Deal Breakers
I’ve broken up with girls for lots of reasons in the past (or given them the Spanish Archer as we used to say), there have even been a few that have broken up with me — the nerve! Most of my relationships have ended with more of a whimper than a bang, slowly fizzling out when the initial spark faded so I don’t have too many dramatic stories to tell, but there was one girl who I caught on the phone having a secret, intimate chat with another bloke in the middle of the night in my own kitchen while she was spending the night at my place. That’s the only time in my life I’ve ever been involved in a get-the-fuck-out! shouting match with a girl and I hope you agree it was perfectly reasonable of me in that situation.
But what about the unreasonable causes? For a while I went out with a girl who told me she voted Conservative (this was when Maggie Thatcher was Prime Minister) and an American who said she thought Ronald Reagan was a great President. Though I didn’t, I hasten add, dump either of these girls on the spot, the thought did cross my mind that this might be grounds for terminating the relationship. Dodgy politics are one thing, but what if — horror of horrors — she had really bad taste in music?
I’ve been lucky in that regard, my long-term relationships (all three of them including the missus) have been with girls who shared roughly the same (impeccable) taste as me, but at college I briefly went out with a girl who liked… Chris De Burgh. This devastating information was given to me by a friend of hers before our first date who passed it on as if she was telling me the girl was a Neo-Nazi or liked to drown kittens — “she’s a nice girl, but…” Sadly she turned out to be a little dull and personality-free so I only went out with her three times, but I wonder if my opinion of her was tarnished by what I knew. Did knowing that she liked Chris De Burgh make her boring to me or did only boring people like Chris De Burgh in the first place? It’s a chicken-and-egg situation! I think I even avoided the “what kind of music do you like?” conversation with her because I’d have to fight the urge to shout HE’S SHIT!!! which would ruin any chance of a second date or getting her into bed (I didn’t), but I suppose if the relationship had lasted I would have had to cross that bridge at some point. I can’t even remember her name now but she has forever gone down in my memory as “the Chris De Burgh fan” I went out with.
Is there any group or singer so bad that they would be grounds for dumping a girl? I think the only answer to that question is “depends how good-looking she is.”
Download: Love’s Gone Bad – Chris Clark (mp3)
Buy: Soul Sounds (album)
I used to check out the record collections of women I was seeing on a semi-regular basis. Any sign of Cat Stevens or Al Stewart and they were considred unlikely long-term material
I did however make the mistake of falling for a Cat Stevens fan and she ended up ripping my heart into a thousand pieces…*sigh*
Eric Clapton. Even if she was a stunner.
I built up an immunity to bad music from good lookers during the late 70′s as an essential survival mechanism during the Great SoftRock Plague, so maybe I’m like The Omega Man and my blood can be used as a serum for desperate guys everywhere. No, probably not.
But the dreck music-immune gene thing is real. My lovely better half is also a rabid Air Supply, Sheena Easton and Bread fan, and we’re just about to celebrate our 19 anniversary.
Back in the eighties I often used to write letters to John Peel (on BFBFS), mainly about last week’s programme, but also about the subject of girls, or, to be more precise, about the problems I had with them. I remember that on one occasion I wondered what to do, because the girl I started to be together with at the time urged me to go and see ‘Hair’, which, obviously, I had no intention at all to do. Peel’s reply simply was: “Break up this relationship NOW!” …. which is what I did after a while.
I’ve been out with girls who pretended they liked the music I liked because they liked me. And I’ve certainly hid an aversion to the music they liked because I wanted to get laid. And would probably do everytime, if sex depended on it to be honest!
The ones I don’t understand are the ones with no interest in music.
Me:”lets have some music”
Her: “I don’t really like music.” Pause “I could put the radio on if you like”
I did go out with a girl who became an Liberal MP. She dumped me for a combination of being too left wing and for taking too many drugs. The fact that I wasn’t actually as left wing as she thought and couldn’t afford to take too many drugs didn’t matter.
I fancied Steph at university – I thought she had really good taste in music for the time (1982) & was part our group of raincoat-wearing musical shoegazers at a certain hall of res at Liverpool university. Into the Smiths, Bunnymen and loads of other bands that were indie before the term indie had been invented. Then suddenly she announced she was going out with a guy who we only knew by nickname, Shakatak, from his obsession with the Brit Funk band. Was this just a one-off or are girls able to set aside all musical taste considerations just because a guy has “a nice bone structure”?
Michael, listening to the Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen for a prolonged amount of time is known now (and was then too) to bring on Bi-Polarism and many other depression related illnesses. Maybe she thought it was Shakatak or a nervous breakdown.
I’ve dumped girls on first dates because they have brown eyes…all of my girlfriends have had blue or green, something about not being able to see through brown and therefore i back away, so the doc says…
You don’t notice what colour their eyes are when you ask them out in the first place?
Lee, in defense of Bobbi may I offer two observations:
1. Pink-tinted “rose colored” granny glasses on comic-strip cutie in the illustration, which were standard gear in that era and made noticing eye color difficult if not impossible in many situations. The first time I saw more than one date back then without her glasses was only after everyting else had come off.
2. Inability of many of us to prioritize eyes in our initial assessments of potential mating material during that same era, which included at least a careful preliminary review of below-the-neck inventory as well.