When it comes to her opinion on men, my mother is certainly, certifiably even, mad. Any poor female friend of mine who has had to be driven anywhere by her, and therefore inescapably subjected to an extended monologue on this, her favourite subject, can testify. She doesn’t even manage consistency. One friend politely endured a treatise on how at ‘our age’ we didn’t need a man cluttering up our lives, whereas another was vigorously lectured on how if she didn’t start treating the males in her life better, she would never ensnare one as her own.

So frankly, I wasn’t even slightly surprised by what I received in the post last week. Initially, it wasn’t much of a shock to find the sole newspaper article in a hastily addressed envelope; years of boarding school had accustomed me to my mother’s bizarre postal habits, and usually I manage to pay the content of said articles as little attention as possible.

However this time it was a bit harder to take it all in good humour.  

I’ll describe what I received then; a piece from the times2 section featuring an interview with the writers of the 1995 dating book entitled ‘The Rules’ which could essentially be summed up as ‘playing hard to get’. These two esteemed ladies, high-powered gym-going man-eaters from what I could make out of their veiny arms, tight dresses and 200 dollar blow-dries, had recently re-written and re-released their infamous work for the digital era.

But what really made this article oh-so-special was that mother had annotated it. Yes, you read that correctly. ANNOTATED. What particularly bothered me was the fact she had underlined, starred and exclamation marked the lines ‘Do not respond to late night calls, texts or “booty calls”’. Thanks for that mum. Nevertheless I had to appreciate the fact she had scribbled out the section which said ‘men don’t like curly hair’ (I have a propensity to afro). So whilst she thinks I’m easy, it was good to know she still values my self-esteem.

Intrigued, and possibly hopeful of some tips, I read excerpts of the book (well whatever I could get free online – I’m not paying for that for the same reason I will never actually give money for the Daily Mail). I was soon heaving one of the sighs I normally reserve for such moments as reading those Heat magazine photo spreads essentially entitled ‘someone that used to be quite hot and skinny but has recently really let themselves go/discovered cake’.

I was hugely disappointed with a slight feminist twinge. It seems according to the great Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider (at least her parents had a sense of humour), that despite the great technological advances that have brought us such unique and exciting potential dating tools as Whatsapp, Twitter, and heaven forbid even Instagram (whatever floats your boat I suppose), the ‘rules’ – and I really dislike that word too – of dating are still living it up in 1995 along with Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey.

Some of the rules themselves are move beyond the archaic and into the grossly impractical. For example there’s the ‘Don’t text back for 2 hours’ rule. If applied to my own love life this would be disastrous. The majority of my textual communication with my male of choice centres around the 5pm three word question ‘hall at six?’ (and who said romance was dead?), so to not reply even for half of the allotted time would severely increase our chances of not getting in the queue nice and early and therefore dramatically affect his mood for the worse. And there is nothing more annoying in this world than a hungry male. Perhaps other than a hungry male in a queue.

What’s more, especially in a place such as this where the male species see their laptop as a slightly inconvenient but very useful extension of their fingertips, and have more in common with Forest Gump than is strictly necessary, most guys just wouldn’t bloody realise you were interested.

That’s just the practical reasons, surely we can’t ignore the apparent feminist (yeah I went there) issues at hand here. Why shouldn’t women go after what we want? Most guys, particularly those in our age bracket are just too lazy, emotionally stupid and/or plagued with mummy issues to dabble in these games women think they need to play.

So, when your RAG blind date texts you post rendezvous, for god’s sake don’t wait 2 hours, text him back in 10 minutes. Otherwise he’ll probably just think you’re really slow at typing.