IT'S A DAD's LIFE:A meeting with an old pal – a promiscuous single – leads ADAM BROPHYto make a life comparison, .
FACEBOOK ISN’T the most useless thing in the world. Not quite. If I could buy back the hours wasted trawling strangers’ photos or searching for old girlfriends’ profiles and work that time profitably, I could devote myself to a life of FB alone.
But very occasionally it turns up a gem. Recently FB popped up a proper geezer from the past. As we had been “real” friends in previous lives we immediately bypassed FB’s communication system, got on the blower and within hours I had booked tickets for a family-free weekend away, some actual face time.
A week later I land. We get settled. Turn to each other and begin examination. Who has fallen apart more gracefully in the intervening years? Whose emotional state is more fragile? Who has been more successful? Who has evolved? Who has imploded? Whose life view has descended furthest into the mire? Who has bred and who has loved?
Our assessment takes maybe 30 seconds. We are frighteningly similar, which is probably the reason we became friends in the year we lived and studied together.
Our work has followed parallel paths. Neither has gone to seed. We’re prone to severe and nauseating introspection and we’re right-onish liberalish types with flashes of right-wing conservatism bubbling to the surface in rage more and more as we get on and become more irritated by “yoof today”.
We both fill a particular late-30s stereotype, one we could have seen coming, one we are, in reality, rather smug about.
I have bred while he seems to have loved, just about every female from Land’s End to John O’Groats with a pulse and between the ages of 35 and 45. This is the T-junction of our lives at which we chose different directions.
I am madly jealous and consider not making the flight home, donning a smoking jacket, whipping out the Brylcreem and adopting a Leslie Phillips accent. Like flies to spider shall the ladies flock to my lascivious charms.
After a lengthy relationship, bud had entered the singles arena, with a lot of time to make up, just as online dating became mainstream.
The feeling he got when he signed up for his first account was probably the same as that experienced by George Best when he first rippled the back of an onion sack. It was just meant to be.
Some years, many women and even more motorway miles later he shows no signs of easing off the throttle, in fact he becomes most alive when explaining the process, from initial contact to inevitable conclusion.
It is now that I should comment on the apparent emptiness of his life, the lack of intimacy in the shallow encounter and the void in his soul that he has yet to realise needs filling.
It would make me feel better to at least think that and be able to express it in slightly less stark terms, returning myself in comfort to the loving bosom of my family. But that wasn’t what I found at all. Instead, in the vast array of communications between men and women I felt the naif.
Okay, he likes to shag and that is the primary focus of what seems to have become his life’s work, but the byproduct of this is a huge amount of time spent alone with a variety of women, grown-up women too.
Down the years, lotharios have proclaimed an insight into the female psyche due to their sexual prowess and both women and less athletic men have scoffed.
The bud is not doing this: he is stating that he enjoys the twists which the past few years have taken. And getting up from these twists and going home.
Alone. He loves living alone. His apartment is pristine, even the spines of the books on his shelves are so unblemished they could be returned to the shop.
For two days I walk around barefoot and not a single hard plastic toy drives itself into my skin.
We drink and talk and eat curries and go to comedy shows and night clubs and swallow painkillers and start again. At no point do I get the impression he is blindsiding me.
Sometimes, as a father, you wonder how come your life seems so un-adult. Equilibrium is maintained by keeping small people happy so your life is about managing expectations, the least important of which seem to be your own.
All of this is good and right and appropriate, it is the natural order and the demands lessen with time.
It’s just sometimes you wonder, however briefly . . . what would have happened if you’d turned left.