The not so secret Bill

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
THE SECRECY BILL

However, my desire for transparency is often put to the test on the dating website that I frequent. I recently started chatting to a very charming gentleman. However by the end of our first online conversation, on the very first day of making his acquaintance, he’d let me know that he was completely broke and starting over after a messy divorce, that he had no car, and that he had major back issues from an old surfing accident that required a number of surgeries every year just to keep him comfortably upright. He also revealed that his cat was diabetic and required a series of carefully-timed shots every day, oh and that his brother was currently in hospital.

So while transparency is a must for me in any relationship, perhaps it’s simply a matter of timing. Maybe when it comes to dating, we should consider an Ever-So-Slightly-Extended-Secrecy Bill.

I’m not saying wait seventeen years before you tell your girlfriend you’re a cross dresser (and here I mean a man who wears women’s clothing, not someone who gets grumpy when they have to put on pants). I just think that maybe some of our secrets are best left for a second or third date, and perhaps our other even deeper darker ones should be left for that moment when your partner is so hopelessly irrevocably in love with you, that the fact that you have incurably smelly feet, or impossibly bad cooking skills, or six exes who have all died in house fires, is overlook-able.

That’s why babies are so well designed, if parents didn’t already love them so completely and unconditionally from the very second they popped out of the womb, there would be no way on earth those already exhausted folks would put up with the endless dirty nappies and constant middle of the night crying. That’s clever design we can learn from, people. Fall in love first, reveal massive production flaws second.

I know this sounds like I’m advocating secrets, lies and half-truths in dating, but really I’m not. Please feel free to be open, honest and transparent about every dark, dingy, scary nook and cranny of your life, but maybe we should meet first.