The Man Diet: One woman’s quest to end bad romance

But when I get home, instead of feeling jubilant about kissing a text-book hottie that had entered my life as a very professional masseur at a spa in central London, I lie on the bed and feel … down. Rejected. Crap. Tired. Like I’ve sold myself short, but I’m not quite sure why. What had I been hoping to gain? A romp with a man – albeit a muscular one – who I’d had to lure out on a date with the promise of free alcohol?

Here’s another story: My friends Kim and Kate are watching Uruguay play Holland in the World Cup semifinal and end up snogging a couple of happy Dutch fans. However, expecting their snogees to be eagerly in touch afterwards, both Kim and Kate are dismayed when they hear nothing. Kim follows up with an email only to receive a downright rude reply. It would have been comical – if it hadn’t made her feel crap and empty and induce a week-long funk of low self-esteem in which she threw the baby out with the bathwater (job bad; career trajectory stalled; life going nowhere). And for what? A randomer! Meanwhile, Kate’s lad does respond and agrees to meet her for a drink. He isn’t free for a week, during which time Kate gets moderately excited. When they meet, it’s at a grotty pub of his choosing, and afterwards he seems to expect her to accompany him home. She allows him a snog and then – three days later when she still hasn’t heard from him – she sends him a drunken text. He doesn’t reply and she too enters a few days of self-loathing and anger.

We’re meant to be having the times of our lives but, as the above stories suggest, being single and content in the 21st century is far from straightforward. Ruth, 29, puts it well: ‘Being single is a job. But it’s a secret job.’ We’re constantly juggling our private anxiety about being single with a free ’n’ easy public persona. So while being single sounds like a barrel of laughs for the well-waxed, sexually liberated, financially solvent young woman, it is far from being a walk in the park.

What made me want to write this book is the fact that the Western single woman has never had it so good. She’s got more opportunity than ever before – professionally, socially and sexually. She puts up with less harassment and fewer superiority complexes from men than ever before. She earns more, shags more and drinks more than ever. She can do what she wants. But somehow – when it comes to society’s ultimate flash point, sex and love – she can’t get no satisfaction. Or not enough.

The Man Diet expresses my belief that it doesn’t need to be that way. I want to help the single woman cut through the biggest obstacle to her happiness today: junk-food love. I want to help lift the sense of doom and even worthlessness many of us feel if we are sporting neither a rock nor a man on our arm so that we can get on with the business of being – and feeling – awesome.

‘Being single is a job. But it’s a secret job.’

Easy highs, easy lows:

welcome to a world of junk-food love

Badoo is a mobile hook-up site for the straight market with 120 million users and 300,000 more added per day at the time of writing. Floxx, which originated as FitFinder, is a microblogging site where users describe hot people nearby in salacious terms (a perving portal, in other words), while tube.net allows users (female only, interestingly) to post pictures of hotties photographed surreptitiously on the Underground. Flirtomatic allows users to send electronic flirts – the homepage is a surge of photos that come forward then recede ever so slightly sickeningly. There are dozens more like this being conceived every day. I’m going to sound hideously prim here, but I see these sites as a natural by-product of a dating environment that’s becoming increasingly high in poorly made fast food and low in slow-cooked, well-sourced nourishment. There, I’ve said it.

Back at the beginning of 2010, when I became single again, I was all about the fast-food style of love, and warmly embraced the ‘many fish in the sea’ idea. I was a bit manic, going after men and saying yes to them as if it was my job to do so now that I was single, and – as I said above – supposedly ‘loving it’.

It was psychologist and relationships expert Dr Cecilia d’Felice who first recommended that I go on a ‘Man Diet’ after I told her about my experience of being single.

‘With each failed encounter – a man that doesn’t ask for a follow-up date, a guy that is rude, or a date you didn’t enjoy – there is the potential to lose self-esteem. Too many negative experiences will chip away at your self-worth leaving you feeling low and anxious about your date-ability.’

Dr Cecilia d’Felice, clinical psychologist and relationships expert, author of Dare to Be You

So, I hear you all ask, what is a Man Diet? Well, pure and simple, it’s a diet, in which you take a break from chowing down on men – literally and otherwise. You let them go. Forget about them. Instead, you focus on building up your sense of self-worth, your interests, your personhood. Your ‘you’. You relax, and give yourself a time out on dating, romantic timelines and so on.

I thought more about this brave idea. Could I do it? And ultimately, did I want to do it? I had to admit it sounded tempting and challenging in equal measure. I wasn’t sure I could do it, but equally, I sensed I’d benefit massively if I did. The Man Diet smacked of a path to somewhere good, not without its tiring uphills but generally pleasant and with interesting scenery along the way. It seemed like the kind of ride whose uphills would leave you with excellent, enviable glutes and thighs at the end of it.

I started not only to pay close attention to where I was going wrong, but to quietly observe my single friends’ behaviour, rather than just urging them to keep going in order to erase the bad taste of one unsatisfying encounter with another one. Of course we were all roughly going wrong in the same ways: giving ourselves away too much and to too many people, for no particularly good reason. Great men – potential life partners – don’t grow on trees these days (did they ever?) and you know them when you see them. We weren’t seeing them, so instead we channelled a Samantha from Sex and the City-style quantity-over-quality approach, and guess what: it wasn’t making us happy. Nor did it appear to be increasing the chances of meeting someone worthwhile – the types of guys we were attracting never really improved or changed.

And if we weren’t getting action – if we were in a ‘drought’ – we talked about that, using up our emotional energy. Follow-up dates with guys we didn’t particularly like spending time with – whether we met them online or elsewhere – bruised and eroded our self-esteem, too. With men or without them, we seemed to be defining ourselves in relation to men.

Who fancies you, how many hook-ups, shags, suggestive texts, Facebook come-ons or intrigues you can run up seem to be the single girl’s bread and butter (or rather, her high-carb fix). I began to see that, in reality, they’re our poison. Not because they are bad in themselves, but because they so easily become like drugs: without them, we feel crap, and when we have them we can only think of our next fix. Are we ever left feeling satisfied? Of course not.

Identity and the single woman: am I hot enough?

Hotness, like gold (only not nearly as solid), has become society’s most sought-after social and sexual currency.

In Female Chauvinist Pigs, a brilliant book, Ariel Levy states in no uncertain terms that the image-generated, ‘overheated thumping of sexuality’ in the West is far more about consumption than real human connection. Indeed, people spend a large amount of cash acquiring this glossy form of hotness.

As Maria, 31, puts it: ‘Everything comes down to: “Do you think I’m good looking or not?”’

Somewhere, nestled deep inside our brains, is the childhood idea that good things come to pretty girls. Namely: knights in shining armour; doting attention; popularity. So, lacking her knight as well as a range of good options, the single woman feels she has to prove to herself and others that she’s not single because she isn’t attractive. While being considered hot is a huge motivator for women of every romantic status, I think it’s an even more emotional concern for the single woman. We feel a bit like this: ‘Show me I am pretty enough so that I know I really am. Otherwise I’m afraid that people – myself included – will see my singleness as a function of subpar hotness. And that will crush me.’

The false promise of shagging like a man

We want to show we’re hot, and sex is one way we do it. But it has to be easy, breezy casual sex because we’re independent women and are led to believe that a good way to show independence is to shag a lot or outrageously.

Getting notches on the bedpost has become a widespread symbol of empowerment, but in my view a false one, because the quantity over quality equation doesn’t add up to happiness for most women. This conviction is based partly on my experience as a single person – numerous generous offerings of my body with little repayment of the friendly, caring or (God forbid) emotional variety. (Random Italian men with sub-zero IQs in hasty encounters in borrowed flats and drunken German cheaters in broom closets at parties may sound like rollicking fun but they lose their appeal very quickly.) It is also based on a whole host of research, some convincing, some not. After all, the last thing you need is male researchers saying that science shows women should be chaste while men should continue to enjoy rampaging the field because it’s in their DNA. And authors such as Natasha Walter in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender are excellently enraged on the topic of biological determinism and will convince any thinking woman to take prescriptive biological arguments with a rigorous pinch of salt. But there are grains of useful, fair evidence about women and sexual profligacy that can help substantiate what I have learned from experience and observation, of which more later.

The idea of ‘throttling up on power … and having sex like a man’ seduced a whole generation of young women through the delicious portal of Sex and the City. We thirsted to see Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and, of course, Samantha, the show’s proudest sexual figurehead, hilariously and frankly discussing, then actually having ‘sex like a man’ (their stated goal in the first episode). There was a kind of competitiveness to it, and many of us watching this and numerous other episodes in which the girls indulge in purely utilitarian sex (the norm for Samantha) felt an urge to chant ‘yeah!’ and fist pump the air. After all, it looked an awful lot like feminism – indeed, the casual and experimental sexual ideal presented in SATC helped define the kind of feminism known as ‘third wave’. US magazine Bust co-founder Debbie Stoller has said that in their quest for sexual fulfillment , the ‘lusty feminists of the third wave’ are leaving no stone unturned. Toys, techniques: we’re trying them all.

However, I think a friend of mine called Kristen, 32, presents a picture that’s closer to reality than the powerful one of clacking Manolos and perfectly coiffed just-had-sex hair in SATC:

‘There’s this expectation that we’re supposed to be having casual sex, that it doesn’t touch us – but it does. We see casual sex as empowerment. But when I was having “casual” sex with my flatmate, I would lie there sobbing in my room while he had sex next door with someone else. It didn’t feel all that empowered.’

Several of the young women interviewed in Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs explain frighteningly well how they and their friends are using a gung-ho, blokeish approach to sex to show they’re not ‘girly’.

Boatloads of casual sex does not signify actual empowerment (though it’s not necessarily contrary to it). Empowerment isn’t feeling like shit when a guy has used you as a masturbatory aid, or pretending you don’t care. Empowerment isn’t insisting: ‘I can do what I want and if I want to get hurt and misused and undervalued and feel corroded and lower my self-esteem, I can!’ And it’s not about performing empowerment through sex. You are empowered if you pay close attention to what really builds your sense of wellbeing, and to knowing and understanding the difference between fun and crap treatment masquerading as fun.

Social discomfort and the single woman

As if the cake needed any more topping – single women today still feel an anxiety about their non-manned status that ranges from the manageable to the debilitating. Women are no longer defined by their childbearing and house-cleaning skills. But that doesn’t seem to diminish society’s obsession with female romantic and sexual status. In the US, successful professional women are known to take two years (TWO YEARS) off work to plan weddings.

‘There is this societal pressure whereby if you’re a single woman in your 30s, you’re seen as mad, desperate or somehow lacking. It’s like Stanford in Sex and the City says: “you’re nobody until someone loves you”. But I don’t want to reach 50 and be really successful and live in a nice flat and all anyone can see is I’m single. I don’t like being reduced to that – a failure because you haven’t got someone to shag you long term.’

Ronnie Blue, 30, journalist

Reality shows about weddings and man-finding are cultishly popular and spawning like rabbits: Bridezillas, The Bachelorette, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and dozens of others. In the UK, the hen party has become a kind of adulation akin to goddess worship and money is not meant to be an object to the full homage the bride-to-be deserves. ‘Marriage has become a cult,’ says Ronnie. ‘The hen-dos have become insane as if getting married is the biggest achievement a woman can have. If you’re single, it makes you feel like you’re a total failure. But if there wasn’t that pressure, that view, you wouldn’t become so anxious about finding someone, and that anxiety affects the way you are with men. It makes you less attractive.’

The waning glory of the single woman: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I to Bridget Jones

It’s worth remembering our proud origins. The most terrible epithets were thrown at non-widowed single women – they were, at the bare minimum, assumed to be either shameless whores or hideous spinster frigid virgins. But many of our predecessors, from Joan of Arc to Florence Nightingale, saw their singleness as essential to the pursuit of the kind of work they wanted to achieve. Cleopatra spoke nine languages fluently as ruler of Egypt and could barely tolerate lover (not husband) Antony’s idiocy. Elizabeth I remained a virgin, ‘wedded to her people’. Catherine the Great of Russia had numerous lovers who she paid off generously when they no longer satisfied her – meanwhile changing the course of European history.

Such stateswomen were, of course, rare among rare exceptions to the rule of ‘to be a single woman is to be pitied and kept down’, and the obstacles facing them were enormous (men mainly, and the laws written by men). Now that we’re free to get on with doing whatever we want with or without a man, with as kinky or polygamous a sex life as we want, we should be racing ahead, full of the joys of freedom.

Yet instead of seeking to emulate Catherine the Great’s astonishing approach to lovers and imperial policy, it’s Helen Fielding’s hilarious but terrifying model of early-mid-life singleness, Bridget Jones, that exerts real influence. We adore that chaotic jumble of career ineptitude, vulnerability, embarrassment and frustration in part because it seems to say, ‘this is you, too’.

On the page, in that nice font, it’s all charming and fine and ends in a fairy tale marriage. Reality is different, though, and we can do better. The more I observed and considered, the more it became blazingly clear that Dr d’Felice was onto something – we’re filling our lives with too much junk-food love and instead of making us stronger, it just bloats us with dead emotional weight. So I decided to give the Man Diet a go.

The Man Diet explained: what’s it for?

The Man Diet explains and explores ten rules designed to wean you off junk-food love, namely:

• negative man-related experiences

• corrosive man-obsessing thoughts

• damaging man-related actions

It is designed to tweak your behaviour – mental and social – in such a way as to strengthen your core sense of self. In doing so, it should make your singledom healthy, creative and, yes, happy. Many books either add to the stigma of being unattached, by trying to show you how to snare a man, or aggressively trumpet the message that you can be happy even though you’re single. This one shows you how to treat yourself well – emotionally and intellectually – while you’re single.

Diets are hard. Is this one?

Not hugely, but it’s not a breeze either. Though definitely less painful than following a food diet (though not necessarily less challenging), the Man Diet does require significant effort. It does involve a cutting down of widely available, habitually consumed junk-food love. JFL is everywhere – it’s in our Facebook newsfeeds, our availability online, our multiple inboxes, our short attention spans. It’s in the belief that emotional attachment is bad and that it certainly doesn’t go with sex; that some guy is better than no guy; that the easiest and best way to pass the time is to think and talk about men. It’s in the guys themselves: men fed on a culture of porn and anything goes, in which chivalry is dead and – miraculously – sex grows on trees.

Remember, good love is around, too. That’s why this diet is ultimately positive. In cutting down on bad love, it opens up space for good love. Good love can involve good men, or good things with men you like, or it can mean you feeling good without a man. The Man Diet is a method of discerning the wheat from the chaff: emotionally, sexually and romantically. Whether you’re enjoying dating and having fun, you’re long-term single and feeling desperate for a shag, or serious about finding a life partner, cutting down the junk-food love is a major bonus.