Close Encounters
On Australian men and other animals
As I had long planned, I was spending my birthday with kangaroos. And that's how I found myself at the edge of an enclosure, fenced in, but with wide spaces between the slats, craning my neck to see an odd-looking marsupial: half roo and half bear, the colour of a chocolate labrador, with a rusty-looking snout, in the upper branches of a scrawny eucalyptus tree, chewing on some leaves. But then the creature spotted me and scurried down the trunk with surprising speed and, making eye contact all the way, bounded straight towards me. I was holding a plastic cup full of kangaroo kibble so I held it out between the fence slats. The tree-kangaroo glanced downwards for a moment and then grasped my extended hand with its cargo of feed firmly between both of his own and tugged. His hands were huge and his sharp claws made deep indentations into my skin. All the while, his button eyes continued to fix me with a stare of laser-like intensity. He looked at me as though he had a purpose beyond simply grabbing food, as though he had a message for me. For a moment, I felt deeply disconcerted. He looked like a teddy bear—yet he was strong, unpredictable and irreducibly alien.
I’ve often felt that way when dating.
I think of my personal friends here in Australia as an eclectic bunch. They vary in age, sex, marital status and political affiliations and—while we now know each other in real life—I met them mostly because they follow my Twitter account, which seems like a rather random method of making friends. But whenever I venture out on a date, I realise that my friend group is pretty homogeneous, after all. They are my mob, my skin group, my tribe, my species. Meanwhile, the world is full of men—and women, too, but as a straight woman, I mainly encounter the men—whose habits, motivations, preoccupations and values are as alien to me as if they lived in another world. Every person is a microcosm unto themselves, the Ptolemaic centre of their own universe. On dates, I get a glimpse of those universes and I find myself, often, a bewildered astronaut, astounded by the alien topography, and without a universal translator to decode the local babble.
And almost every universe hides a secret. I am often reminded of one of those classic plot devices beloved to the creators of episodic sci fi shows, in which our valiant space explorers land on the Planet of the Week and find it too good to be true. The place is full of nubile women, athletic men and laughing children, gathered around a bustling marketplace or strolling through a manicured garden past ornamental fountains and beds of technicolour flowers. And then, inevitably, we learn the ugly side of the supposed paradise: a draconian system of thought control or implanted memories; a bizarre obsession with astrology that justifies the lifelong incarceration of those born in an accursed month; a tortured child whose screams sustain the idyll of Omelas. Or, in a less sinister but almost equally troubling vein, we find that the extraterrestrial city with its gleaming skyscrapers and flying cars is powered by a hidden battery that is almost depleted; or that the occupants are afflicted with inexplicable (or man-made) infertility and this generation will be the last. Or that it’s all an illusion and our plucky heroes are actually NPCs in some computer simulation or are entombed in stasis chambers, being drip-fed strong psychopharma while their life force is gradually drained away and their memories and imaginations ransacked to create the illusions that hold them in thrall.
The problem is partly that online dating is mostly so random. Very few profiles offer up any meaningful information about the men concerned. Everyone enjoys surfing, watching footy and riding motorbikes, everyone is “kind, loving, trustworthy” and looking for “a partner in crime.” There are so many empty assertions even though surely everyone knows—and knows that everyone else knows—that in dating as in science, as the motto of The Royal Society has it: nullius in verba (don’t take anyone's word for it). Texting and even calling over the phone rarely help to illuminate much, either: most people (including me) find it difficult to make meaningful conversation with a complete stranger. I often find it hard to find a way to open up the other person. I cannot find a flap I can lift, a corner I can get a purchase on, a perforation I can tear—a way to prise them out of their wrapper and see what’s inside. So when I go on a date, I almost always feel that I am venturing out into the complete unknown. I’m standing at the Stargate controls, punching six symbols into the computer at random and hoping that the wormhole’s whoosh won't transport me to a completely barren world—or worse, eject me into the middle of a firefight or within the event horizon of a black hole.
I long to meet someone; I long to make a connection. I have no laundry list of requirements. I try to stay as open as I can. I’m a social person; I’ve been an extrovert ever since my personality settled into its adult groove; I’ve always found it relatively easy to make friends—but to make boyfriends is another thing altogether. I am wandering through a human zoo, peering in at pigeontoed wombats and ribbon-tongued echidna, at the delicate fractal patterns of the veins on a ghost bat’s diaphanous ears and the bright eyes of a quokka looking up expectantly at my cup of kibble. I find myself admiring the perfect stasis of a crocodile and recoiling from the pile of deflated old tyre innards that is a deadly taipan. I am raucously scolded by black cockatoos and silently side-eyed by a pair of black-breasted buzzards. The world is a fascinating menagerie. But I am looking for someone of my own kind, for a mate of my species with whom to climb that ramp into the ark at last. And the waters are rising.