Love is a losing game
This week, I have mostly been job hunting. Pimping myself out to contacts around London.
Trying to get a job feels a bit like dating.
Most girls in their twenties and thirties will be all too familiar with the(occasionally) excruciating dating scene.
It’s not even the truly heinous dates which get you down....y’know, the ones where your date tells inappropriate jokes about disabled people, offensive to the extent you have to turn and walk out of the pub (seriously, this happened to me) or the one where your date tells you, on the FIRST date, that he is actually already seeing someone (again, true fact). These at least provide you witty anecdotes with which to regale your friends, or material for your book on the 50 worst dates.
Nope, it’s the “no-spark” dates that get you down, the dates with perfectly attractive, funny and clever boys, with whom there is just no spark, no matter how much you try to conjure one up through copious amounts of liquor. The “no-spark” dates get you thinking: if you can’t connect with the good ones, who are so few and far between anyway, what chance is there of ever finding love, the tiniest needle in the haystack of hormones that is our metropolis?
“No-spark” dates go like this. You meet a guy in a bar, online, at an after-work drinks party, down an alley...wherever...and you decide you like each other enough for a date. He seems nice and he looks good in stripes (we East London girls love a bit of Gallic charm) and you are, well, borderline OK even if you say so yourself. Magic.
Only it’s not magic. It’s fun and all; you share some shandies, move on to vodka tonics and end with a shot of sambuca. You talk about your childhood: his parents divorced, yours moved around but otherwise normal, happy backgrounds. He’s hoping his rock band takes off, you’re hoping there’ll be another series of Flight of the Concords (ah Brett, we miss you, and your wolf-embossed leisure wear).
There’s no electricity but you’re having a nice time. Average nice, alcohol fuelled, average nice. Your hand slips into his on the way out of the pub. You share a beer-breathed kiss on the street. Probably with tongues. Your heart’s not in it, but it seems only polite, on both your parts.
When you get home (alone), you sit on the sofa. Your housemates are all asleep and it’s too late to dissect the somewhat lacklustre date. You feel a bit empty. You know he won’t call. This doesn’t bother you because you like him; you don’t. This bothers you because it’s still rejection.
Well, that is what job hunting is like.
I’ve met wonderful, amazing people for coffees over which they impart advice, but I leave feeling more confused and further away from the JOB than before. Not because they haven’t been helpful, they all have been, but because getting a JOB just feels so far from my grasp. Every job seems to call for a special set of skills, which I don’t have, some special spark which I can’t bring.
Applying for jobs online, has forced me to attempt to write witty and concise covering letters –like writing my own dating profile - citing all the ways in which I am fabulous and should be offered a job for which I am not really qualified.
I went to a job interview recently, where I was quizzed for an hour before they escorted me to the lifts with a pitying look in their eyes. Not sure I even like them, but that’s not the point, because they still haven’t phoned.
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