Is London really a big city?  Is the world indeed a large place?  I’m starting to doubt it.  As I come into weekly online contact with friends (or often just “friends” with inverted commas) from Lebanon to Liverpool, the world is starting to look less like an infinite, unknowable expanse and more like a small, tangled cat’s cradle, with digital links binding us all into uneasy false intimacy.  It now seems rare to meet somebody who is a completely unknown quantity – through social networking everyone knows someone who knows someone who… you get the idea.

Bearing this in mind, I completely understood my friend G’s enthusiasm for the man he’d just started dating.  Discussing him with me in a deserted café in Bethnal Green last Sunday (everyone else was at Lovebox), G mentioned his most impressive quality:

“You know what’s best about him?” he asked “He’s practically a Facebook virgin”

“What, you mean he doesn’t even have a profile?”

“Sure he’s got one, but we’ve only got three mutual friends in common.  Two of them are old work colleagues of mine I hardly see and one of them lives in Madrid.  We’ve got almost no connections at all – and that’s after his living in London for 7 years” he smiled.

So it’s true.  There has long been a rumour that there is actually a gay man in East London that Nobody We Know has had, but due to lack of verifiable sightings, he’s now been filed with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster as just a beautiful legend.  Meet someone you think is new and invariably someone says something like: “watch out for that one, a friend of mine did him and he stole a box of breakfast cereal the morning after”.  You might also get something like “he’s still in love with my ex and goes round to shag him every second Tuesday” or the enigmatic and not entirely unpromising “he’s dirty”.

This run of familiarity and rumour is nothing true love or lust can’t overcome, but it’s slightly annoying.  Don’t we all want to find someone different and shut the world outside for a while?  To forget our futures shrinking away second by second and to find someone with whom to live briefly in the here and now?  If the hazily understood object of your affections turns out to be friends with people you hate, or just out of a relationship with someone you once shagged absentmindedly, then the world outside sneaks its way under the bedroom door and escape is harder.  And believe me, when you’ve been writing about your love life publicly for years, it’s nigh on impossible.

I’m pleased G has proved its possible to break out, to find someone likeminded, attractive, kind and based in London for years who is still as yet not yet entangled in your social network.  At least that way, he gets to find out his new man’s strengths and flaws all by himself.

Popularity: 7% [?]