Ever dated a Bermuda Triangle? What about a pirate? More below:
Here’s yesterday’s Sunday Times column. Sent to you with love.
LOVE TRIANGLE – By Paige Nick
In the last five hundred years, over one thousand ships and planes and countless human beings have gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle. Will we never learn? Surely there’s another route to get where you’re going? One that doesn’t drive directly through an axis of evil.
There are too many theories about the crazy inexplicable stuff that happens in there to pick just one. It’s a huge area, renowned for bad weather, so that might be it. Or could we put all these disappearances down to human error? Or maybe pirates? If I were a pirate that’s where I’d do some of my finest work, since it comes with a built-in alibi. It wasn’t us, your honour, it was the Bermuda Triangle; ask the aliens what happened to your yacht.
My friend Robyn just dated a Bermuda Triangle, and it practically killed her. I feel her pain. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt and the whisky. I once dated this guy, let’s call him Jason. a) Because that’s his name. And b) so if my body turns up in a dark alley chopped into a thousand pieces, the police will know who to question first.
We met online and our pre-meet-up chats were great. But within the first hour of our first date, I knew deep in my gut that something wasn’t quite right. He had a couple of stories to tell, and by all accounts, every woman who had ever travelled over him had disappeared. Well, they hadn’t actually disappeared, but their relationship had. The same went for his friendships, family and business relationships too, all had disintegrated over time, bar two lone survivors.
I should have seen the signs and made a run for safer waters straight away. You can tell an awful lot about a person by how many of their exes have tried to take them to court. But instead I did that thing most of us do; we batten down the hatches and tell ourselves that the Bermuda Triangle is a myth. Or that we’ll be fine, we can steer through inclement weather, or we’ll find a way to calm the choppy waters. Or it won’t happen to us, or those incidents were all coincidences or accidents. And then we bravely and stupidly head straight through the centre of it like so many idiots before us. Unfortunately, under the circumstances, we’d probably have better luck with pirates.
In the dating world there’s another kind of Bermuda Triangle too. That’s when the person you’re dating just disappears. They’re SMSing you like crazy one day, saying how amazing you are and describing all the sexy things they want to do to you, in badly spelt detail, and the next day there’s sudden radio silence.
If this happens to you, try not to worry. Ninety nine times out of a hundred they’re not lying somewhere dead in a ditch. In my experience, this kind of Bermuda Triangler is just extremely commitment phobic. Or they’ve been caught by their wives (never leave evidence on your cell phone). Or they went out last night and met someone who has bigger boobs than you, and they don’t have the balls to come clean about it. So instead they just do a disappearing act.
Which is actually quite impressive in this day and age. Between cell phones and social media, it’s becoming harder and harder to just disappear. Last year a student in California was declared missing by her friends and family, so the police activated a search party. When they found her she claimed she just wanted some alone time and peace and quiet, so she’d turned off her cell phone.
There’s nothing pleasant about being a victim of a Bermuda Triangling. Mostly because there’s no closure. And us women like our closure. It’s like watching a whodunit and never finding out who dun it. Or like sitting through one of those reality TV shows that go to a commercial break just before they announce who the winner is. But then the SABC makes a cock up and they never go back to the show after the Ginzu knives commercial. I think it’s the not knowing why we’ve been Bermuda Triangled that drives us nuts, more than the loss of a shag.
Ultimately though, down the line I’ve always been glad those Bermuda Triangle guys disappeared. Whether they were the latter who simply vanished into thin air one day, or the former where I had to get a restraining order to make them disappear. Some relationships are just like Teflon, they’re not supposed to stick.