The Sun-Herald

I'm a self-help dropout

I'm reading a lot of self-help books at the moment - for work, I hasten to add, not my personal growth. That ship sailed long ago. And sank.

These books haven't changed much since I had to exist on a daily diet of them while writing a weekly relationship column. They still leave me with the impression that in terms of being in charge of my life, I'm the ineffectual headmistress of a school for delinquent children who roam without any discipline, occasionally pelting me with sharp objects.
I'm supposed to be In Control, Know What I Want, and Have Goals. And when it comes to mating, now I'm in my thirties I'm supposed to be adopting a life-or-death military approach, helped by experts such as Rachel Greenwald and her stern How to Find a Husband After Thirty* Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School.
I'd rather use what she learned there to get my tax returns done on time and find out how to maximise my super, but that's why I'm a complete failure in the eyes of such dating gurus. After years of reading the literature, I still ignore all the advice about suitability and stability, Greenwald's techniques of 'auditing' and 'marketing' (increasingly, these days, the language of commerce is applied to dating) and I can't bring myself to treat the whole business of pairing up like some sort of grim and rather urgent business model. I allow my heart to behave haphazardly, inconveniently (example: the last man was in another hemisphere and stateless) and impulsively. I can't see this changing because I believe all efforts to control how, whom and where you love will be ultimately futile.
Besides, control freaks are just not sexy. I had a friend we used to call The Conductor thanks to a bizarre behavioural trademark: when her partner spoke for too long or about subjects she found unsavoury, she raised her hand and brought it down slowly - just like a conductor directing an orchestra to diminuendo. As she did so, the man would obediently fade out mid-sentence. It was like watching a person being operated by a puppeteer: intriguing, and at the same time, appalling.
She chose his clothes too, and they were mostly beige. It was as if she had tried to remove all elements of surprise from him and perhaps, we thought, it was because her job was so stressful and unpredictable she didn't want any more nasty shocks - even in the form of a tasteless shirt - at home. We prophesied a messy end to the whole thing, with him staging an angry uprising one day, after she'd faded him out once too often. And we were right, although he hung on in there for quite some time, as men can do when they are forced to wear too much beige.
Control is for hairspray and ugly underwear, not people. It belongs to self-help books such as my nemesis: 'Are You in Control?'. That one's about 'learning to relate' by calming turbulent emotions and rationalizing your urges. Useful skills for the workplace, but about as conducive to love as a mother-in-law on your honeymoon.
Yet the author seems to assume everyone wants to control this pesky instinct. Like the harmless bacteria living in our insides, it can flare up at any moment into a raging disease, and must remain subdued. Passion, and the people who give in to it, is disruptive and can lead to all sorts of trouble: bunnies boiling in saucepans; wild-haired men roaming the Yorkshire countryside shouting about their lost love; wars, suicide pacts, days off work.
Admittedly, love is scary. The prospect of plunging headfirst into it frightens us, surrounded as we are by divorce statistics, dysfunctional celebrity couples and other, more urgent priorities. People you fall in love with threaten to disrupt your comfort zone. It's really no wonder some try to mould them to fit.
And when the whole endeavour ends badly and you're broken and weary, it's easy to look back and decide you should have exercised more caution or made more lists or read another book or just stayed at home instead. But the truth is, if you'd done all those things and even followed every word of Rachel Greenwald's advice, it would have finished up exactly the same way, just because love often does. Sad fact.
When I first moved in with a man I remember panic rising in my throat with each box of his stuff emerging from the removal van. Suddenly, on the pavement in broad daylight, it looked like too much excess baggage. Where would I fit the owner, and what havoc was he about to wreak upon my jealously guarded order? For weeks I tidied his things into little piles and marked out bathroom territory until the poor guy finally suggested, only half-joking, that he should live on the balcony. He said he felt as if he was being minimized, like a spare document on a computer screen. I admit - he was right. I apologized, stopped segregating our laundry and chucked the whole lot in together with joyous abandon.
The relationship book I want to read is called: 'If it feels good, do it (even if he doesn't have a huge bank account or designer wardrobe or hasn't marketed himself or audited you) using what I learned behind the bike sheds at high school which stood me in good stead for a lifetime of glorious, sometimes ill-advised, but always interesting love affairs.'
Hell, I might even write it one day.

*The book's title has now been updated to How to Find a Husband After 35, presumably because five years on its original disciples are still out there searching.