How to meet a man at 40 - ( 2 )

How to meet a man at 40 - ( 2 ). So you’ve dumped the List, or at least made a concerted effort to put aside your prejudices. Now what? First, a small pep talk: you need to be ready for this to happen. Long-term single women have been known to get hooked on keeping their options open.

You secretly like the feeling that something life-changing might be just around the corner. And the reason you — who travels solo, makes friends easily and never says no to adventure — need to rethink your future is because you may be ready to try everything and risk everything but your heart.

Shane Watson

GETTING IN THE ZONE

• Assume that you are going to be having sex in the very near future. It generates that mixture of adrenaline and pheromones that people have been trying to bottle since the beginning of time.
• Make the extra effort. If you go to the party wearing your second-hottest dress, because you are saving your No 1 dress and you’ve already decided that you’ll only stay for an hour, then you might as well not bother. You will not exude the right anything-is-possible glow and the One will look in your direction and think “Downer”.
• Do something differently. Wear heels instead of flats, put on a slithery dress instead of jeans, do something unexpected with your hair (though obviously not involving an Alice band). You won’t necessarily look any better, but you will feel like you’ve changed up a gear. Part of the game (after a period of being overlooked) is believing you are definitely worth some attention, rather than passable in a low-lit environment.
• Lose your friends. I know, this sounds like madness. Who has the single woman got if not her loyal girlfriends? Who is going to bung you in a cab at the end of the night and then ring to check you haven’t fallen asleep in the stairwell? Nonetheless, as much as you love them and need them, your friends will cramp your style. What you don’t need is one of them rolling her eyes as you nibble provocatively on the rim of your champagne glass, or another bellowing: “Go on, do your Hoffmeister bear impersonation!” Plus, if something should happen to develop when your friends are in the vicinity, you can expect them to react in one of the following ways: gawping, followed by circling at a not-discreet- enough distance, texting all your other mutual friends with updates on your progress; giving the double thumbs-up immediately behind his head; leaping in to help things along (Isn’t she just gorgeous. I just love her! Doesn’t she look amazing tonight? Isn’t this brilliant?). Alternatively, if drunk enough, they may start popping up behind sofas, sniggering. This stuff doesn’t change the older you get; if anything, it gets worse. So don’t automatically arrange to go to the party with a couple of girls or, once you get there, rush to find the people you’ve known all your life.
• Pick your man. Don’t wait for him to find you. The One says he saw me steaming across the room, nostrils flared, elbowing women out of my path, but this is not true. I did spot him in the distance and then sort of worked my way across the room in his direction. But it’s true that I made it happen. And then, drum roll please, I did that thing happily single women so often forget to do. I set about making him like me (as opposed to waiting for him to prove to me that he was worth the trouble).
• Flirt and then some. However much you think you are flirting, double it. What the hell, quadruple it. Barely-there flirting will register as average civility, if it registers at all. Singledom makes a girl cautious. She is preoccupied with not looking like a mad, sad, ticking man-huntress. Trust me, you need to be flirting at a level where you think, “Blimey, steady on, he’ll think I’m a pro”, before you can be confident that he has twigged you might quite like him.

SOME RULES OF FLIRTING

• Be intensely interested in everything he says. Casting your eyes around is counterproductive, especially if you’re hunting the canapés.
• Maintain eye contact for long enough that you are both in no doubt it is not accidental.
• Be very impressed.
• Tease, a bit, but not about any of the no-go areas — height, hair, lisp, mothers, his level of inebriation/sweating.
• Flatter, but only lightly, in passing, and not more than once.
• Don’t touch. You could lightly touch his forearm, maybe. But better not.
• Disappear at some point. For roughly 10 minutes. You want him to have the chance to miss you.
• Some say fiddle with your hair, your cleavage, your earrings. I say don’t risk looking like you have fleas. Don’t lick your lips/teeth under any circumstances. He may think you are chasing canapé particles.
• Be extravagantly open about everything (bar medical stuff). Honesty is disarming.
• Make him responsible for you. Say, “Would you get me another drink?”, “Would you let me lean on you while I do up my shoe”, “Would you tell me what you think about buying property when the subprime market is in collapse?” Just kidding. ( timesonline.co.uk )