionally desperate, is profoundly annoying. But even when I try and hook up with a more normal single man who is almost always either terrified of intimacy by past experience, or emotionally distanced due to near-virginal uncertainty, it usually ends up being less satisfying than a bowel movement. I’ve concluded that I would prefer a good one of those than bad sex, and have increased my fibre intake accordingly. That’s right, you can quote me directly: a good sh!te is much better than bad sex. And the older you get, the truer it gets, as the act of elimination for the older person begins more and more to resemble heaven. (At least it will give the lifetime religious celibate something to look forward to.)

I have chosen a sort of voluntary celibacy in lieu of my growing cynicism, which is otherwise threatening to destroy my belief that a sober, genuine, respectable and sexually healthy man is out there for me in Ireland somewhere within the next lifetime. I have concluded that the past year of celibacy I have both suffered and enjoyed is an experience quite common to Irish women. In essence, although I am not really Catholic, I have been involuntarily subjected to the hard Catholic experience. I’ve gone from being a carefree and liberated American woman, openly happy, to an elitist prude who is a highly sceptical observer. If that’s what the ‘nice guys’ in Ireland are scared of, whilst sitting at home and not getting dates, then it is obvious as to why. This does not stop me, however, from having no sympathy whatsoever for their plight.

Thank you, Ireland.

And if any part of this article offends you, it’s you I was writing about.