For Valentine’s Day I want a blow job.

Yep, today I would like a nice, hard, deep-throating blow job. The sloppy kind – dribble and spit and choking – that ends with you coming violently all over my face until your spunk dribbles down my chin and I can use the excess to draw a heart shape on the bedsheets.

And I want to give you flowers. A beautiful, big, hay-fever-inducing bouquet of them. Roses, tulips, lilies, anything frothy and soft and romantic. All tied up with a big fat pink ribbon that you can put in your hair afterwards or keep in a special memories box to remind you of the day when girlonthenet displayed some vague semblance of emotion. An expensive bouquet, too, so your Mum knows I’m a good financial bet for your future.

OMFG SEXISM

I don’t usually give much of a shit about casual sexism in couples – if two people, within a loving committed relationship, choose to conform to old-fashioned gender roles then I’m not one to stop them.

My problem comes when every single goddamn article or advert decides that we should all be doing the same thing. Usually we question this sexist dickery – we raise a wry smile at the dude in the cleaning products advert who’s crap at wiping the kitchen surfaces, or the woman who uses the expensive beauty product because it’s imperative that women defy the laws of physics by refusing to visibly age. We question it. We laugh at them.

And yet on Valentine’s Day for some reason our questioning attitude is hurled out of the window. Sexist? Aw, it’s just romantic. It’s just how couples are.

He should be panicking the day before.

She should be getting excited.

He should be saving his pennies.

She should be dropping hints about roses, chocolates, her favourite restaurant.

The racier, cheekier brands will lace their adverts with hints of euphemism. Maybe, just maybe, if you buy your girlfriend something grotesquely pink and painfully expensive she might just suck your cock. You lucky bastard.

A quick note about gays

It’s worth noting that I am not immune from presumptive twattery myself – I frequently write as if I’m talking about boy/girl couplings. This is deliberate – it’s because apart from the odd squirm with a ladyfriend or two, that’s mostly what I know.

But that’s not to say that we should automatically exclude what happens to be a fairly sizeable portion of the population from enjoying these couple-centred celebrations. Whether you love it or loathe it, Valentine’s Day is for everyone. And insisting on prescribing Valentine’s Day behaviour like only heterosexual couples exist gives a skewed and laughably ancient view of the world.

Gender roles and Valentine’s Day

Where was I? Ah yes – we’re not all 1950s chocolate-box dream couples.

It shouldn’t need to be said, to be honest, but I’m going to say it anyway, because some narrow-minded cardboard-cut-out cunts still think I should be crossing my fingers in the hope that someone gives me chocolates. I like chocolates, I do. I have also gone a bit melty inside on the very few occasions when boys have bought me flowers. Likewise I enjoy champagne, Lego and being wanked off by a boy while I watch porn I’ve nicked from the internet.

But some people still think that the sign of a successful relationship is one where the guy does all the work. Where he feels compelled to spend money making his woman feel special, and that if he jumps through these specially-defined hoops then maybe she’ll repay him by giving him sexual favours that she wouldn’t have given otherwise because she’s that fucking feminine that she must keep her sexuality under wraps so as to avoid breaking a fingernail or displaying some semblance of human frailty or something.

Women don’t just want chocolate, and men don’t just want sex.

Perhaps she wants a fucking Scalectrix. Perhaps he wants a nice long bubble bath and a box of chocolates. Perhaps both of them just want to fuck in an alleyway then head to a late-night bondage bar.

Perhaps – just perhaps – all your roses and cards and adverts and irritating 1950’s Goodwife bullshit can fuck off back to the ad agency that spawned them, because neither of the members of our fictitious happy couple give a flying tossfuck about romance at all.

Love is like being tied to a rock that you also sort of want to have sex with.

It’s like being repeatedly punched in the face, but by something quite nice, like a pillow or a bowl of trifle.

Despite all of my best efforts not to fall into this pitiful trap, I am in love with a boy.

Being in love changes people

Love seems to make my friends do odd things, like deliberately go on tedious, all-inclusive holidays. Like buying joint-owned kitchen equipment and cooking things with butternut squash in.

Likewise love makes me do weird things, like spout inexplicable platitudes about his possessions. Like cancel an evening’s drinking so I can stay in on a Saturday night with his big arms wrapped around me. Like writing a blog which – let’s be honest – you couldn’t crack one off to if you tried.

Love makes me think more about a boy than about things that matter – like my career.  

It makes me lazy. All I ever want to do is sit with him, on him, by him, until my bills go unpaid and my washing up starts to evolve new breeds of bacteria. Until the sun goes down and the world is destroyed and everything I’ve worked for crumbles to dust.

I love love

Don’t get me wrong – there are up sides. He is, as you’d expect, especially spectacular. Of all the boys who have stamped their footprints into my ice-cold heart, his are some of the very few that I want to put my own feet in and go “Ooh, look, big. GIGGLE.”

He’s beautiful when he lights cigarettes, when he’s biting my nipples or bringing me coffee. He’s funny and fun and good and gentle and filthy and kind and calm. He makes me relax and he makes me laugh and he fucks me like it’s the end of the world.

He’s the one whose friends I’ll meet. Whose house I’ll stay at. All the other boys get fucked and moved on, but he’s the only one who gets to spend the night. He’s the one who can stroke my face without making me hiss, and he gets to call me pretty without me vomiting copiously all over his living-room floor.

I hate love

But ultimately the great stuff is desperately overshadowed by the bad. Love is a fucking bastard. It makes me irrational and needy. It tempts me into shit decisions. Problems I’d previously have stamped on become reasons to run to him for a hug. Challenges stay unchallenged, because he makes them easy to forget.

I don’t want to love him – I love me – normal me. I love the me who can tell boys to fuck off when I’m busy, who has enough motivation to pull myself together when I’m miserable and do good things when I’m not. Love can make me blind to a lot of things, but I’m not yet blind to what I could achieve if I weren’t sitting so comfortably in his arms.

How do you solve a problem like a hormonal imbalance?

For a long time my solution was to break up with guys if I thought things were getting emotional. But things have gone too far this time. I cannot decide to not be in love because I am in love, and so I am irrational.

How can I not see him when I need to see him? How can I not love him when, at just the moment I think I’ve steeled myself to tell him I’m off, he says something that makes me laugh like I’ve had a lobotomy? When just the idea of his shoes lying jumbled by the kitchen door makes me grin with possessive, deranged pride?

I love his shoes.

His shoes.

I am ridiculous and I love his shoes.

If you’re expecting some sort of conclusion or words of wisdom after the above torrent of out-of-character arational loved-up bullshit then you’re probably a fucking idiot. But I’ll forgive you. If you’re powerfully idiotic then you may well be in love yourself. Unfortunately for all of us there’s no known cure, but to relieve the symptoms I can thoroughly recommend wanking and gin.

 

What do you mean you want to fuck someone you’ve only just met? What on earth would your mother say? Well, whether our mothers like it or not, sometimes we want to fuck strangers. And sometimes those strangers are people we’ve met on the internet who could turn out to be anyone – from secret millionaires to serial killers.

In my experience, people you meet on internet dates are far more likely to just be normal people with whom you have little in common, and who you’re reasonably unlikely to fuck. But if you do want to fuck them, here’s my magic list of rules for staying as safe as possible.

Note: as safe as possible, not 100% safe. There is no way that I know of to absolutely guarantee your personal safety, but then such is true of many of life’s funnest activities. Also, this is written as if it’s a girl-meets-boy thing, but I reckon you should use these rules no matter who you are or who you’re banging.

Meeting

Now, everyone knows that you should meet in public, right? OK. So that’s an easy one – pick a pub, or a coffee-shop, or a well-lit community centre, and arrange to meet at a time when people will be around.

So – central London Wetherspoons at 7 pm? Great.

Outside a small cafe in an area of town so heartbleedingly cool that it’s often empty? Not so great.

Fun GOTN dating fact: About a year ago, after a bit of chat with a fun-sounding guy on OKCupid, I asked him to meet me for a drink. His response was that it might be a bit more sexy if we meet somewhere secluded. In the dark. He suggested a particular spot in Hyde Park, at 8pm in midwinter.

I did not meet this man.

Telling people about yourself

The first date is great for getting to know someone, right? Well, yes – you need to find out about them and you need to tell them about yourself. But I’d strongly urge a teeny bit of caution. You might be proud of your job, but do they really need to know exactly where you work?

You might hang out in a particularly cool bar quite frequently, but would you like a rejected date rocking up there and haranguing you because you never called after the first shag? No.

Fun GOTN dating fact: I once went on a nice first date with a seemingly lovely guy. For reasons I won’t go into, I refused a second date.

He subsequently sent me five emails in quick succession, of increasing levels of nastiness. My particular favourite was one addressed to ‘you fucking bitch’ that thoughtfully reminded me that he knew where I worked.

Inviting someone back to yours

Dangerous – bear in mind that just as you wouldn’t post your address on the internet, neither should you really invite internet strangers to your house unless you know them well.

I have invited a couple of strange guys back to my place, and both of these times I have had stomach butterfies when it turned out they were more keen on me than I was on them. After you’ve let them down gently, it still takes a couple of weeks to get over the worry that they might turn up at your door bearing roses and erotica and asking for a second go.

However, if you want to take someone back to yours, but are worried that they might either:

a) do something you haven’t consented to or

b) nick your fucking telly

then it’s worth having backup.

There’s no ideal way of doing this, to be honest – anything you do will need to be pretty extreme, thus implying that you think they’re untrustworthy. And if you think they’re that untrustworthy then it’s best not to invite them back.

But I’ve done it a couple of times, and the only solution I could think of was to take something that they value and hide it somewhere in my flat. Obviously you have to ask them for it (ideally in a joking, coquettish way) and they have to know you’ve taken it, so they know you need to be on good terms with them to give it back afterwards. Watches, keys, wallets – anything that they wouldn’t fuck off without.

It is crucial that you remember to give it back – you don’t want to get stuck in a second-date situation just because you’ve still got their Tesco clubcard.

Fun GOTN dating fact: I once rescued a drunk guy whose friends had abandoned him outside a strip club I was in. I took him home and put him up for the night, but insisted first on getting his driver’s license. He was so aroused by my aura of cheeky dominance that he proceeded to lunge adorably at me before passing out face-down on the floor.

Going home with someone

He might not have brought his serial killer axe with him, but he could just have left it in the cupboard under the stairs, ready for when he’s lured you back to his house. So vigilance here is especially important. Here’s the drill:

• Text a friend with his address straight away, let him know that you’re doing this.
• Send your friend a link to his dating profile, his real name, and a picture of him if possible.
• Ask your friend to call you in a few hours. Give them a set time, and make sure your date knows you’ll be expecting a phone call.

Now here’s the key part, so listen very closely: you should not at any point believe that any of this stuff is excessive or overly paranoid. It is not – this is completely normal, sensible, and wise. Recommend to your date that they do the same thing.

These precautions are as necessary as using a condom for the first fuck. As important as wearing a fucking seatbelt or looking both ways when you cross the road.

If at any point your date makes you feel bad or odd about being careful, hop on the first bus to fuckoffsville and don’t ever see them again.

Fun GOTN fact: None of the guys I have ever been on dates with have questioned any of this.