The dating trap - a whole new set of rules

Janelle Wills, 35, is single and looking for love. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Step into a crowded bar and you'll feel it; a wary tension, jungle-coiled, eyes flashing. Part of it is sexual, but there's something else. Anger. Hurt. Frustration. A misdirected chat-up, a misread signal, a clumsy grope could trigger a lethal knockback fuelled by a bitter backlog of disappointments and disillusionment.

Says Auckland film student Tom Atkins: "Some women act really hostile towards guys. My female friends say, 'Well, you don't know what we put up with'. One friend just wants an erudite, nice, successful guy and all she gets is gropes and looks. It makes everybody a bit angry and they can't help but take it out on each other."

(Atkins is gay, so this isn't sour grapes.)

And it's the same in internet dating forums echoing with castigations of heartless players and shameless sluts, snobby bitches and weirdo creeps.

If love is a battlefield, for many of us looking for love is a booze-sodden minefield of crosspurposes, misunderstandings, and halfconscious, muddled expectations. With the old, pre-1970s rules around dating and mating happily dismantled, Western women have more financial, social and sexual wherewithal than ever before and the ground is supposedly set for an equal, mutually-negotiated meeting of bodies and minds.

Yet often both sexes are still fumbling about in the dark.

There's light on the horizon - or rather, glowing from computer screens across the land. Internet dating is a known stalking patch for casual sex. But now it's mainstream, it's also forcing us to relearn a kind of dating most of us only know through American TV.

"Date" is a loaded term in Kiwi vernacular. Says Auckland singleton Janelle Wills: "It's this pressure that this is going to be a relationship. Everything you say or do means so much more and that's really scary so you've got to drink to lessen that fear."

The more common scenario for the teenage to 30s age group goes something like: get drunk to still the nerves, fall into bed on the first or second night, wake up and start figuring out whether you're lying next to a one-night-stand, a fling, a new friend-plus-extra, a potential life-partner or something we don't yet have a word for.

"It's like emotional Russian roulette," says Wills, a 35-year-old artist and conservator. She's unusual in her circle for not jumping into bed at the drop of a wine glass. It galls her, but she's come to the conclusion that playing hard-to-get is still the modern woman's most powerful weapon.

"You've got to make men hunt. If a woman asks a man out, he'll never consider her a potential mate, but rather as a potential f**k. The way a woman gets the guy is to withhold and be intriguing and mysterious and look fabulous. It's an inert power."