This is what you get for having a female contributor to Samizdata – I don’t think any of the guys would care to link to an article by Leah McLaren about The tragic ineptitude of the English male.
Leah is a Canadian reporter who moved to London and found her ‘dating’ experience profoundly inadequate. If you are an English male and thinking well, perhaps, it’s just her, she wasn’t interesting, attractive, sexy, blah, blah, blah enough, don’t even go there. She is right whether you like it or not!
Obviously, there are exceptions, I hasten to add in order to salvage my reputation and male egos of those who might take my emphatic agreement with Ms McLaren personally.
The truth of the matter is that the English male is confused by women in general, and by English women in particular. He handles foreign ones better, simply because he can be more patronising to them, especially if their first language is not English….Ouch! I know that hurt.
The trick of a quasi-normal interaction with an English male is to stop behaving as a woman and just be a person easy to talk to. Generally, it works provided they can get past certain features of the female anatomy. Obviously, this approach is not suitable for ‘dating’ and Leah may have to stick with North American ex-pats. Good to hear that things have really changed there over the last 10 years…