Mum, will you marry Ronan?

For some reason, if you’re thirty-something and single, all your friends are interested in your love life – which is fine, because sometimes it makes for hilarious story telling over a glass of wine. The problem is that mostly everyone is very keen to be a matchmaker.

“I know who would be good for you,” is a phrase I hear an awful lot from my friends. Even though I have, over and over again, said that I am not, (with the ‘read my lips’ kinda of speech), repeat, not, in search for an all consuming love, they still excitedly list the apparently alluring attributes of ‘the’ guy on their mind.

This often turns to a full-blown marketing campaign, ending with them showing me his photos on Facebook (where he would be posing next to the car – yeah perfect), and with plans for ‘organising’ a dinner.

At which point, I stamp my feet and draw the line: I am called a spoil sport; and they mutter away about them not going to give up. This matchmaking business I find very, for want of a better word, um, wacky.

There you are at a table, like a proper twit, conjuring small talk with someone who has just launched into a detailed analysis of his high society connections/ his last piss-up/ the nice pictures he bought from Tal-Lira. What do you do? Look bemused? Be rude and not suppress the yawn? Or retire to the refuge of the loo?

I don’t mean this in a snobbish manner. It doesn’t make a difference to me whether one is a candyfloss maker or a university degree churner - the important thing is that there is kind of depth to a person. “Oh, don’t worry about passion or intense connection,” say the matchmakers. Pah. I look around me and I see how many acquaintances have settled for pinhead boyfriends or girlfriends just so that they’re not single.

And I say, Jesus, what’s wrong with being on your own? I am amazed how most people are unable to be in their own company for a stretch of time. Some people leave one relationship and plunge straight into a next one. Why, some actually have their foot in another even from before.

What about taking some time to discover who you are and what your baggage is? You know, just so you recognise what works and what can be left behind? And enjoying doing things without having to check or reach a compromise with someone, like, say, leaving a party if you’re damn’ bored, or deciding on a whim to pack off on a holiday. Or simply appreciating good times with your close knit network of friends and family?

Granted, perhaps I’m the other extreme. It’s not that I have an ingrained fear of having my heart broken. Having had, some years ago, my heart ripped out and stomped upon to a bloody pulp, it is now the ultimate plastered-up-but-sounder-and-wiser pumping machine.

But as a single mother you just stop banking on the idea that a toddler-friendly George Clooney would materialise. And even if that were not so, I actually find the thought of jumping from one long-term, space-sharing relationship to another, almost claustrophobic. Perhaps that is why the thought of anything beyond a coffee date makes me want to do a runner.

It doesn’t help that we live in a society which does not embrace singledom (think Bridget Jones and all the romcom movies). It’s pure social conditioning. I blame it fair and square on the fairytales. Go on, think of one fairytale plot line where the pretty-but-placid princess is not saved by a prince?

Ban the fairytales I say. From now on, in our household, all fairytale endings are scrapped and re-written. Princesses are feisty and princes don’t ask for hands in marriage but for friendship. Fine, occasionally they might ask the princess if she’d care to join them on a gap year travelling around the world.

It’s only lately that I realised how early we start being brainwashed by the stereotypical status of coupledom. My daughter, aged three, is the keenest observer of street billboards. On school-run mornings she’s the first to announce any new billboard poster dotting the road and demands a brief on the product being marketed.

(Thanks to that car insurance ad, she still to this day chides, like a mini nagging conscience: “Mum don’t drive fast, or you’ll crash into the poster.”)

So, the other day, as we drove past yet another Ronan Keating billboard (we’ve been waving at him about six times a day for the past months), she called out from her car seat: “Mum, will you marry Ronan one day?”

Aggrh. Now even my very own daughter has turned matchmaker.

Copyright: Sunday Times of Malta