A Field Guide to Irish Women

If that much quoted statistic – that there are three women to every man in Dublin – is to be believed, it’s a jungle out there. Nikki Walsh betrays her sex (well, she offered) with her guide to who to watch out for on the dating scene. Sitting comfortably, gentlemen?

Ms Heartbroken
Find her wallflowering at weddings, emaciated at concerned friends’ dinner parties or flat out at work events (a safe place for all that chaotic energy). If you are the sensitive type who likes nothing better than a gallop on your big white steed, brace yourself for endless conversations about how wonderful he was (he’s an idiot); melancholic silences in restaurants; eyes constantly full of tears, and worst of all, an army of overprotective girlfriends more than eager to interrogate you regarding your intentions – and this is all after date three. If you must save her, remember this: when you finally admit defeat and saddle up for the hills, she and all her friends will tell everyone in Dublin that you are a bastard.

Ms Money
She’s a doctor, a lawyer or something in PR. When she meets you she will make a point of telling you she is not shallow or materialistic. You will believe her. She believes herself. She despairs of her friends: the clique from school (Alex, Mount Anville, Holy Child) who love stockbrokers, weekends in Bellinter, designer dresses from Costume (would you be so kind?) and dinners in Bang. But for all her noble Guardian-borrowed ideas she can’t bear to miss her Friday night coke-fuelled bitching sessions with the girls, is furious when she doesn’t make the waiting list for that designer bag in Brown Thomas and is always late for lunch because she had to top up her fake tan. Then there are the drinking sessions in the Shelbourne, (this one overlaps with Ms Lush, she just hangs out in posher places, drinks posher drinks and has posher friends) and her obvious contempt for your salt-of-the-earth friends. The penny drops: she will never escape her clique or herself. And neither will you.

Ms Vamp
This woman is capable of silencing a room at age 40. She wears a short skirt and a headpiece. Women hate her. “She’s not even pretty,” they hiss. No, she is not. But she is white-hot fire in bed and delicious surrender. Men know this instinctively. Eight weeks with this woman and you will find yourself driving her to rehab, sweeping up the glasses she drops at dinner parties and covering up her lies. Then there’ll be all those rows, and all that making up. When she displays her vulnerability – she’s all eyes, lips and breasts – it will be compelling. What was it F. Scott Fitzgerald said about the tyranny of the weak? You will want to solve her. For a while, she will stop drinking, flirting and conniving. You will propose. She will accept. Six months later she will leave you at the altar. Where is she? Back on the party scene again, soon to be engaged to some fool called Dave.

Ms Damaged
She was daddy’s girl until he left her mother for another woman just before her Leaving Cert. Now she picks her victims carefully. No womanisers or charmers; she stares doe-eyed at eager types who like to think they’ve ‘traded up.’ You’ll think you’ve snagged a real prize until you find out that she hasn’t quite left Simon, her long-term ex. After a tearful confrontation, she promises to leave him, and you return to running her baths. Until friends tell you about Peter – she’s dating him too – and Johnny and Donal. When she leaves you – it won’t be you who does it by the way – the only emotion she will display is scorn. Prepare for years of heartbreak and head-wreckage, as she tells you, watery-eyed over drinks, that you will always be the one.

Ms Head Wreck
She’s on a diet again, and she’s going back to her counsellor because she has some work to do on, well, you, actually. She thinks she might be becoming co-dependent, so she just wants to nip it in the bud. (You have been going out for a month.) Over dinner (no wheat/dairy/sugar/fun – she has digestive problems. They can’t work out if it’s candida or IBS. She’s having tests.) she wonders if you ever got over your first love, or your parents’ divorce. You find yourself wishing you could get mildly pissed. Have you ever considered therapy, she asks? Rebirthing? Perhaps there’s a group therapist you could both talk to. There’s nothing wrong with you, you tell her – you just need a night out with the lads. You thought she was just eccentric at first, but now all this analysis is beginning to grate.

Ms Chippy/Reinvented
She’s the high-flying scholarship girl living a resolutely middle-class life. She owns her own (southside) apartment, shops in Brown Thomas and reads Image. But give her a few drinks and she starts to make scathing comments about your ‘middle-class’ friends. Later, her accent slips, an angry flush creeps up her neck and you have half an hour to settle the bill and flag a taxi before her poisonous attack on your privilege begins. She hates you, you realise sadly, and she hates herself. You tell her you don’t care about where she is from but she doesn’t believe you. Why? Because she is everything she accuses you of: she is a snob.

Ms Artist
Meet her at Monster Truck or McGruders. She’s the ethereal beauty – Winona Ryder pre-shoplifting – with a wardrobe that screams nerd chic: oversized Mongolian jumpers and tweed A-line skirts. Pseudo-spiritual, she curls her creative lip at the ‘material world’ (luckily, Daddy – who works at Arthur Cox – is supportive of her ‘work’) but don’t be fooled: this one’s expensive. While she films cars in gridlock, you will work long hours to pay off that renovated red brick and the red mosaic tiles in the bathroom (“I need colour, I’m an artist”) or that glass cube in the country (“I need light – my sinuses”). And that’s if you get past the first date. This one only hangs out with the right crowd. No gelled hair and cheap suits for her; she only talks to scruffy types who are too cool for school. If you want her, you’d better be a bearded gaeilgeoir or a stockbroker who used to have a beard, with the right music collection and the right trainers.

Ms Perfect
She’s beautiful, intelligent, kind and oh! such a lady. So what’s the catch? Your soft maternal sweetie has a rigid side to her personality that few know about. Over time, she doesn’t want to go out, doesn’t like your friends, wishes you would stop drinking (you had two pints) and glares at you when you have a cigarette. Her criticism is relentless and her silences are full of judgement. (You are not perfect. She cannot forgive you. If you were perfect you would be so bland she wouldn’t love you.) Sex becomes perfunctory: she is – always – on her period, doing the crossword or tired. The subtext? She doesn’t like to lose control. It’s over when she catches you watching porn late at night. “You are,” she says – straight backed and quivering – “a pervert.”

Ms Agenda
She isn’t listening to you. She is looking through you, scanning the room for her future husband. She has no interest in a cautious courtship. She wants the ring and babies, and she wants it now. It’s not just her desperation that repels men (although it certainly doesn’t help), it’s her pragmatism. In her haste, she has lost her sense of romance. As long as you tick the boxes on her list, she doesn’t really care if you connect. Avoid her at 30-something drinks parties in waterside apartments, after work in the Dylan or eagle-eyed at the Galway Races. Ironically, if she could only recover her self-possession, this intelligent, attractive woman (so long as she is not a golddigger) would be something of a catch. In the meantime, if you do date her, be warned: she will not hesitate to sleep with you, if only to make you commit. You won’t. She will be devastated and all the other girls will think you’re a cad.

Ms New Ireland
She’s from Poland, Latvia, Estonia or Spain. She’s younger, prettier and thinner than an Irish girl (she doesn’t drink and loves the gym) and her accent (mad intonation with culchie moments on words such as ‘night’ and ‘craic’) will have you melting into your pint. She’s smart too: she might be a cleaner (reeks of Pledge) but back home she was a pharmacist, librarian or brain surgeon (she’s not bitter). You’re smitten until… she sniggers at your attempts to speak Polish/Latvian; hisses at you in disgust when you order another pint and leaves you hungover and frustrated in bed on Sunday mornings for spinning sessions in the gym. Then there are the wearing comparisons with back home, the constant laments (“That would never happen in Kalisz/Tallinn/Riga”). It’s only a matter of time before that warped-Kerry accent – particularly when she nags – begins to grate. What was wrong, you ask yourself, with Irish women? 

Comments

[C.]

Ms New Ireland = perfect description

[reinvented monied vampish emaciated headwrecker.]

Thank you Nikki for this introspective tell-all and handy compendium to the 'modern Irish woman'. Haha, she nags, sex is perfunctory, she want the ring and babies now,she doesn't like your friends, she's a hard-ass ballbreaker who other women hate,that emaciated tearful fake-tanned wallflower, oh and how she grates, she grates, ha ha. Had so much fun wondering which category I fit into. Not so much in deciding which barrel the dubliner is scraping now. Something like the overcooked, overworn cliched load of shite barrel.

[Neil Brennan]

Dear Reinvented Monied Vampish Emacaited Headwrecker,

Thanks Mam!

Love,
Neil