Relationships

Divorce Diaries: Who’s the boss

You can’t start a fire without a spark.
Messy break-up? Tidy up your look and get back into the dating game.

Divorce dishes out a lot of curveballs, but one thing that really knocks me for six is finding I identify with Bruce Springsteen. Not that I’m wearing blue jeans and a muscle shirt, or doing knee slides across my living-room floor. But suddenly I feel like the Boss’s other half.

Standing in my bathroom with the sunset blazing through the window, I finally understand – really get – the lyrics of Dancing in the Dark, that anthem to breaking out of ruts, lighting fires and becoming a gun for hire.

I check my look in the mirror, I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face! Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself… “Boss,” I say fervently, “you could be the spokes-person for post break-up women everywhere.”

Unless you’re Diana Vreeland (always dressed for dinner) or Gwen Stefani (never appears in front of her husband without makeup), you’re likely to be familiar with the slide into comfortable coupledom. Marital familiarity can lead to… well, if not contempt, something dangerously close to it. Bundling your hair into the same ponytail every day, dressing the way you did when you first met him – and then you realise that was 15 years ago.

Cue the midlife crisis, when men buy cars and sleep with babysitters, and women cut their hair and enrol in pottery classes. As I stare in the mirror, with Bruce loudly advocating love reactions, I think, ‘To hell with it!’ I won’t experiment with coiffs (too costly) or with clay (too time-consuming) – but with men.

Ever since I was 13, I’ve had a type. Alternative, artistic, leftist, greenist, tough on the outside, soft on the inside. In the movie of my life John Cusack would play the love interest. From cradle to grave. Hell, is it time for a change!

As I sweep my hair into an updo and pull on my skinny Maje jeans (French clothes cross all style boundaries), I feel the Springsteen spark. You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart. Damn right, Bruce! There’s a reason why ‘break-up’ rhymes with ‘wake-up’.

If you want romance in Berlin there’s no need to turn to Tinder. There’s always a local hangout offering just as many human options as any dating website – and beer into the bargain. I head down to a tiny, smoky, divey hole-in-the-wall bar where even Darwin’s eyes would have widened at the wildly varied cross-section of males within.

I sit at the usual artists’ table, but instead of sinking into conversation about how gentrification is ruining Berlin, I do what my friend Phoebe does when she’s just broken up with someone: I ‘scan’. Whenever a new man walks in, I openly size him up. I don’t rule out suits. Or scientists. I’m open to anyone who might be a human spark.

By midnight I’m chatting to a man who’s been a regular here for eight years. I’ve seen him about three hundred times: I’ve just never bothered to talk to him. An ad man, a German Don Draper in a Hugo Boss suit, he talks about money with men and nothing serious with women. Basically, he’s everything I’ve spent my life running away from.

But he makes jokes, even if they’re not ironic. He’s courteous, which many of my past men were not. Having shelved my entrenched preferences, I find it curiously restful to hear him knowledge-ably comparing the latest Audi with the new Porsche. And when he puts his hand on my knee I decide to like it. As Hamlet said, there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

When the Unsuitable Suit kisses me, tasting of cigarettes and whisky, I find it surprisingly appealing. And when he says, “I live quite close. There’s a much better red wine there”, I don’t laugh and make some smart-arse remark that reveals I know exactly what this euphemism means. I simply lower my appropriately ‘Fake it’ mascara’d eyelashes and murmur, “Great! Let’s go.”

Words by: Sarah Quigley

Photographs by: Corrie Bond / Bauersyndication.com.au

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