Dr Dick’s guide to hooking up

PART I

It’s a Wednesday night.

All of your friends are pre-drinking. They’re taking turns to divulge their deepest, darkest secrets, faking groans of embarrassment and shame as they tell the likely apocryphal story of the time they went home with five different people in one night and ended up being turfed out by the porters each time due to the sheer volume of the climaxes they induced.

You’re sat at your desk, surrounded by empty Blue Bolt bottles and packets of Doritos (that you only ate half of because you started to feel guilty five crisps in) – it took a little while for your crippling body image issues to overtake your hope that a hundred grams of Chilli Heatwave might provide you with some of the fulfilment you’ve so desperately craved since your supervisor predicted you a 2.ii in your last report.

I’m back

You want to be with your friends, drinking and lying through your teeth about the number of people you’ve slept with, but tonight it feels wrong. No matter how hard you try, you can’t remove from your mind the terrible memories of the last time you went out and made a total tit of yourself. With your vision swimming with the effects of one too many vodka cranberries, you caught the eye of that hockey player you met briefly out the week before – or was it on a swap? It was some form of organised fun, that much is certain.

You don’t do enjoyment unless it’s been planned a week in advance. At least. Too nervous or socially incompetent to engage them in conversation in the smoking area, you attempted to dance with them. You did the awkward-but-endearing two-step and it was all going pretty well, up until you decided to make your move. You try to grind. Much like a couple who attempt anal play for the first time when horrendously drunk, attempting to grind someone you vaguely know in a club tends to end shittily. They looked at you like you’d just told them about the time you couldn’t find any tissues so had used your favourite stuffed toy to clean yourself up following a particularly vigorous hand-shandy. Desolate, you turned your back and sauntered shamefully out of the club to go home and cry yourself softly to sleep.

That is the memory that pervades your mind as you stare wistfully at images of your ex from 2012 for the fifth time today and try to think of a different time, a better time, when you weren’t such a fucking loser. The problem is, no such time exists. That’s just who you are. Awkward. Socially inept. Decidedly average looking. Nothing to really set you apart from the crowd. That’s who you are, and that’s who you’ll stay until the day you die – known by few, liked by fewer, loved or loathed by none. Your friends will try to deliver an obituary, but all they’ll be able to come up with will be, ‘Yeah, they were alright. Can we go to the pub now?’.

What if I told you it doesn’t have to be this way? What if I told you there was a way out? Whilst I can’t guarantee you won’t die alone and unloved – after all, you can only really work with what you’re given – but I can help you to achieve some fleeting degree of satisfaction in a world devoid of meaning.

Step into my office

My name is Dr Dick, and I have returned to give you my guide to hooking up. I’ll walk you through the preparation stages, the pull, the sex and after. I’ll give you my top tips on how to trick people into thinking that you’re a charmer with a killer sense of humour, rather than a soulless husk of a human being who hasn’t known what hope is since the time their tutor deliberately blanked them in Sainsbury’s. I’ll tell you how to avoid coming across as the desperate, clingy and entitled heap of excrement that, deep down, you know you really are. I’ll even tell you how to be good at sex.

You’ll be hearing from me soon. In the meantime, for god’s sake put some pants on. Ideally some which have been washed in the last couple of weeks, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Or maybe I will, because you smell.

Much love,

Dr Dick

If you’re feeling low and need some advice. why not take a look at some of my previous sterling work