Don’t date a writer. I wouldn’t

Late-night trysts with Webster and Collins. Posthumous affairs with 19th-century authors. Writer Leigh-Anne Hunter explains why she would never go out with herself

Mother always told me: never trust a man who wears white shoes. Mr X’s were slightly beige. So I married him.

Perhaps I sensed a more stable personality in the wearer of those sensible shoes. Someone who would balance me as a young writer. Mr X, an IT guy, was as straight-laced as they come. He was steak and chips. I was paprika curry.

My hunch was right. Mr X puts up with me, and bless him for it. Because I would never marry a writer.

We met at the international NGO where we both worked. Huddling in the glacial IT  server room, dark but for flashes of electronic light, I’d quote Dickens while he regaled me with tech-speak. It was poetry in binary code.

story_article_left1

I travelled frequently. On assignment in the Congo, the tin-can plane I was flying in almost  swan-dived into the Congo River.

Later I tried to tell Mr X what had happened over a crackling phone line. “I flipping nearly cr...a...shed in a godd...am plane.” “You went skinny dipping with Saddam Hussein?”

It’s plausible. I wouldn’t call my job dangerous as much as unpredictable. Mr X worries. “What do you mean you’re interviewing a vampire at his house?” he said. “No, no,” I said. “He's a reformed vampire. He’s gone fruitarian.” 

 Mr X  would listen sans complaint when, as an annoyingly chirpy rookie, I’d retell the  banter I’d overheard round the sludge-encrusted contraption that poses as a coffee machine. Things like: “Try book a hotel room in a war zone. No one answers the bloody phone.”

He chuckled at my stories, like when an editor chucked water from a flower vase over a writer’s head when his copy wasn’t snappy enough. The reporter sat dripping at his desk until sunset.

On deadline day all you’d hear was the tik-tak of keyboards being punched into submission.  I loved it.

The thing with writers is that we’re constantly writing. More than likely we are writing the scene we’re in as we’re in it, in our heads. “Jake’s wife, a petite blonde, pouted when he corrected her blunder at a dinner party. She had said ‘dangling marsupial’ when it was obviously dangling participle.

Jake knew he’d have to make up for it with some form of commercial gift. Right after he finished this paragraph...” How annoying it must be to know, as a non-writer, that your relationship is the subject of your lover’s unpublished novel? Going for marriage counselling? Fantastic. Resentment makes for great prose.

block_quotes_start To make him feel included I recruited him on a few stories. One was about a dominatrix, a Boudica-like babe in cling-wrap leather block_quotes_end

It’s said we are attracted to someone because our genes are compatible. Maybe so is our grammar.

I’d say I’m a cliff-hanger ellipsis. Mr X is a full stop. Stoic. Grounded. The anchor that keeps me from floating into a sea of pernickety curlicues.

I once interviewed an amusement-park assistant whose job it was to push a large silver button about every 33 seconds to release a trap-door. “It takes patience,” she said. Try being married to a writer.

But Mr X forgives me my late-night trysts with the dictionary and the tell-tale cologne of newsprint on my blouse. And the many times I’ll rehash the day’s interviews.  “He had the biggest penis…” “That’s nice honey, please pass the potatoes.” He needn’t have worried. “He” was a Romanian pachyderm.

story_article_right2

“She’s a writer,” he whispered once to a checkout lady by way of explanation, that time I shouted “Proboscis!” in a supermarket after I’d been searching my brain for the word. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We see them a lot. In the booze aisle.”

I’ve realised I will never be one of those wives who say, “You must come for din-dins.” Mr X arrives home, asks: “Did you do the dishes? You know, those things in the sink growing legs?” “Hmmm? What’s a synonym for obfuscate?”

He always says I got the “cool job”. How was your day honey? Well, I rode a russet Arabian gelding with a Rapunzel mane. Mr X had had a dalliance with an Excel spreadsheet. Life just isn’t fair.

To make him feel included I recruited him on a few stories. One was about a dominatrix, a Boudica-like babe in cling-wrap leather.

“So you want me to get tied up and spanked by a gorgeous woman for research?” he said. “I think I can manage.” He arrived in the dungeon after work wearing plaid and a pocket calculator.

In a way, we’re not entirely different, even if he does wear beige shoes. He fiddles with microchips. I fiddle with words. And sometimes, on a good day, we get it right.