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Being newly single can be daunting – but there are a host of activities available to take the pain out of going it alone

Send your dating stories, tips and advice to singleinthecity@dailyecho.co.uk


My life: Sally enjoys the novelty factor

NOVELTY value goes a long way.

I've been seeing my new man for three months.

During this time we have been to the cinema, the theatre, out to dinner, to gigs, to bars, for a weekend away - and now I can add a garden centre and curtain shopping to that list.

And the really weird thing is not so much that we decided to head into such mundane territory so early into a new relationship but how fun it was.

It reminds me of the fascination and excitement that children feel about such things as birthdays, swings and cardboard boxes, which we adults have long since become too jaded to appreciate with such - if any - enthusiasm.

Being in a new relationship can sprinkle some sort of magical fairy dust over otherwise tedious situations, making them fun/romantic/ entertaining/date material when you experience them with your new man/woman.

On the one hand, this can be great news. After all, we all have to do a certain amount of essentially dull stuff to ensure that life runs smoothly, whether it's pushing a trolley round a supermarket or taking empty bottles to be recycled.

And if something which is usually a chore becomes a great evening's entertainment through the addition of a date, that's great news.

On the other hand, though, part of the fun of being with someone new is the fact that you tend to make more of an effort.

It's not just that you spend an infinitely greater amount of time doing your hair and picking out an outfit than you did when you were flying solo. It's also that you get out more and go to interesting places, partly in a bid to impress the object of your attention and partly because, in the normal course of events, it just might not occur to you to branch out and do something different.

It would be a shame to totally abandon romantic walks along the beach in favour of strolls round your local DIY centre too soon, if at all.

But that said, if you're still doing plenty of the "proper" date stuff, there's definitely something to be said for sharing the mundane with the new person in your life.

I suppose it's all part and parcel of letting them into your life and vice versa.

This is what I told myself in a recent Sunday - it would be a Sunday, wouldn't it? - trip to a garden centre with my new boyfriend to buy gravel.

That is to say, I was buying the gravel - he was in charge of lifting it and driving it, and me, home.

More recently, I returned the favour by helping him pick out curtains for his flat and hanging them.

The thing is, it was actually fun. A big part of that was, of course, the novelty factor. I don't think curtain shopping - or indeed hunting for any sort of home-improvement product - would compete with, say, going to the cinema as far as regular dates go. But there is something sort of romantic about doing it every now and again.

For fear of sounding desperately sad, I feel I should emphasise that I'm far from the only person who takes pleasure in sharing the mundane with my new man.

I tend to think of Steph as one of my more "rock 'n' roll" friends, so I was quite pleased to hear that even she and her new man enjoy indulging in a spot of domesticity.

"My boyfriend and I are relatively young and we do have some good adventures - road trips, BMXing at various skateparks and we usually go out and get drunk at the weekend with all our mates," she says.

"But last weekend we somehow ended up building a garden rockery and then sitting in bed with me painting a garden gnome and him playing brain training' on the Nintendo DS. That's not right for a couple in their early 20s is it?"

Dave thinks there's a lot to be said for sharing the "dull stuff" with your new partner - though only up to a point.

He says: "Food shopping is great even at the start of a relationship. Cooking a meal together can be great fun: everyone has their own secret ingredients etc that they use and it's easy to bond in a small kitchen (like mine!).

"And weekly food shopping, stuff like that, is surely a necessity after a while.

"Given the choice, however, helping to dump a mattress at the tip is work for friends in exchange for food and beer. Not the new squeeze, who's probably wondering why you obviously don't have any mates at this point!"

May adds: "In the early days of my current long-term relationship, we rarely did anything mundane'; at least other than things that did not involve stepping foot outside of the house.

"This was not the result of any romantic notions about keeping our relationship special. Rather, it stemmed from the fact that my partner appears to have a pathological fear of activities that could be construed as shopping'.

"However, in the early days, I was blissfully unaware of this problem and so, on the very few occasions when we did venture forth to carry out a mundane activity, for example, visiting PC World for him to purchase some blank DVDs, it did very much have the feel of a special undertaking.

"Men with serious hang-ups aside, I think it is a good idea to keep mundane activities to a minimum in the early days of a relationship; that way it is possible to enjoy a visit together to such places as Ikea, something which will certainly no longer be true once you are established in a full-on long-term relationship and when you may well have to drag your partner screaming and kicking (as I do) out of the front door."

I think Dave and May are right. You probably shouldn't expect too much in the way of getting your new boyfriend/girlfriend to help you with the dull stuff or it may start to feel less like you're letting them into your life and more like you're using them as a skivvy.

But when it comes to it, sharing the ordinary stuff is the same as letting someone see the real you.

It might not be as obviously romantic to go to the greengrocers as it is to have a sunset picnic, but it's real life. And there's a lot to be said for sharing real life with someone special. I suppose it's a bit like playing house and seeing how you might work out in a more settled relationship. If you can make DIY shopping and supermarket trips fun now, you could be onto a good thing!

4:03pm Tuesday 8th July 2008

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