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- Tarzan was great at two things: pulling off the loincloth look and swinging from one thing to another.
- It's for the latter that I gave one of my friends the nickname Tarzan.
- I have no idea what she looks like in a loincloth, but her signature move was always swinging from relationship to relationship.
- In this piece, I suggest slowing down the rebound.
My friend was a love junkie. A hookupaholic. She didn't believe in having little breaks between relationships. Instead, she swore by "blended relationships" - when one ends, the next begins, and you swing between the two as swiftly as an orangutan.
To be fair, she was excellent at it. At a time when most of our friendship group struggled to get an evening date that didn't involve doing overtime at work, our Tarzan had no shortage of male Janes. It was almost like she had a production line of dudes under her floorboards.
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The same pattern always emerged: she'd swoop fast, move fast (sometimes move in, fast), and things would end fast. She was also a magnet for unpleasant and extreme characters.
One was so controlling that he'd threaten to break up with her if she went out; the last was so indifferent that when he wasn't working he would smoke cannabis around the clock and demand that she did "women's work" (cooking and cleaning, naturally).
So when she told me she had called time on seeing the latest charmer, I was already expecting news of his sex-cessor. Surprisingly, she decided to cut the line she'd been swinging on. She wasn't moving on. She was moving to Europe. Alone.
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There wasn't even a possibility for her to lapse back to her Tarzaning ways because she didn't have any European standbys.
Oh, and she didn't even have an apartment. So first she found a home, then her bearings, then herself, and then her confidence. Six months later, she reluctantly went on a date. (He - and it - were great. Still are.)
She recently confessed that her years of relationship hopping were deliberately engineered because she didn't want to deal with the negative emotions of being single. She saw it as a sign of weakness, that it might take time to adjust from being half of something to being 100 percent alone.
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She had no interest in emotional rebuilding and considered herself strong enough to keep her own walls standing.
But rebound guys were this Tarzan's loincloth. They covered up her emotional bits, but in terms of their potential as future life partners, they were as useless as a plastic stitch over a broken leg.
Right now, dating apps like Tinder make it easier than ever to Tarzan your way through dating. But rush in and you could end up rushing out, because at the end of a failed relationship, we're a mess.
It's normal to be a mess. And embracing that beautiful, fragile mess - with wine, womanhood or whatever other brilliant activities that don't involve a penis - is a good way to move on.
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Relying on a rope to get to the next stage was great for the king of the jungle, but the queen of the dating world needs to stand strong on her own two feet. As my friend now admits of her former Tarzaning ways: "Yeah, they were apesh**".
Ultimately though, it's all up to you - your life, your choice.
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