With his debut book, memoir Coward of Love – a ‘tale of love, lust and everything in-between’ – author Cooper Canon has been refreshingly honest about his romantic life. Here, he makes an appeal for more honesty in dating.
By Cooper Canon
Honesty – a trait that in a kinder world would be near the top of the tree for desirableness, along with compassion and kindness.
As it is, however, it’s just a word, and one that in the world of dating is, it would seem, largely buried in the dirt.
In writing my book Coward Of Love, this is an issue that has raised its head numerous times.
For I penned my candid ‘warts and all’ memoir of my romantic adventures almost out of compulsion. I felt it had to be done and that was reason enough, somewhat hoping that putting my honest experiences to paper would help me make sense of them, even if it was painful to relive certain moments.
It’s perhaps something all should consider more often.
But honesty has to be a two-way street for it to have any meaning and therein lies the problem: lies and deceit are not only easier but also make matters much less personal.
I’m not deluded enough to say I have never lied in this but feel I’ve been honest more often than not, which is why certain experiences in my life, recorded in Coward of Love, have been horrendously painful for me.
One such example would be a time when I was told – after the fact – that if I’d been more forward earlier on then things could have been different further down the line.
However, before we first met up I was told in clear terms that it would be for “drinks as friends”. To act in any way different to that would, then, have been wrong.
More broadly speaking, but also gleaned from my personal experience, I believe that men and women operate in vastly different ways.
While I’m no psychologist, this assessment comes from my interactions with others.
Men are, in simple terms, hardwired to seek an advantage, going back to our earliest days as hunter-gatherers. An advantage must be sought and gained in order to ensure survival.
Taking this belief and applying it more specifically to the world of dating and relationships, it seems that men will tend to seek to gain an advantage and the upper hand. Not all men, of course – I, for example, tend to stumble through experiences and hope for the best – but most.
A friend of mine, for instance, treated every relationship he had as some great game that was played to be won.
When that is the mindset, it soon becomes necessary for a greater advantage and control. Manipulation creeps in as a means to maintain the advantage and in some cases, as it did with my friend, leads to the conclusion they have ‘won’ the game.
When this applies there is a ‘bonus’ level: cheating. Here, the willingness to take advantage is dialled up to the nth degree and honesty becomes a barrier to obtaining it.
While I do not believe this to be what the majority of men aspire to in life, it does happen and in the end there is only pain and hurt for those involved.
What of the other side to the story, that of the woman? (Being heterosexual, I will limit myself to these types of relationship). I’m not here to mansplain but, again, to offer insights gained from personal experience.
Like with men, I believe that there is a trait deep within the female psyche that stretches back long before we ever became a ‘civilised’ species.
Unlike with men, this is not the need to seek an advantage but something much deeper than that: maternal instinct.
What does that have to do with honesty in dating from a woman’s perspective? Everything, I’d say.
It is why women by and large have a caring and nurturing disposition towards children, be they their own or another, and at its centre it expresses in a desire to protect from harm.
Generally, I’ve seen it seep into almost every other aspect of a woman’s life but while it is an intrinsically positive trait, in dating it can prove the opposite. The desire to protect from harm results, ironically, in harm being caused.
In failing to be honest at the earliest opportunity, wanting instead to protect someone’s feelings, relations become confused, leading to a much worse conclusion when it inevitably arrives, by which time a huge amount of emotion has been invested by the disappointed party.
It also seems to me that this serves as a means to self-protection, by denying what is true and obvious in order to insulate from any potential fallout.
I don’t want to cause offence. Being a man, I can’t begin to understand the pressures on women on the dating scene, but I can say that nipping things in the bud is generally better for both sides’ emotional wellbeing.
So both sides could, in some instances, do better, and I’d count myself within that group as much as those women I’ve interacted with.
Taking my personal experience above, had we mutually behaved in a manner that would have been apparent to the other, that more than friendship was being sought, the happier the outcome could have been.
Honesty is something deserved by all, yet rarely afforded. When it is, however, a broken heart can usually be avoided.
Coward of Love by Cooper Canon is out now on Amazon, priced £9.99 in paperback and £2.99 as an eBook. For more information, visit www.cowardoflove.com.