If you haven’t yet read it, you might want to see this article first: “Date a boy who travels”

Date a boy who travels. Date a boy who has an Oyster card or a car or one of those Segway things. Watch his face light up as he successfully navigates his way from A to B. Sigh blissfully at his ability to do things that you could only dream of.

Date a boy who treasures experience over toys. Who wouldn’t be seen dead in a Rolex. Date a boy who cares about memories, and this one time in Thailand when he and his mates got off their tits on mushrooms and cavorted wildly in the sea.

You might find this boy in a bookshop, a Starbucks, a back-alley, or somewhere on the internet. Offer to buy him a drink. Make sure it’s something unusual so that you can please him, while simultaneously pretending you’re just as interesting as he is.

His twitter account will be riotously colourful, and will make you feel stupid for not knowing what ‘chai’ is. He’ll study books and magazines that you probably don’t like, but his excitement for these things is a tangible reminder of just how much better he is than you.

Listen to his stories. He’ll have shitloads of them, and they’ll all be a thousand times better than anything you could say. Feel warm inside as he regales you with yet another tale of something incomprehensibly exciting. Cross your fingers and perhaps one day he’ll deign to let you join him.

Date a boy so that you can live vicariously through him. He will teach you what excitement feels like, his stories of risk-taking will throb powerfully through your veins, and every single thing he introduces you to will be new and fresh and good and superior. Date a boy who tells you how you feel. And know that he is right.

Wait for him to propose, which he’ll do if and only if you’ve proved that you’re capable of living the same life as him. You’ll get married on a beach somewhere, or in the middle of a crumbling temple, or while bungee-jumping into a pool of understandably terrified dolphins. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Let this magical traveling wonder-boy show you how to live your life.

Date a boy who travels. Or not.

Or don’t do any of this. Because although this article has been shared around the internet like it’s a template for The Happy Life Of A Straight Woman, straight women are in fact not all identikit man-hunting machines. Nor do we languish in a chrysalis-like state, with no ambition or desire of our own save the hope that one day – one day – our prince will come and shape us into more exciting human beings.

Date a boy who likes you. Date a boy you like. Date a boy who watches some of the same TV shows as you. Date a boy who hates your taste in music but smiles indulgently when you drag him to a karaoke night. Date a boy who values experiences, possessions, trips abroad, Rolex watches, food, drink, politics, or whatever. Date a boy who values you.

Date a boy who sees you as an individual rather than a bucket into which he can pour his own ideas. Date a boy who knows you’re not a piece of clay to be moulded and shaped by someone who knows better. Date a boy who is interested in your stories, who brings you on his adventures and wants you to bring him on yours.

Date a boy who travels, a boy who sings, a boy who cries, a boy who skateboards, a boy who shouts at the TV when Question Time is on. Date a boy who eats nachos like a pig, who is teetotal, who drinks like a fish, who is a domestic wizard or who never does the washing up. Date a boy who teaches reading to children, or watches Game of Thrones with one hand down his pants. Who calls you ‘princess’ and won’t fart in front of you, or a boy who laughs when you dribble yoghurt down your chin. Date a boy who couchsurfs, a boy who holidays at Butlins, or a boy whose idea of adventure is a trip to the 24-hour supermarket with a printed discount voucher.

Date a boy who likes you. Date a boy you like.

I’ve been called some crappy things in my time, and I’ve hurled a good few insults myself. But there’s one word that, when I hear it, makes me boil with rage.

That word is ‘psycho.’

As in:

“When I dumped her, I realised she was a proper psycho.”
“He’s got a psycho ex girlfriend.”
“She’s been stalking him on facebook like a psycho.”

Why you’re not a ‘psycho’

Let’s begin by stating that applying the word ‘psycho’ to anyone is pretty offensive. Remember Hitchcock’s classic shower scene? That’s what you’re alluding to when you use this word. Whether you’re using it to belittle your ex or to try and humiliate people with mental health problems, it’s a nasty word to use in anger.

What’s more, it’s frequently used as a weapon to make women (and ex-girlfriends in particular) feel small. Not when they’ve done things that are dangerous or troubling – I’ve seen the word ‘psycho’ applied to people because they’ve done something as innocuous as:

• asking an ex to talk to them about the reasons for a break up
• crying in a public place because they were upset about a break up
• texting someone when drunk to tell them they love them
• looking at someone’s profile on Twitter or facebook

Compare these to the ‘shower scene’ – are they really ‘psychotic’ actions? Or are they, more realistically, natural things to do if you’re in a state of emotional turmoil?

I’m not talking about genuine stalker behaviour here – none of us want our bunnies boiled. None of us want ex-partners turning up at our workplace and screaming wildly on the street “why don’t you love me?! What did I do?!” I think we can all agree that actually being stalked by an ex is a terrible, frightening thing.

But labelling someone a ‘psycho’ because they’re visibly upset about the breakup of a relationship, serves to trivialise the idea of ‘stalking’ by lumping all of this behaviour in together. If your ex is sending you threatening messages, harassing you, and making you uncomfortable, that’s a very serious thing. If they’re looking at your publicly-available information and shedding a few tears over the good times you had when you were going out, that’s quite another.

‘Psychotic’ men

I’ve rarely heard the word ‘psycho’ applied to men who do similar things. That’s not because they don’t do them – men can be just as emotional about breakups as women, it’s just that their emotions are less frequently used as a weapon with which to humiliate them. Ex-boyfriends of mine who have cried over our lost (or, more realistically, mutually abandoned) love affairs have never been skewered by my friends saying ‘oh, I knew he was a psycho’ or ‘he texted you again? What a mental.’

Guys are shamed in other ways for emotional behaviour – being expected to keep a stiff-upper-lip when they’re being torn apart inside, for one. Being told that ‘boys don’t cry’ and invited to shake off their upset by rebound-fucking their way around town, as if their emotions and their erections are just two sides of the same coin. But that’s a discussion for another day.

There’s an entire minefield of shit surrounding the way we discuss people’s more extreme emotions surrounding break ups – sobbing gentlemen are obnoxiously induced to ‘man up’, and female despair is painted as something oddly sinister. Her justifiable sense of grief is framed as dangerous instability. Guys might shed a few tears or get drunk to dull the pain, but you’d better watch out for these ker-ay-zee women – with their wailing and their texting and their unreasonable sense of sadness.

The worst thing you could do

There are those who handle breakups badly – the ones who cut up their ex’s clothes, send increasingly alarming and desperate emails, show up at their house at 2 in the morning and wake the neighbours by banging on the door and demanding to be let in. I’ll stress again for those who might have missed it – these things are unacceptable, and often downright scary.

But most of the time when the ‘p’ word is applied, it’s to behaviour that is perfectly understandable and normal: crying or mooning over your ex, or wanting some form of closure at the end of a relationship. These aren’t ‘psychotic’ things to do, in fact if you’ve broken up with someone you love, even if the break up was mutual, it would be abnormal not to be emotional about it.

The very nature of love is that it’s a powerful emotion, and when we mess with powerful emotions we do strange things. I’ve done things that would justify a fair few  insults – from getting crying-drunk at parties to mentioning a new partner in front of the ex I’m not quite over.

I’m ashamed of and angry at myself for doing these things, and if you were to call me a ‘bitch’ or a ‘hypocrite’ or a ‘cold-hearted bastard’ you’d be bang on the money. But the word ‘psycho’ says so much more than that.

It says ‘you’re not normal’ in a way that is coldly calculating. It says ‘you’re hysterical, you’re overreacting, your pain is not significant as you think it is.’

Above all, the thing that makes me shudder and cringe: it tells someone that their affection is not only unwanted but repulsive. That the most unacceptable, horrific thing this person has done is to love you.

I don’t want you to hug me in the office. In fact, unless we’re pretty damned close, I don’t want you to hug me at all.

I’ve been called ‘standoffish’ because I’m not the sort of person who responds well to being hugged. I dread that bit at the end of parties, where everyone’s just pissed enough to think they’re better friends than they actually are, and some person I’ve spent about twenty minutes chatting to screeches “Byeeee darling, it was amaaazing to meet you” before forcing me into an awkward cuddle.

Maybe this makes me odd, but I don’t actually care. Whether my aversion to being grabbed by random acquaintances is odd or not, you need to respect that. And I mean respect it properly, not just acknowledge and then ignore it. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said to me:

“I know you don’t like hugs so I’ll just do it really quickly.” or even “Hey, come on, it’s only me. Gizza hug.”

I don’t want to. I’ll do it if you make me, but I’ll hate it, and I’ll resent you for thinking that our acquaintance counts for nothing if I’m not willing to awkwardly squash my chest against you at the end of a night out.

Back to the office.

The rules about touching your coworkers

You don’t need to be told not to rock up late for an interview to know that being late for an interview is a bad thing. Likewise, you don’t need to be told that stroking a colleague’s thigh, patting them on the arse, or putting your arms around them might make them a tad uncomfortable.

I’m writing this blog as a plea for common sense. Because since the ex-chief-exec of the Lib Dems has been accused of inappropriate workplace touching (an accusation which, for legal reasons, I shall point out he has denied) there’s been a lot of bullshit spoken about how difficult it is to know when a touch is inappropriate. A few guys have plaintively cried for guidance.

“But how do we know?” they say. “How can I possibly tell whether one of my work colleagues wants me to touch her, or whether she’ll be offended?”

The answer to this question is: you don’t, unless she expressly tells you. At no point during the working day can you be 100% certain that a female colleague wants you to touch her. Whether she’s in the middle of an email, chairing a strategy meeting or – like me – trying to inch her way closer to the biscuit plate during a particularly long PowerPoint presentation. It’s not like a green light goes off over her head if she fancies you and is up for a quick squeeze.

But, and I cannot possibly stress this enough, the fact that you don’t know is inconsequential. You hardly know anything, none of us do. The boundaries of our knowledge are tiny and the realm of the unknown is vast. Yet somehow most of us manage to get through every day without sexually harassing random members of the opposite sex. We’re not special, we don’t have knowledge that you don’t, and nor are we telepaths; we’re just not arseholes.

To use the ‘we can’t possibly know’ defence for any kind of inappropriate touching, whether inside or outside the workplace, is the largest pile of bullshit I have ever scrolled angrily past on the internet.

The impenetrable mysteries of how not to be a creep

We don’t go through life understanding exactly what other people want from us at all times. Sometimes we take risks, and do things that might get us into trouble, and other times we are cautious. The key thing is to assess whether a risk is worth taking – not just for you, but for the object of your affection as well.

That girl sitting at the bar might reject you, or burst into tears if you go and chat to her. But the risk of these things is minimal, and you’d be unlikely to offend or harm her by saying ‘hello.’ So you don’t grab her arse. You don’t call her ‘babes’. You don’t shout ‘OI OI!’ from the other side of the room. Because all of these things are high-risk, potentially high-harm situations. So you just say fucking ‘Hi.’

Likewise, you don’t offer to spank a woman on a first date. You try and ease the conversation round to spanking, in a non-threatening way, to see if she might be up for it. You don’t grab a girl’s arse on the tube. You talk to her, try to work out if she fancies you, talk to her some more, and then ask for her number if you get the right signals.

In any of these situations you might fuck up – go in for a kiss at the bar and watch as she leans away and says ‘I’m sorry, I’m not that into you.’ Bring up spanking and have her tell you you’re not her type. And this is fine – these mistakes, while embarrassing, don’t actually cause any harm.

Whereas if you just go up to a girl, grab her tits and then cry ‘how was I supposed to know?!’ when she runs for the hills, then you are a stupid, stupid cunt.

To err is human, but to pretend that women are so complex that you can’t even try to empathise? That’s pathetic.

Work is a non-contact sport

In my ideal world no one ever touches work colleagues. But that’s because I am ‘standoffish’, and would rather find my fun outside a building in which I’m supposed to act like a professional. I wouldn’t ban workplace touching, because I’ve witnessed office romances that have worked. At some point during the blossoming of that relationship someone laid a hand on someone else’s knee, or leant in for a kiss at a Christmas party, and took a small calculated risk.

But you know what? That successful person, who ended up marrying their office sweetheart and living happily ever after? That was almost certainly the person who held back, who waited, who had enough respect for their colleague not to gamble on a fumble before they could be sure the touch was wanted.

The successful person was patient, respectful and empathetic. He certainly wasn’t the kind of twat who’d jump on a woman in the stationery cupboard, get sacked, and then whine about how unfair life is, and how hard things are, and how he’ll never understand just what these fickle women want.