Will Harris rethinks the wide-net approach

When it comes to dating, I’ve always been of the school of thought that it’s entirely possible to land the man or woman of your dreams, provided you cast a wide enough net. This is all well and good, until the realisation hits that two years of bad dates have made me the amorous equivalent of a deep sea fishing vessel, and my widely-cast nets are now tearing up the seabed for miles around and entangling creatures that ought really to be left to the depths.

“My widely-cast net is entangling ceatures that ought to be left to the depths”

Recently, I dated someone who is currently treading the boards in a West End musical. I’ve always been a sucker for a youngster with a head shot, be he actor, dancer, or – on one occasion in the dim and distant past – a recently released felon (that was more of a mug shot I suppose, but he still had a certain I don’t know what). It has even been suggested by one of my less sensitive friends that I spend my afternoons hanging around outside stage schools, hoping to dupe someone into autographing a civil partnership certificate. Not true.

For all I enjoy the company of thespians, I know deep down in the pit of my bruised and bloodied heart that I will never marry one. They’re good fun, nice to look at, and very handy for things like comp tickets and noisy orgasms, but trying to get an actor to commit to anything other than a fling is like trying to make him say Macbeth or eat carbs. They are slippery fish indeed.

Having gone into our dates forearmed with this knowledge, I was far from surprised when over the course of one weekend my actor disappeared into thin air, stage left. Shortly after the actor there was a gay Christian, who got drunk on the blood of Christ, confessed he’d never had a same-sex experience, then promptly pinned me up against a bus shelter. Then there was an Australian financier who, no word of a lie, reeled off his interests as “binge drinking, more binge drinking, oh, and canvassing for the Battersea Conservatives Club”. And after him, there was a South African. I can’t tell you why I dumped him, this being a family magazine.

So, with the wide-net approach clearly not working for me, I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to narrow my fishing grounds. From now on, it’s no people of faith, no one born in the southern hemisphere, and nobody who earns a crust pretending to be someone they’re not.

I will, however, make a special dispensation for dancers. The main reason being I have a date with one tonight and am loathe to pass up any opportunity to reel in a man. There is, after all, a drought on the horizon.