My chemist has gone early. I’m not talking about a lax approach to closing time or his untimely passing, but that even though we have all barely moved on from October, he’s started with the Christmas wrap.
As joyful, jolly and goodwill-to-all-men as that might be, every currently-single person knows that nothing good can come of the festive season
If nothing has pried you off the couch thus far, the concept of spending ANOTHER new years eve at risk of a sob into your champagne or another Jan 1 resolution-triggered lash at online dating certainly will.
Get one of these family Christmas greeting cards complete with gushing account of a year full of wondrous adventures and a procession of successes from over-achieving kiddies and you are going to end up on a quest to ensure that this time next year you will have some loved-up coupley soft focus offering of your own.
However, December is not the time to kick off a new relationship. Here’s why
It’s an edgy time
The festive season is rather unfortunately placed at the end of a working year, and if you are anything like me you are barely staggering over the line. If accumulated fatigue doesn’t make you as ratty as a red-cordial-fuelled three year old then the horror of shopping for the ever increasing list of kids that your siblings are busting out certainly will. As the TV stations start churning out ‘the year that was’ offal in the non-ratings season, you may find that this year’s set of natural disasters offer an uncanny parallel to your love life and the recounting of achievements in cinema, science and medicine only serve to make you feel you have contributed about as much to society as Miley Cyrus.
This accumulates in an insidious fashion until the next thing you know you are shouting at the checkout attendant for having the scanner beep switched up too loud.
Not conducive to offering up a sedate and chilled vibe to a new partner.
Tis the season for fashion fails
If you attempt to hose down your inner Grinch by throwing yourself wholeheartedly into the season at hand, amongst the persusal of gingerbread houses and Griswold-esque inflatable decorations you will find you are sliding down that slippery slope of festive fashion.
The first sign is Christmas jewellery
Nothing resembling a biscuit should ever be worn as jewellery. Start there and you are one Christmas carol chorus away from something like this.
If you are a little on the short side you might get whisked off by Santa to join the toy-packing crew for next year but no other red-blooded man is going to find that attractive.
Unless they are prone to a few festive fashion fails of their own.
It’s a high risk environment
The festive season involves two of the natural enemies of a fledgling relationship – booze and families. Strike up a relationship in the first breath of December and there are some inherent hurdles. Alcohol always features in the festive season night-out and you may negotiate many of these with tremendous grace and poise, but you can guarantee that the only one where you invite your new fella is the one where you throw back one too many mojitos and rock a bad santa impression.
If you negotiate this wrinkle and get past the mid-month, then choosing to participate in your respective family Christmas gatherings is about as safe as betting on the new Karshashian kiddie growing up humble.
Gift selection becomes perilous
When you attempt gift selection at a point in your relationship where you can barely recall the colour of his eyes or how he takes his coffee, you are going to freak yourself sideways:
a) trying to choose something and
b) agonising over whether the two of you have gift-value parity
Don’t believe me? An entire Big Bang Theory episode was dedicating to exploring the latter – google the ‘Bath Item Gift Hypothesis’ if you aren’t sure. Note: at this point you’ve followed every kind of crackpot dating advice so surely taking cues from a fictional, socially-inept physicist will feel quite sane.
But hey, this year could be different, and there’s always the festive staple of mistletoe ready to trigger some smooching.
O’ come all ye faithful. And fast!
navigatingdating 
This is bloody hilarious. I actually said out loud ‘Oh f*** off’ at the picture of Christmas jewellery. Words cannot describe how much I despise Christmas jewellery. And the whole smug-family-newsletter thing? My family used to do that. But only ironically. Promise. And one year, after becoming suicidal and furious over the annual offering of another family’s newsletter which was teeming with things like ‘Louisa played the tuba in front of the Queen’, ‘Francis got 1,000,000% in a Maths test’ and ‘Graham has become Lord of a small island in the North Sea’, we wrote one in response that simply said ‘The Mayhew family was voted ‘Best Family in the History of the World 2009’. That was it. We didn’t get a Christmas letter back from that particular family. SUCCESS.
Loved this post, love your style, love Christmas jumpers, HATE Christmas jewellery. Just hate it.
*squeal* Thanks so much Becky!!!
Even worse than gingerbread men earrings are those with the bells that actually tinkle. Who would want that going on right near your eardrum? I have also noted that the modern equivalent of the smug family newsletter is smug family facebook postings – usually with the hashtag #soblessed.
Love that you read it and commented as you are my blog idol. (please let me know if this is sounding stalker-ish) Have a great day!!