I will try to remember that. What you see everywhere are couples or people trying desperately hard to be coupled for the evening or forever. It all depends on the situation. I decided, I was tired of waiting to be coupled before living my life. I was happy to be single without a care in the world. This means I don't have to indulge in certain self destructive temporary coupling habits involving others - like going to the cinema, call K. Going to an Art exhibition call C or wanting to eat out call M or going to see a play in Shoreditch with B and listening to A's endless monologue about sex non stop. A doesn't rile me. I'm a firm believer in personality make ups. A is a Scorpio and Scorpios are sex obsessed so equation solved QED. B is a fish and fishes are ethereal, so we tend to talk plays, music, psychology and astrology in whatever order picks our fancy. K is flat liner Capricorn with the emotion of a goldfish, which suits me fine as I get on very well with unemotional flat liners. D has anger issues and T is only available virtually. My friends tell me that I keep them in in silos or partitions, where it seems the twain shall never meet.
The issue -
The thing is that we are all single unwed in a big city like London full of single people looking for other single people to engage with but often with little success. We seem to be looking for the same thing and different things at the same time. I see the girls, many of them with better looking men, in London like elsewhere on this planet man still reigns supreme, never mind what the feminists and equal opportunists say. In many ways women want real men and want a man to be a man even if they dream of equal pay and equal status in the Board Room. And so you see lots of plain-Jane inner London professional types hanging on desperately to the few men who make themselves emotionally available. In most cases they are more sexually available than emotionally so. As they say a beggar has no choice, so short of becoming a Lesbian or a vestal virgin, you can as a woman be sexually available too, in that way you hope that you can snare your man with your girl trap.
The good thing about London though is its healthy mix of people from around the globe. The inner part reflects that mix more intensely than the outlying more mundane suburban parts. The majority group the white British live mostly in the 3 outer zones while most non-white Brits and expats live within the inner three zones. Minorities of all types live everywhere, but in the recent past the majority of minorities inhabited the inner areas but have been priced out with the gentrification onslaught. The 3 inner London zones pulse heavily with the young and beautiful and the fabulously wealthy as well as social housing tenants. It is from this melting pot that most inner Londoners go hunting for partners. It is also because of the very nature of who they are that inner Londoners have relationships that are just as transient as the lives they lead.
Nothing comes close to the inner London male - good looking, liberated from the shackles of the shires or whatever provincial European city they come from, to them the world is an oyster and London is its mother of pearl. Inner London men trade partners as frequently as they trim their hipster facial hair. The plain Jane English girls or pretty continentals running in tow often fall victim to Hoping that they can ensnare them but the inner London male only hopes to play the field for as long as they can before succumbing to a life of 2.1 kids in a grim outer London suburb with good schools or an even gloomier southern English town with even better schools and a duck pond, butchers and lone pub. This life is dreaded by the majority of males but most believe that it is a reality they must succumb to at some point in their lives.
The even more attractive foreigners make up a significant force in inner London. They share similar characteristics to the British inner London male, primarily because they come to London to make money and to lose themselves to the many fleshly and material opportunities that the inner city has to offer. Their equally attractive female counterparts are also running away from life in their provincial Polish, Spanish, Italian or Bulgarian communities with high hopes of learning English and of possibly finding a genteel English, German or Scandinavian catch. Truth is most Englishmen are emotional flatliners and simply not available to engage with foreign women other than for cursory sexual encounters. foreign inner London men are too busy working and fucking in their spare time that marriage is often the last thing on their mind. To cut a long story short they are there but not there. Marriage and its responsibilities will only remind them of the dull mundane lives that await them back home, so there is a tendency for them to overindulge in more non-committal fucking with a cross section of equally exotic non British foreigners than necessary.
The life of minority ethnic inner Londoners can be radically different, depending on one's ethnic or religious background. If you're South Asian or middle eastern your inner London life will resemble that of your countrymen back home and vaguely that of the majority of up country and outer London Brits in their married bliss. If you are a Latino or American minority your life may or may not resemble other inner London foreigners. If you're black Caribbean the likelihood is that you'll by now have been proscribed to any one of the outer London banlieus that now serve as reservation areas for inner London working class evictees. Those Africans and other minorities left in inner London are often settled in their council estates in places like Woolwich, Catford, Walthamstow, Peckham, Stockwell and Wilesden awaiting the gentrification police's expulsion order to the outer London banlieus when their time in inner London expires. On the whole many of these men remain single for economic or cultural reasons, cultural in the sense that singleness has never been a barrier to procreation or having as many women as one can possibly handle.
In the end, the single inner London male has one distinct advantage - don't judge and you will not be judged. In this milieu of the weird and wonderful anything and everything goes and most inner London men share something in common, they are smart, single and emotionally unavailable and the world is increasingly full of them.
