Around the World in 80 Dates

But for this to happen, I knew I needed to do a better job of meeting Mr. Right. I felt I'd tried everything in London. Maybe it was time for a more radical and far-reaching solution?

Rather than traveling to recover from Mr. Wrong, what if I went traveling for Mr. Right? I mean, I was sure Fate had him out there waiting for me, so why was I wasting time in London moaning when I could be out in the world searching? I'd put my heart and soul into my job; maybe it was time I put the same amount of effort into my love life.

So, after some soul-searching, I quit my job. I had a new job now: finding my Soul Mate.

So that's me, packed and ready to go: passport, little black dress, and the names of eighty men I'm going to date in seventeen countries over the next six months. I'm off to find my Soul Mate, and I'm not coming back to Yonkers till I do.

Time to leave London
and start dating.

Settling into a steady rhythm of drinking, crying, drinking, crying, I became aware of the music for the first time:
“Stand by your man, give him two arms to cling to…”
I glared at the radio: I've always hated that song. My feeling was that if the only way a man could remain standing upright was by leaning heavily on you, surely it was best just to let him fall right on over. But since today was the day I'd discovered Kelly had been cheating on me for pretty much the five years we'd been together, I let out a long, ragged sigh, too exhausted to cry anymore. It was also the day I had to accept that maybe there's a little bit of Tammy in us all. I really loved Kelly. Which was surprising because he actually wasn't that lovable. He was very sexy—one of those dark, brooding types, with piercing green eyes and a tangle of curly black hair. He was tall and strong, with a gentle mouth and a chest broad enough to do a week's ironing on. But he was also self-centered, secretive, and moody. The kind of guy who sits in the corner of a bar, smoldering over a beer and a shot. For some reason I was drawn to “the difficult ones,” and Kelly was as difficult as they came. A man who would sooner eat broken glass than tell you where he'd been, what his plans were, or if he loved you. I have no idea why I kept trying, when he'd wanted to go to parties on his own, stayed out late, kept a phone number with just an initial next to it…. In fact, for some reason it made me try harder. Over our five years together, as Kelly morphed into Clint Eastwood, I increasingly turned into Coco the Clown, pulling out all the stops to entertain him, make him feel involved, get his attention. I did the emotional equivalent of driving a small red pedal car around the ring of our relationship, frantically tooting on my little horn as bunches of flowers popped out of my shirt and small men in orange wigs emptied buckets of custard down my trousers and twanged my big red nose. It was not dignified. And, ultimately, it was pointless. I knew in my heart we would only ever share a “now.” Never a future. Then I rang the number with the initial next to it, and our “now” was over.

As soon as I split up with Kelly, I went straight to the airport and got on a plane to New York City. The experience of being in New York is like stroking a man-eating tiger: As much as it scares the bejesus out of you, for those moments it allows you to touch it, you know you are blessed and immortal.

And on this occasion, like every other I'd been there, New York uplifted me. I lost myself in the markets, boutiques, and coffee shops around Greenwich Village and Harlem, whacked softballs in the batting cages over at Coney Island until my arms sang. Being in the city didn't cure my heartache, but it distracted me and stopped it getting worse, and for that I was grateful.

I actually had to be in New York for work, so in a way it was good timing (if such a thing exists when you're talking about splitting up with your boyfriend). But then again, I worked in the travel industry, so it wasn't that unusual for me to be heading off somewhere. I loved traveling and had been determined to get a job in the industry from the moment I discovered its unerring ability to make me feel really good.

This was especially true after an ugly breakup. Some say that time is a great healer, but I discovered years ago that it's actually travel that quite literally moves you on. Staying on the crime scene of an awful breakup is the worst thing you can do: too many painful memories and reminders. I subscribe to the “pack up your troubles” school of relationship recovery, and let me tell you, it works. It had been almost by accident that I'd learned travel mends a broken heart. I was eighteen and William was the first big love of my life. We were at school together and shared the kind of pure and trusting love only possible when you have yet to experience that first deep cut. When William dumped me out of the blue for Melanie (a girl who shopped at Miss Selfridge, who had never even been to Glastonbury), I was completely unprepared for the shock. I spent that whole summer after my exams moping around, crying on my best friend Belinda's shoulder, making her come for long walks so I could tell her (again) how awful it was and how I was never going to get over it. But when, at the end of the summer, I left home for Leeds University, I was really surprised to discover that out of sight really was out of mind. Here I was in a whole new place, with no painful memories. There was no danger of bumping into Will and Mel in Leeds; I didn't have to go to
our
places on my own or have people drop into conversation that they'd all been out together the night before. So, free from constant reminders of my old Will and his new girlfriend, I got over him and on with my life.

All thanks to the M1 motorway and National Express buses. But my lesson in the healing power of travel didn't end there. It was my next boyfriend who taught me that travel makes things easier for the dumper (as opposed to the dumpee), too. Peter was the guitarist in a band I sang with in Leeds, and we lived together for most of my time at university. He was gentle, kind, and very cute. But sadly, as time went on, it became increasingly clear that “gentle and kind” wasn't enough. I really didn't want to hurt him—Peter didn't deserve that, plus I remembered how bad it felt—but as much as I loved him, I felt restless and the need to move on. But I couldn't end it. I really tried: I'd psych myself up, telling myself I was going through with it this time, but at the last minute I'd think about how upset Peter would be and I'd lose my nerve. Actually, a couple of times I did end it, but Peter persuaded me to give us another chance. I was hopeless: I just couldn't face his heartache and make a clean break. Until I went to Australia.

It was one of those whimsical decisions that only makes sense after you've done it. I'd just graduated from university and had no idea what I wanted to do next. Going to Australia on my own for three months suddenly seemed the perfect solution: It would be both an adventurous challenge and the chance to think everything through.

So I flew into Perth, Western Australia. And virtually the first thing I did when I arrived was to call Peter and split up with him. As crazy as it sounds, I needed to go to the other side of the world to do it: I wasn't there to watch him fall apart, knowing it was my fault and still caring about him. And because I didn't feel wracked with the guilt I would have felt at home, I got over it far more quickly (as did he). I was free to fall madly in love with Australia, and I stayed, traveling all over Australasia for the next six years.

I think I have to be honest at this point and confess it wasn't only Australia I fell madly in love with. I might have been Peter's girlfriend when I flew into Australia, but six months after arriving I was Philip's wife.

I'd been in Australia for two weeks when I met Philip. He worked at a theater company where I'd landed a job, and it was love at first sight. I immediately recognized Philip, a spellbinding, charismatic, risk-all outback Romeo, as one of my Soul Mates. (Well, cats have nine lives, who's to say we are limited to a single, solitary Soul Mate?) He wasn't afraid of anything, and when I was with him, life was exciting and full of possibilities. We fell deeply and passionately in love. Although we got married very quickly, we
clicked
so powerfully together it felt the natural and right thing to do. Neither of us had really done much traveling, so we set off to explore, experience, and discover together. We spent six months driving through the hot, red outback in an old Holden panel van, living on wild fruit, swimming with dolphins, wrestling with spiders. We trekked through craggy outposts of India and Nepal, spent weekends snorkeling in the coral-studded waters around Vanuatu and the Solomons, took crazy surf-trips to Bali, and sailed boats down the muddy Mekong in Vietnam. It was amazing. And in the end, maybe that was the problem: Man cannot live on thrill alone. After six years of wonder and discovery, I was all amazed out. I'd had one brief visit home in all that time. I missed my family and friends; I missed normal old England. I missed Marks & Spencer's potato chips; I longed to sit in a pub on a damp autumn day (Australia doesn't do seasons) and pretend I cared about soccer; I was desperate for a colorful argument about politics and the chance to browse through some decent weekend papers (
MAN LEAVES CHANGE ON CONVENIENCE STORE COUNTER
was about the level of reporting in Australia). It was time to come home, and as much as I loved Philip, he was a creature of the outback. Beautiful, passionate, and wild, he had—and wanted—no place in Britain, with its crowds, traffic, litter, and drizzle. I went to Australia alone. Six years later, I returned home the same way.

 

It had been a year now since Kelly and I split up, and thankfully I was past the I'll Never Fall in Love Again stage. I spent a lot of time thinking about why we stayed together for as long as we did, also trying to work out how I could avoid making the same mistakes again. And during that year going over past choices and future options, I learned two things. Firstly, anyone who wants to know anything about Cher or Def Leppard should tune into VH1 at 3 a.m. Secondly, trying to find even a halfway decent boyfriend in London is a total nightmare. If you know the latter, chances are you've already discovered the former. Londoners have the longest working hours in Europe, and the highest number of stress-related diseases to prove it. It's hardly the setting for a romantic Barry White–type encounter—
“You're my first, you're my last, you're my intray?”
—yet precisely because we spend the majority of our time in the office, inevitably this is where we're hoping to meet Mr. Right. And failing to find him. Manners may maketh the man, but work unmaketh him pretty damn quick. It used to be exciting meeting someone in the office, but nowadays it means sifting through a pack of lifeless men so stressed and depressed that the only relationships they have the energy or confidence for are with their laptops and their lads' mags. And we SIWWIDs (Single-Income Women, Working Instead of Dating) have bought into the whole “mustn't try harder” myth: that being successful at work and having fun with our friends makes us independent and therefore unattractive to men. This really isn't the case: It's simply that the office—all floppy disks and soft launches—is not the place to find a satisfying relationship. Ten years ago when I moved from Australia back to England, I had to accept the sad truth that my marriage wasn't moving back with me. But I knew my love affair with travel was a relationship that would flourish wherever I went, so I lost no time getting a job in the travel industry. I became spokesperson and head of PR for the guidebook company Lonely Planet Publications, as well as a travel writer and correspondent for the BBC.

And as I traveled to and from my office in London, and to and from my work overseas, I was struck by how much more interested in women foreign men are, compared with British men. At times it feels as if you can't find a decent date in London to save your life, the bar being so low now that I mean any man who knows how to use a fork and possesses a matching pair of shoes, but you virtually have to fight them off with a stick in every other capital city around the world. I don't want to sound like an international hussy here, and I'm not even vaguely God's gift—I don't have Britney's butt or Melanie Griffiths's lips…though, to be fair, neither does she. But it is so much easier to meet men when you're abroad. Walk down the street in any other country and there'll always be men checking you out, coming over, chatting you up. In London, the only guys who make eye contact with you are the inmates on the subway. I'm not saying British men are totally to blame: We women have to take some of the responsibility, too. There are only so many hours in the day, and chances are that if you have a successful career, it's your job that takes up most of them. As the economy flourishes, are we in the grip of an emotional recession? Have we made our jobs the primary relationships in our lives, settling for so-so boyfriends because that's all we have the time to either find or maintain?

I say
we,
but of course I mean
I.
Had I loved my job more than I loved my boyfriend? By putting in and getting back so much from my career, how much did I have left to give Kelly? And how much did I really need from him in return? If I had needed Kelly more, would I have been forced to accept sooner that the relationship sucked and saved myself from going through “Jen and Kel—The Crap Years”? I know this sounds terrible, but is it really possible to have a great relationship and a great job? And if not, which would you choose?

And to get back to talking about me again (oh, go on), if I was right and all the
great relationships
were wandering down streets in every country other than the one in which I lived, what was I going to do about it?