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June 9, 2008 11:57 AM

BOOK EXTRACT: Daisy Dooley Does Divorce

Anna Pasternak writes a Daisy Dooley Does Divorce column for the Daily Mail and now the column is available in book form.

If you're a fan of the column, you'll probably know this already. If you've never heard of it, then hop over the cut and read our extract!

The PDD
(Post-Divorce Date)

There's only one thing worse than being thirty-nine and single: being thirty-nine and divorced. The biggest upside to getting married was the relief of never having to date again. The subtext of "I do" was: Thank you, hubby, from the bottom of my heart, that I do not have to scan men at parties anymore, I do not need to fire up my married friends' search engines for "eligible" or "available," nor suffer the angst of "will he call or won't he?" A trip to the altar in Jamie's family tiara put paid to that. Or so I thought. Yet here I am, three years after I hurled my bouquet in the air—as if celebrating a win at sports day—about to go frog kissing. Again.

Turns out Jamie Prattlock wasn't my prince after all. I wanted the marriage to work—every woman does—but he was incapable of blowing my heart right open. On the honeymoon, I asked myself, How long does it take for it to feel right? After a year of being Mrs. Prattlock, I wondered, How long do you wait for it to feel right? I stayed for another six months. In the end, it wasn't so much that I was unable to live with Jamie. I was unable to live with myself and the gnawing sense that something was missing. Something so much more.

My oldest school friend, Jess, claims that even as a child I was overly sentimental. If we played near a blossom tree, I'd scoop up handfuls of pink petals and fling them over her, shouting, "It's your wedding!" (She's nudging forty and single. By choice—not chance or lack of it, because with her lofty libido every man is a potential fuck, or even better, a willing fuck buddy to add to her Rolodex of sex.) These days Jess blames my addiction to self-help tomes for my fractured state. My chaste diet of soul-stirring, female-empowering, self-esteem?boosting best sellers has, she believes, completely skewered my expectations. But it can't be unreasonable to dream that your husband views you as a pivotal player in his dreams, or to dream that he views you, period. And anyway, doesn't it say everything about Jamie's blocked-off plight that I openly devoured Should I Stay or Should I Go? before I left him?

My new bible is the Little Book of Dating Dharma. This precious gem guides me through the post-divorce date, or PDD. I don't enjoy being a relationship statistic now that I've got more emotional baggage than Heathrow handles in a day, but I press on because I know my soul mate exists. Otherwise I couldn't possibly be this lonely.

When my marital dreams went up in smoke, humiliatingly, I boomeranged back home to the country to Mum. Not only couldn't I afford to replicate our marital pad in town, I couldn't face purchasing a flat on my own, to live in alone, when all my girlfriends were looking to expand their properties along with their pregnant waistlines.

Mum is a dotty divorced dog breeder—her slogan is "Dooley's Dachshunds: Long and Strong." When she dropped me off at the station to go to London for my first PDD, she pulled up alongside a dishy bloke on a motorbike. My ring radar immediately alerted me to the fact that he wasn't wearing one and I was about to try a pre-PDD flirty smile when Mum shouted out, "Remember, Daisy, nice girls and divorc?es don't." He gaped in our direction while Mum continued brazenly, "And don't forget, princes get warts too."

I had my friends Lucy and Edward Primfold to credit or blame for setting me on this blind date. I clearly wasn't thinking straight when I went to stay with them a couple of months after my divorce from Jamie came through. What was I thinking? I had chosen them knowing that they had the best stocked guest bathroom in all of London, but towels as thick as telephone books were small comfort when I'd broken the blood vessels beneath my eyes sobbing over my unhitched and childless state. Visiting a picture-perfect family with angelic twin girls was pure insanity—or pure masochism.

It was nursery tea when I arrived and the twins, Tabitha and Lily, age six and dressed up as flower fairies, were tucking into homemade carrot cake and crudités. Edward, a suave public school type who moves through life with the languor only breeding and masses of inherited money afford, put his arm around me as he led me into the kitchen. "Chaos as usual," he said, gesturing to the girls quietly eating. They smiled up at me as if I was the photographer for a center spread in the Mini Boden catalog. Click. It was a Kodak moment of such domestic harmony that the bile of jealousy instantly rose in my throat.

Lucy was at the end of the table, stunning in a crisp white shirt and Chloe jeans, her short blond hair expensively highlighted. I'd met Lucy at a freshers' drinks party in our first week at university and have marveled at her composure ever since. Lucy never looked like a student even when she was one, whereas I can still pass for a disheveled student on a bad hair day. You always knew that Luce was going to waltz off campus and into the City, marking time until she fell into the eager embrace of a prospective husband, because even when she was single she had the aplomb of a married woman.

"Darling Daise," she said, hugging me. Walking into a scene of such purity and innocence made me want to rip off my own failure-riddled skin. I wanted to bury my face in her smooth scented neck and scream. Why me? As Lucy poured me a cup of tea, I stared at the parrot tulips billowing out from a crystal vase in the center of the table and I wondered how come she got it so right? How did she sign up for the right life story at birth and manage to hit the bull's-eye ever since? With her rock-steady marriage, her über-earning hubby, and her angelic, well-adjusted kids, there was no need for her to obsess over what-ifs. She had nothing in her past to regret, only well-rounded decades to reflect on with happiness and pride. If she weren't such a loving and generous friend, I'd truly hate her.

"Sorry to hear about the divorce coming through," Edward said, breaking through my private musings. "I always thought Prattlock was okay."

"Okay isn't always enough," I sighed. Really, when had Edward ever settled for okay? The Chelsea townhouse with access to communal gardens was a sight better than okay. His collection of Old Masters, including a Veronese and a Frans Hals: were those merely okay oils to hang on his drawing room wall?

I forced myself to listen to his chatter and before long, Edward happily let slip that he had bumped into Jamie at some arse-numbingly boring charity bridge tournament where Jamie had boasted about his new girlfriend. Talk about kicking a dog—or a divorcée—when she's down.

"So?" Lucy said gamely. "Men always pull straight away to prove that they don't have a problem. It's just comfort sex at the end of a relationship."

"You should try it," Edward said, winking at me. "Got a mucker who's recently moved back here from Bahrain. Troy Powers. Bright bond trader, successful, stinking rich, and recently divorced. So at least you will have one thing in common."

Yup. We both know what it is to feel irremediably broken inside.

A few weeks later in her South London bachelorette pad, Jess opened a pack of fags as she helped me prepare for the date—she's an extremely pragmatic general practitioner. As I stared at my reflection in the mirror, she stood behind me blowing smoke rings. With her liquid green eyes, strawberry-blonde Pre-Raphaelite curls and lightly freckled skin, she has an attractiveness and easygoing charisma that eludes me. It's not that I'm ugly; I'm just not a natural beauty either. I'm the type who's referred to as "striking" when I'm all done up. My large brown eyes are probably my strongest point—even if they look sufficiently bulbous when I'm tired that my mother keeps asking me if I have a thyroid problem. Worse, I have an intensity that frightens men; I don't do lighthearted, particularly when it comes to flirting. (That's also partly due to Mum, who wouldn't let me flick my fringe around when I was a teenager because she said it would make me look thick and my hair look thin.) Jess radiates sexuality because her agenda is upfront and uncomplicated. With the teensiest hint of a smile, her message reads, "We both know that we want it so why pretend?" whereas my attempts at a light "come hither" grin seem to send men running.

Infuriatingly, even though Jess lives like an errant teenager, smoking, rarely exercising outside the bedroom, drinking hard alcohol, and eating sugary food late at night—Krispy Kreme doughnuts are her favorite postcoital snack—she looks not exactly younger but decidedly fresher than me.

Angst is terribly aging, I thought as I smeared a face pack on, carefully avoiding the crêpe-like skin around my eyes. Mind you, boredom is another zest zapper and while it's difficult to reconcile it with her personal irresponsibility, Jess thrives on the demands of her job. She is highly respected in her practice—and presumably reaping its financial rewards as well. I, on the other hand, had injudiciously thrown my once-promising future in publishing away when I got married and now had little left to show for it. After all, you can hardly have your marriage license framed or inserted in your r?sum? by way of explanation for a lengthy career dip, can you?

Eyeing the razor I held at my shin, Jess exclaimed, "No shaving, Daisy! You'll be tempted to reveal too much, too soon." Wise though she might be, I got busy with the Bic anyway. An insurance policy, just in case. I started cream bleaching my mustache, which Jess pooh-poohed as too high maintenance, but small beer when you consider that in New York they are into pre-date butthole bleaching. "I can't do this anymore," I said, wiping the creamy gunk off my upper lip.

"Good, because he's unlikely to inspect your facial hair with a magnifying glass."

"No, this!" I gestured to the beautifying paraphernalia spread around the room. Then, forgetting about my carefully applied, nonwaterproof mascara, I got weepy. Nearly twenty years, minus my fleeting marital break, of wondering if tonight's the night, made me churn with despair. "It still hurts that Jamie didn't fight for our marriage. I wanted him to fight for us."

"No," Jess said softly. "You wanted him to fight for you."

And there's the rub. I may be a born-again single, I may be dolled up and drinking Rescue Remedy for Dutch courage, but I can't override the fact that I feel like a failure and a fool. I turned to Dating Dharma, held it against my chest, and opened it at a random page. "Everyone's story is completely different yet exactly the same. Isn't everyone searching for the same thing? To end up in the arms of the right partner?"

I got my coat.

Copyright © 2007 by Anna Pasternak

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Posted by Aigua Media on June 9, 2008 in Book Extract | Permalink

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