The dimples made me do it.
With these six works, I can explain away most of my dating history.
Dating as a whole is interesting to say the least. It’s a complex and often time-consuming game that, at some stage, everyone must play.
Play it well and you could find a partner for life. Play it badly and you’ll end up with a good story or a trip to the therapist.
Thankfully, I love a good story… which reminds me of this one time I woke up on a rooftop in Pisa…
Anyway.
I recently threw caution to the wind and agreed to go for coffee with someone I hadn’t met previously.
It wasn’t an online date as such although it did come about through Instagram and Facebook (apparently being asked out by a stranger who follows you online isn’t as creepy as one who follows you in real life!).
A quick Facebook reconnaissance revealed him to be attractive—with incredible dimples—intelligent, witty and we had eight mutual friends, which made me believe it was unlikely that he would be a serial killer.
But he is also 23. To my 31.
Which means three things:
1. He was born in a different decade to me.
2. He’s probably never used a fax machine.
3. He wasn’t alive when Scott and Charlene married on Neighbours (cue Angry Anderson singing ‘Suddenly’).
Yep, THAT young.
Having said that, this isn’t the first time I’ve dated someone younger than me; at the ‘mature’ age of 19, I was dating someone who was 17. And still in high school. My brother’s high school. It was only slightly awkward.
And … well… I’ll end the list there because a girl has to have some secrets.
But I can honestly say that a couple of my past dalliances have come about, in part, due to dimples (theirs, not mine).
In Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, Adonis, the God of beauty and desire, was described as having “in each cheek a pretty dimple”.
Dimples may be small, and technically a genetic quirk caused by shortened facial muscles—but they’re mighty powerful when it comes to attracting the opposite sex.
In fact, a 2010 UK report found there had been an 11 per cent surge in requests made to plastic surgeons to have dimples like UK pop star Cheryl Cole—at a cost of about $1500 per dimple.
Creepy much?
In order to manufacture these not-quite DIY dimples, a plastic surgeon cuts the inside of the cheek and then puts in a suture which pulls the skin in at the site of the desire dimple, causing both scar tissue … and a dimple!
What. The. Hell.
Dimple piercings are another popular move, although if you’d rather not go to such extreme measures, WikiHow has a hilarious ‘natural’ process which will only take 30 minutes a day, for several weeks.
All you need to do is literally poke yourself in the cheeks every day.
Although I LOVED that the story included this handy little disclaimer: “There is no scientific support suggesting that this tactic will work. Hearsay indicates that it is possible to weaken the muscles in your cheek enough to leave lasting, if not slight, dimple marks. Whether or not this is actually true is questionable, at best.”
‘Questionable’ seems a bit of an understatement.
But whatever the cause of dimples, I think they’re bewitching and I’m happy to let them continue to lead me astray.
