A few days ago I was chatting to a friend who had been introduced to someone at a house party and 'thought of me', as it were. He said, and I quote, "he's got tattoos and piercing-type things and was wearing a red and black checked shirt" and apparently he wanted to set us up on a date. A nice idea with just a few problems.

Having been newly single for only two weeks I'm not really ready to have dinner and polite conversation with anyone (let alone do anything else) and...my friend couldn't actually tell me anything more about the potential match. What does he do for a living? "erm, don't know" How old is he? "er, about your age I think?" What kind of tattoos? "Tattoos. You know, tattoo-type tattoos". Even his name was an uknown. Brilliant, sounds great, what's his number?! The other thing that crossed my mind was, that despite having so little information about someone, a good friend had decided I would like him, based almost solely on the fact we both had ink. If that were true then life would be much more simple - I felt like a lot of my gay friends must feel when people say to them 'My friend is gay, maybe you'd like him?'. Yes, it's just that easy.

On the other hand, after I thought more on the subject, I decided I would probably never date a guy who wasn't alternative in some way and would probably use little 'flags', like body mods and coloured hair etc, to judge what kind of scene someone was into before deciding to approach them. I've dated a few punks, an Iron Maiden loving metaller, a goth and an open minded trendy bloke who liked football and Oasis (don't ask) and have experienced difficulties dating outside my genre.

The punks were polotically minded vegans, very active in protest and demonstrations and generally very accepting of others. The metaller got hassel from his friends for going out with 'a miserable goth', but more as a joke than anything else and the trendy guy got the piss taken out of him at work because his girlfriend was a 'weirdo'. It made social occasions kind of difficult and meeting his friends was also...interesting.

So I guess my point is, if you are a goth/punk/rockabilly can you date a 'normo', or even someone alternative that is outside of your scene, or is it easier to stick to what you know, judge people on appearance and go from there? Is it true that opposites attract or is it better to have lots in common? I must say that with the goth fella it meant I could borrow his make-up (and sometimes his clothes) and we also shared an interest in music, architecture and film so i think I'm a little biased on this one...still not ready for GothicMatch.com though.