Why I’m waiting to pounce on the first round of divorcees
Wonder Women, telegraph.co.uk, April 2013
Rebecca Holman has turned 30 and she, like many of her female contemporaries, is now playing the waiting game for the first crop of decent men to flood the dating market, fresh out of the divorce courts. She explains her rationale.
In my first year at university, one of my lecturers was a fairly attractive man in his late 30s/early 40s. When I say fairly attractive, I mean he wasn’t a total troll, appeared to be single, and had a droll, slightly surly manner, which was a) quite hot and b) a precursor to a decade of me mistaking rude disinterest from the opposite sex for droll surliness.
Anyway, Fairly Attractive Lecturer (FAL) gave an 18-year-old me a piece of dating advice I’ve never forgotten. When we, idiotically, asked FAL why he was still single, he told us (drolly) it was because he was ‘waiting for the first round of divorcees’.
Even at the tender age of 18, something about this plan resonated with me. I was full of adolescent disdain for anyone who wanted to marry young. I imagined I’d spend my 20s having a string of dramatic, ill-advised love affairs and generally gallivanting, before settling down about three days after my 30th birthday. And living Happily Ever After.
