The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

I have had very little success romantically. Even though I am the product of billions of years of evolution, and every single one of my ancestors got laid (they must have done, for me to be here), I have had great difficulties finding a mate.

In this post, I'll go over all of my romantic failures in excruciating detail.

Girlfriend #1: Sarah

Attractiveness rating: 5/10

Furthest I got with her: French kissing

I got my first girlfriend at the age of eleven. Her name was Sarah and she went to the all-girls school on the other side of town. We met at a school disco and she instantly claimed me as her boyfriend. I didn't find her attractive, but she forced herself onto me. And she was obsessed with French kissing. She'd force her tongue down my throat for minutes at a time. I didn't enjoy it. I awkwardly kept my eyes open throughout. While kissing, we would 'dance' by slowly rotating on the spot.

She once took my hand and said, "Let's go outside", but the teacher wouldn't let us out of the building. If we had escaped, I imagine we'd have had anal sex behind the dustbins, or at the very least, I would have received my first handjob.

Despite her outgoing sexuality, I dumped her at the next disco. I told her, "I don't like you any more," and she ran away crying.

Girlfriend #1.5: Sixth form girl

Attractiveness rating: 9/10

Furthest I got with her: Hair touching

This one time, one of the sixth-form girls in my school moved a stray strand of hair from my face while I was waiting in the lunch queue and her touch on my hair was the single-most best feeling I've ever experienced, without exaggeration.

Girlfriend #2: ???

Attractiveness rating: ???/10

Furthest I got with her: Her phone number

I met another girl at the school disco shortly after that. She gave me her phone number and told me to call her. From that point on I understood we were boyfriend and girlfriend, though it was hard to be sure because I never actually saw her again. I can't even say I remember her name or even what she looked like.

I called her once, from a public phone box on the way home from school (I would have used the phone at home but I didn't want my entire family listening), but her brother picked up the phone instead and asked what I wanted.

"Can I speak to ??? please," I said.

"What do you want?" her brother said.

"Just tell her that Paul phoned," I said.

Then I hung up without even leaving a return number.

A week later, after school, her friends ran across the street to gleefully tell me I'd been dumped. On the one hand, I was shocked and saddened, but on the other hand, it was nice to know she had thought of me as her boyfriend after all, so there's that.

Lisa

Attractiveness rating: 3/10

Furthest I got with her: A date. A pretty terrible date.

As a teenager, I used to go to a teenage reading club, though ‘reading club’ was a misnomer because we didn't actually read anything. We just dossed around for an hour in the library and then went home.

One of the teenagers there was called Lisa. She was an unattractive girl, around my age, who had blonde hair and wore glasses. She invited me on a date to the local family entertainment complex, Star City. My mom drove me there.

I met Lisa in the centre of Star City. This was my first proper date in my life! My first date! Christ, I was terrified. I didn't know what you're supposed to do on a first date. All I had to go by was what I had seen in American movies and TV, which, as usual, was entirely unhelpful. From what I had seen, I thought dates were supposed to involve:

• sipping milkshakes at an American diner
• drifting along in a swan boat on the Tunnel of Love
• lending her my college football sweatshirt to keep her warm
• driving to Make-Out Point in a convertible
• getting killed by a werewolf while we're making out

But none of this was possible because:

• we didn't have college football in Birmingham
• I was twelve and didn't know how to drive
• I didn't own a convertible anyway
• there was no Make-Out Point in Birmingham, England that I knew of. If there was one, it was probably behind the bins round the back of the Showcase cinema in town
• girls terrified me more than werewolves

I remember feeling nervous and awkward. I couldn't think of anything to say to her.

"Do you want to do bowling?" she asked.

"Yeah, okay," I said.

We went into the arcade and paid for one game of bowling. We played in silence. To make matters worse, I was crap at the game and rarely hit the pins. At times I would throw the ball and the ball would roll slower and slower and eventually roll to stop short of the pins and I had to try to knock it out of the way with another ball.

I tried to make Lisa laugh by grabbing a bowling ramp and using that (the joke was that the ramp was for little kids to use, not teenagers) but Lisa sighed instead.

After that, Lisa suggested we go to McDonald's. It was there I made my final mistake, the mistake that would render the date irretrievably lost.

I was putting my food down on the table and my arm clumsily collided with my paper cup of cola, spilling the cola all over the table.

"Let's move to another table," I hissed quickly, hoping to get away before the staff saw us. But Lisa — mature, sensible, Lisa — just rolled her eyes, took some napkins, and started wiping the cola up. I stood there, just watching, as Lisa cleaned my mess up for me. I should have helped her clean at least, but I didn't want to risk anything else going wrong so I thought it best to do nothing.

Lisa didn't talk to me for the rest of the date. Not. A single. Word. We went through the rest of the date in silence until our moms came to pick us up.

She didn't ask me for a second date.

The Buffy poster

Attractiveness rating: 10/10

Furthest I got with her: Fourth base! Oh yeah!

On the wall next to bed I had a Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster from HMV. The poster featured Sarah Michelle Geller as her character Buffy. She was wearing a low-cut top and a very short skirt with a slit in it. I remember the slit vividly because it revealed the upper part of her thigh.

One day, while horny, I had an idea. I would fuck the Buffy poster.

There was only one problem: My eight-year-old brother was in the room with me. He was playing on the floor with his toys.

Not to be undeterred, I put my crotch against the poster, at the place where Sarah Michelle Geller's vagina would be. Then I started to rub my crotch against it.

I don't know if my brother saw what was going on. If we did, we had probably wondering why his weird brother was rubbing himself against an A2 sheet of paper stuck to his bedroom wall with Blu-tac.

But sadly, grinding my crotch against the poster didn't feel good. I had hoped it would be just like fucking Sarah Michelle Gellar in real life, but instead it just felt like I was rubbing my dick up against a poster on the wall, which was exactly what I was doing. So I stopped.

Still though, I got to fourth base with that poster, so oh yeah!

By the way, what I really wanted to do though was cut a hole in the poster where Sarah Michelle Gellar's vagina would be. Then I could stick my dick through the hole and pretend I was having sex with her. Though I'm not sure how that would even work - surely you'd need a vagina on the other side? And also I'd probably get a few paper cuts on my dick while I was it. Plus, I imagined my mom finding the poster and seeing the hole — a hole exactly where Buffy's vagina would be — and my mom would know I had been fucking the poster. She would know. So that is why I never cut a hole in that poster. Or any other poster.

Interlude: University

When I was seventeen, I was talking to a university student oven MSN Messenger, and I asked him, "Is it true you can have sex at university whenever you want?"

He replied, “One can only try,” and added a winking face.

His response wasn’t a definite ‘yes’ but it wasn’t a definite ‘no’ either, so I continued to daydream that university was a place where anyone could have sex at any time.

When I did finally start uni, the student union gave out free condoms during Freshers’ Week, thus cementing the idea in my brain that this was a sexual paradise. I couldn’t wait to start getting laid.

But no sex came. Not even a snog from a drunk girl. Not even a fumble in the cloakroom, which wouldn’t have happened anyway because the cloakroom was staffed at all times.

I blamed the lack of sex on the fact I was still living at home. Everyone else seemed to be living on the campus. That’s where all the sex and orgies seemed to be going on. All the romance.

While everyone else was living on the campus and getting laid, I was living at home, still in my childhood bedroom, which I shared with my 13-year-old brother. I slept in the top bunk of our bunkbed and he slept in the bottom.

Sharing a bunk bed with your 13-year-old brother is the very furthest away from sex that you can get, unless you count having sex with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster stuck on your bedroom wall. Living at home with your mom and dad is the polar opposite of the Playboy mansion. I mean, where are you supposed to have sex if you bring a girl home? In the top bunk while your brother, mom, dad, and sister all listen?

I remember looking out the window of my bedroom and yearning for something different, something beyond the dim outline of trees and buildings against the dark sky. A life where I went to bed with a girlfriend, instead of saying good night to my mom and climbing up to the top bunk of a bunk bed.

So I decided to move out from home.

“You can’t move out!” said my mom, aghast. “You don’t know how to cook! You don’t have a job! You don’t know how to use a washing machine! You don't have any money!”

It was hypocritical of my mom telling me I didn’t know how to cook when she couldn’t cook herself. She could grill some frozen fish fingers but that was about it.

She saw me as a retard basically. She thought I would be living with her and my dad for the rest of my life.

This made me angry. So I moved out of home and onto the university campus. My mom couldn't stop me.

My mom wrote about it in a letter to her cousin:

The latest thing in this house came out of the blue – Paul decided that he wanted to live on the university campus even though we are only ten minutes bus drive away. I thought he was bluffing but he upped and went last week. Trouble is though he has to pay rent for the whole term till the end of June, £57 a week! [...] Paul has never been away from home before and can only make toast and microwave meals but he is determined to do it. He is over eighteen so I can't stop him.

What makes me cry bitter tears of laughter is the "£57 a week" with an exclamation mark to indicate what a great deal of money my mom thought that was. £57 a week! That's a bargain compared to other places I've lived. I once lived in an apartment in Cork where the rent was €1,300 a month. I'd like to know what my mom would think of that. But I can't because she's dead.

Kallie

Attractiveness rating: 8/10

Furthest I got with her: Sitting next to her

Because I had a weird personality, my best chances were with girls who didn't know me well.

For example, one night I was at a karaoke night at the student union bar. A girl from my Biology course called Kallie was sitting at the same table as me.

At some point, she got up from her chair, walked over and plonked herself down next to me. There she sat, saying nothing but just smiling in a drunken stupor.

At first, I was too stunned to understand. But then I realised: She liked me!

Her sober friend, who knew me better, hissed to her, “What are you doing? Come back here!”

But Kallie drunkenly shook her head in defiance and smiled. And so her friend could only give me angry stares from across the table, as if to say, "Don't take advantage of my friend tonight or I'll cut off your balls!"

But she needn't have worried. I was too shy to open my mouth and talk to Kallie. And because of my shyness, nothing happened.

Frankie

Attractiveness rating: 9/10

Furthest I got with her: Getting hit on the head by her several times with a plastic bottle

One night, at the same bar in the student's union, I saw a perfect girl. I don't know what it was about her, but I fell in love with her at first sight. It was hard to take my eyes off her. But I never talked to her, and when the night finished I knew, with a heavy heart, that I’d never see her again.

A few days later, I joined a jujitsu club, and- Whoa! My eyes almost popped out of my head. It was the Perfect Girl! She was here!

She was joining the jujitsu club, just like me. The universe had granted me a second chance. It was clear that we were meant to be together.

I soon found out that the girl's name was Frankie. Frankie! Of course! O, Frankie, a beautiful name! (Now that years have passed, I can finally see with sober clarity that "Frankie" is a really weird name. What is it short for? Frankenstein?)

But unfortunately, like everyone else, Frankie found me strange.

One night, in a bar, she came over and talked to me, one-on-one. I don't remember what we talked about; small talk about ju-jitsu, I guess. I think she wanted to give me a chance, a chance to prove that I wasn't as weird as everyone said I was. Unfortunately, I actually really was weird, and so I blew it, and so she never talked to me again.

But things got worse. During a jujitsu session, I accidentally punched her friend in the nose and gave her a nosebleed. Her friend had to go to one side and try to stop her noseblood with a tissue. Frankie glared at me with hatred. The sensei told everyone to go back to training, and I was supposed to throw Frankie to the floor. But when I tried to grapple her, she dodged out the way somehow and started hitting me on the head with a plastic bottle. She hit me 17 times, quite hard in fact, while everyone laughed.

Two random drunk girls at the Freakers Ball

Attractiveness rating: 7/10

Furthest I got with them: Arguing on the steps outside the student union about whether to go home with them or not

One night, I was dressed as a fireman for a university fancy dress party called the Freakers Ball, and these two drunk girls came up to me and insisted that I come home with them. They were practically begging me to come back to their dorm room. This is a true event and it actually happened. I didn't dream it or imagine it. You see, I was actually still somewhat handsome back then, and these girls didn't know how weird I was; they only saw me in my fireman costume and they were drunk enough to approach me.

Anyway, I couldn't go with them, because my dad was sitting in the car around the corner waiting to give me a lift home. That's a shame. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d gone home with these two girls instead. I assume a threesome. Maybe I should have invited my dad along, and then we could have had a father-son foursome. One girl for him and one girl for me.

Interlude - Domestic abuse advert

For a while there was a domestic abuse awareness advert on TV. A teenage boy and his girlfriend were in a bedroom.

"So... do you wanna do it?" says the boy, while stroking his girlfriend's thigh.

"No, let's just watch TV," she said.

He didn't like that. So he grabbed his girlfriend's hair. He yanked it hard.

She let out a cry of pain. "Please, let go of me," she said between sobs. "I'll... I'll do it."

He let go of her. She was crying. She went over to the bed.

"Well, go on then," he said. "Show me something."

The advert ended. But we can presume they went on to have sex.

The irony killed me. Here I was, the nicest guy in the world (my own world, that is), someone who wouldn't hurt a fly (flies scared me), and yet girls found me repulsive! And here this guy was, an evil bastard, someone who probably tortured kittens in his free time, and yet his girlfriend was on her knees every night giving him blowjobs!

What a fucking joke. There must be millions of guys like him, smacking their girlfriends round the chops and then getting sex as a reward. Meanwhile, here I was, with my limp dick in one hand and a computer mouse in the other, fapping to niche internet porn. The closest I'd been to a real vagina was my mom's when I was born, which doesn't sound great, does it? And yet the asshole in the advert got pussy every day just by smacking his girlfriend around!

And yet, I believe that when presented with a choice, most women would choose the wife-beating sadist over me.

The prostitute

Attractiveness rating: 2/10

Furthest I got with her: A hand-job

I finished university and now I was living in Bournemouth. It was as far as I could go in my Suzuki Alto before reaching the sea.

And at the age of 23, I was still a virgin.

When you aren’t having any [sex], it’s all you can think about, and it feels like your biggest problem.

That was my biggest secret, that I was still a virgin. I couldn't tell anyone, not even my flatmate's cat Toots, whose litter box was in the kitchen and always made the kitchen smell of cat shit.

I decided that I would do what any normal man would do in this situation: lose my virginity to a prostitute.

You might think I should have waited for 'the right girl to come along', but I'd already waited several years and no girls had yet shown up. If I continued waiting for the right girl to come along, I'd be dead from old age before anyone even so much as touched my penis.

Finally, I found the website of a brothel nearby. Mustering up all my courage, I picked up the phone and dialled the number.

The phone call went like this:

Me: "Hi, uh... is this the massage parlour?"

Woman: "Yes, that's right."

Me: "Uh, okay. Do you uh... do something other than massages? Like, uh... hand jobs?"

Woman:"Sorry?"

Me: "Hand jobs. Or blow jobs."

Woman:"Yes."

Me: "Okay... I'll be there in twenty minutes."

I drove down to the city centre. It was exciting knowing that an hour from now, whatever happened, I would no longer be a virgin.

I rang the bell.

An overweight, middle-aged woman answered the door. She was dressed in some kind of lingerie but there was something wrong. The lingerie made her look worse, not better. I think it was because she was fat and old.

"I phoned earlier?" I said.

Without a word, she beckoned me inside.

She led me straight down a plain white corridor and into a room. Inside the room, there was a bed with a plastic sheet on it, a chest of drawers, and a couple of chairs.

She started getting undressed. So it seemed this was the prostitute. No choice in the matter. It was a shame as I would have chosen someone younger and preferably attractive.

I didn't even know her name. I didn't know the name of the woman I was about to lose my virginity to. But I didn't ask.

I took my clothes off too. It felt strangely normal, getting naked, which was a relief. It felt functional.

"So, what do you?" she asked, while removing her stockings.

"I'm a postman," I said while pulling off my socks.

"A postman?" she said. "Do you like it?"

"No," I said. Thinking I should add some further explanation, I added, "It's crap."

I was took off my pants. She looked at my flaccid penis and said, "Someone's shy!"

Was I supposed to have an erection already? I didn't know how any of this worked.

"Lie down," she said. So I did. I stole a glance at her fat, naked body but regretted it immediately.

She joined me on the bed, making the bed creak.

She reached into a drawer. Took out a condom. Tore the packet open. Then she rolled the condom onto my flaccid penis. I hoped my dick would come to life soon because a) I wanted to lose my virginity and b) I was paying £35.

Then she began to use her hand to jerk off my dick. I felt nothing. My anxiety, the condom, and ten years of masturbating to increasingly niche fetish porn with my hand's iron grip meant my penis was dead to her touch.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine I was watching porn. Meanwhile, the woman was pumping my limp dick up and down with her hand.

It wasn't working.

She got frustrated and stopped. Then she asked, slyly, "Do you want to fuck me?"

"What?" I replied.

"I said, do you want to fuck me?"

Presumably, she thought I'd cry "WOULD I?!" and my dick would leap up like a spring. But instead, my dick remained limp.

"Er... okay?" I said.

She lay down and spread her legs apart. There was nothing but folds of fat. I tapped my limp penis against her fat folds, hoping to find an entrance, like Gandalf tapping his staff at the door to the mines of Moria. But there was nothing.

She was frowning at me. Frowning's not a good sign.

So I went back to the surprisingly difficult task of putting my willy in her vagina.

"Umm..." I said.

I put my limp willy where I thought her vagina should be. Then I started making a humping motion, like a fish out of water. But my dick slipped out.

So I tried again, again placing my dick in the spot I thought her vagina should be. But my dick slipped out again.

She gave me a look that said, "You have to be kidding me." Then she rolled her eyes and grabbed my penis.

Then she began jerking me off hard as if she was milking a cow that had pissed her off. I mean, hard.

After precisely 1 minute and 57 seconds of her yanking hard at my cock, I came.

I left the £35 on the chest of drawers by the bed.

I spent the next half hour walking around Bournemouth in a state of pure bliss. Finally, I was no longer a virgin! I was part of the human race! No longer did I have to carry the terrible secret of virginity around me with me! I was NORMAL!

I was so happy that I went into M&S and shoplifted a tin of biscuits.

I wondered if women could sense that I'd just lost my virginity. That I was now 'open for business'. But the answer was no - women still basically ignored me.

But thinking back, I don't think my penis actually made it into that lady's vagina. And if it didn't, then technically I was still a virgin. Because if I understand the rules of virginity correctly, I have to put my dick into a vagina for it to count as a loss of virginity.

So I was still a virgin.

I WAS STILL A VIRGIN.

Jenny the German girl

Attractiveness rating: 9/10

Furthest I got with her: A kiss

Next I moved to Canada. There I lived in a hostel for eight months, where I ramped up my efforts to have sex and get a girlfriend. The first girl I was drawn to was Jenny, a shy German. She was young and attractive and had an alluring quietness as if she'd seen firsthand the grief of a thousand wars.

We were sharing a cigarette when I said, "I'd like to kiss you ... I've never kissed a German girl before." She shrugged as if to say, "Warum nicht?" We kissed for a few moments, without tongues. I was elated, as I'd last kissed a girl 13 years ago.

The next day I asked if I could kiss her again, but she squirmed and fell silent. Later, I took her hand as we walked, but she looked at me quizzically and said, "What's the point of starting a relationship if I'm leaving in a couple of days?"

Meanwhile, my friends were encouraging me to shave my head. I had a receding hairline and a large fringe which often stuck up in the air. My nickname was "Tintin". Every time I’d been to the barber's, I’d asked them only to shave the sides and back of my head, and not to touch the top. Despite the hairdresser’s protests, I'd thought the style was cool.

Jenny joined in on the teasing by promising she'd kiss me again if I shaved my head. So I did indeed shave my head - completely bald, in fact. Standing on the hostel porch, I asked her, "So what about that kiss?" She looked unsure, like a teenage girl unwilling to dance with her dad. It was then I made the mistake of licking my lips, out of habit, as they were dry. She laughed because she thought I was preparing myself for the kiss. The moment was ruined. I never kissed her again and the next day she left.

The random fat girl

Attractiveness rating: 3/10

Furthest I got with her: Kissing in bed

A few weeks later, some friends and I went drinking. We ended up talking to a group of giggling teenage girls, and the fattest, ugliest one wanted to come home with me. I was thrilled, as this was the first time I'd pulled a girl. I didn't mind her appearance because I had beer goggles on. We went back to my hostel and we started making out in my bunk bed. However, there were three other guys in the dorm, sleeping. She said, "This is too weird", rolled over and fell asleep. I lay there all night, admiring her, and in the morning she put her shoes on and left without saying a word.

Bonnie

Attractiveness rating: 4/10

Furthest I got with her: Kissing with tongues

Bonnie worked at the hostel, folding laundry. She was in her 30s and from Taiwan. She would sit by me in the evening when I played keyboard. She often asked me for neck massages, and she kissed me on the cheek to say goodnight.

One night, a guy was flirting with her. A friend asked me, "I thought Bonnie was yours?"

YOURS? Did this mean I HAD A GIRLFRIEND?

In fact, it did. We went to the park together. We watched films, her in my arms. We sat on the terrace and kissed (she liked to bite my lip while kissing). Finally, after all these years, I HAD A GIRLFRIEND. Her English was poor and she was sexually frigid, but nevertheless, she was my girlfriend.

Melody

Attractiveness rating: 7/10

Furthest I got with her: Kissing

Meanwhile, I was planning a trip to Quebec City with my friends. The hostel receptionist, a Quebecois girl called Melody, wanted to come too. She was tiny, had about a hundred tattoos, and seemed permanently high. We'd flirted a few times and even kissed once or twice, but she'd always remind me she had a boyfriend.

Days before the trip, Melody broke up with her boyfriend. While drunk, she led me outside and held me intimately close. Some of our friends could see us, which pleased me. I wanted a reputation as a "player".

"You know, we could... have sex," I suggested to her.

"Not in the hostel," she said. "But I promise we'll have sex in Quebec City."

Looking back, I’m appalled at my sleazy behaviour. Also, I regret not getting that promise in writing. In Quebec City, Melody went to a bar together. Afterwards, I walked her to my rental car (she wanted to sleep to it as she was too cheap to pay for a hostel bed). There, I kissed her, but frustratingly, she didn't want to go any further. So the next day, we drove back to Montreal having only kissed each other.

Afer that, Bonnie became distant from me. We didn't kiss anymore and she barely spoke to me. I didn't know why. It’s obvious now, of course – she thought I’d slept with Melody in Quebec City.

Girlfriend

Attractiveness rating: 10/10 (I have to put that because she's my wife)

Furthest I got with her: Full penetrative intercourse and two kids

All the while I was flirting with other girls, including a Spaniard called Girlfriend. One night, Girlfriend and I stayed up late watching a film called Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. Near the end, she moved her hand so that it was touching mine. I didn't know if it was on purpose or an accident. I left my hand there. Then Girlfriend starting stroking my hand, with one finger. I looked at her. She smiled apologetically yet expectantly. I leaned in to kiss her. Then we made out on the couch for about an hour.

I broke up with Bonnie the next day. Immediately she gave an excessive smile and said "That's ok! I understand! Don't worry about it!"

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m fine!” she replied, grinning.

She wasn’t though. That night she got drunk and pulled a rebound guy.

The day after that, I was practising the guitar on the hostel terrace. It was raining so I was sitting in a shelter. Bonnie came to see me. She immediately started crying.

"I don't mind that you and Girlfriend are together. I know that you two get along better than you and me. But what hurts me is that Girlfriend went behind my back... she betrayed me... she's supposed to be my friend!"

I got up to comfort her.

"Don't touch me!" she shrieked.

I loved the drama. It felt like being on Dawson's Creek. I had always wanted to be a character on Dawson's Creek.

Girlfriend and I have been together ever since. We've had sex multiple times and I have two kids to prove it.

But, deep down, I will always miss that Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster.