A friend recently told me that, according to my astrological chart, no one will ever love me.
Okay, that’s not exactly what she said. She said that there probably wasn’t anyone in the UK who could tolerate my nonsense, so I should try looking at my astrological travel map to see the places where my planets line up favourably for romance.
Reader, I found the place! A place where the stars are aligned in such a way that my personal empowerment, prosperity, and relationship success is all but guaranteed. It’s a little spot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from the nearest land mass. Beautiful! But even more shark-infested than tinder on a Saturday night.
So I might instead try my second most astrologically-favoured spot: a vast expanse of ice field in the freezing wastes of Greenland. I mean, yes, polar bears are a concern. But at least I don’t have to worry about getting seasick.
Come to think of it, seasickness is a good reason not to go on a romantic quest to the middle of the Pacific. I once went out on a fishing boat with some friends in Turkey, and was so unwell that they had to deposit me on a large-ish rock in the middle of the sea while they went off fishing without me. I was grateful for this at first, because my God! Being seasick was unbearable. Plus, it was a beautiful day and my friends had given me a packet of biscuits with which to sustain myself. But I soon came to loathe my little rock. I mean, it was literally just a rock in the middle of the sea. The whole time I was there, I was thinking, they’ve left me on a fucking rock. I’m going to die here. I need more biscuits.
So I think the Pacific Ocean is a no-go. Then again, the snowy desolation of Greenland also has its drawbacks. Not least that there is literally nothing there except for ice. Nothing and no one. Unless I want to take up with a polar bear, I suppose. Or a snow-mad explorer who happens to wander into my igloo one afternoon and ask me to help treat his frostbite. We look into one another’s eyes as I saw off his left foot to prevent the gangrene spreading up his leg. It’s love. But we both think the other is a hallucination brought on by being stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the imminent threat of death to cheer us up, and so we brutally destroy one another in a spiralling and bloody descent into psychedelic madness. Our bodies are never recovered, but they are there forever, preserved under the ice, mementoes of our brief, tragic love affair.
Overall, I’m not entirely convinced that this is my best path towards finding love and romance.
To be honest, I can’t help feeling that the planets are trolling me a little bit. Or at least, trying to subtly hint that I might be better off on my own. Or maybe I just need to expand my online dating search parameters by a few thousand miles. That’s what an optimist would do, right? It’s just I’m no longer sure that online dating is a good way to meet the love of my life, either.
Listen. I’m the last person who’s going to slag off online dating. It’s given me more writing material than most other experiences in my life, including international travel, growing up in a broken home, and tripping on acid in a cemetery when someone tells you the story of a cursed grave and it turns out to be the exact one you’ve been leaning against, and now you have to spend the next thousand and one years waiting for the tormented grave-dweller to finish whispering the curse in your ear while the ground beneath you breathes out kaleidoscopes of stars.
What online dating hasn’t done is helped me find someone to date. At least, not someone to date more than once or twice and maybe write a substack post about before discarding onto the big pile of NOPE that is my romantic history.
A couple of months ago, I decided to take a break from the dispiriting practice of online dating. I soon found a restoration of peace and space that I hadn’t even known I’d been missing. But as time crept by, I found myself missing the whirligig of flirtatious attention and fun, and decided I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the idea of falling in love again.
But this time I thought I’d do it in real life. With the help of science.
You know what they say about statistics: 95% of them are completely made up, like this one. But one statistic that has stuck in my head for years states that walking with a dog makes you 30% more attractive to the opposite sex than walking without a dog. So walking with two dogs, as I frequently do, must basically make a person irresistible.
And it’s true. I’ve been chatted up plenty while I’m on dog walks. Recently, a handsome gentleman asked me for my phone number, which I gave to him. I quickly regretted my choice when he said to me, “You look great.” This was palpably untrue, even though I did have two dogs with me at the time. Let’s face it, 60% more Bedraggled Unwashed Joggers is not what anyone wants. So, you’re insane, I thought. And I did not answer his calls.
I decided instead that I should focus my attention on a more convenient target: the postman. Falling in love with your postman is literally the opposite end of the convenience spectrum to moving to Greenland on the off chance of meeting a deranged expeditioner and sawing off his foot.
Plus, you can still get the 30%-60% dog boost, as long as you have some dogs handy, which I usually do.
The drawback to this plan is that, as a housesitter, I don’t have a regular postie. Which means that at best I’m going to be falling in love with someone else’s postman, then going away and never seeing him again. This is true also of Deliveroo guys, bicycle couriers, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
So maybe it’s time to relax into my astrological fate. And it’s not all bad, is it? I may be destined to be alone and unloved all my life, but I don’t have to worry about getting mauled by a shark or a polar bear. And if I’m going to get ghosted, at least it won’t be by some expedition wanker with a sawn-off foot.
Hey, so, I’ve seen you around and I was wondering… are you, like, single?
I have a really fit postman, so it's unlucky you will likely only have one post day/time whilst at mine! Maybe I could put your picture up in my window surrounded by pictures of puppies and a note to him saying "please deliver packages to wherever Georgina (pictured) lives". I think that could work really well.
Or you could take the shark infested waters of the Pacific Ocean and write a paranormal rom-com unlike any other. It would be a mix of the fairy tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon, but instead of a white bear, it’s a white shark with a magical kingdom underwater. Maybe your birth chart is inviting you to aim for your growing edges. “Love in shark infested waters”! The new “beast”seller.