Wright On! - Shelley Wright takes a wry look at life

LAST night I enjoyed a few drinks with a pal I haven't seen properly since she started seeing her new bloke about two weeks ago and it's made me remember what a nightmare all that relationship stuff is.

Now speaking as someone who spent her formative years aged 16 to 22 with one extremely nice young man, the next 18 months locking horns with another who I now think was neither nice nor young and most of this year dodging relationships like they're a dose of cod liver oil, I really can't pretend to be an oracle of information where the first few dates are concerned.

But I do know that nine times out of 10 they're guaranteed to be totally unsuccessful, stressful affairs - as Channel Four's Streetmate, where strangers are plucked off the street by host Davina McCall and sent on a date, will testify.

It's an opinion I formed all by myself before the trials and tribulations of my friend confirmed it in quick-drying cement last night.

In her experience - and this is a somewhat familiar if very scary story I think you'll agree - that first meeting quickly turned into the second, then third and the next thing she knew this guy had practically moved in. Eeek!

And while I thought the reason she wasn't answering the phone was because she was cuddled up with him, watching videos and drinking wine in domestic weekday bliss, the reality of the situation was that she was avoiding him by hiding behind closed curtains with the lights off and secretly screening callers through 1471.

That was just a week after they met. It's not good. And although he seems to have got the message after days of unanswered, unreturned calls and messages, she's still skulking around in dark glasses and a baseball cap, dreading the moment she bumps into him, which you know she inevitably will.

What will she say? Get lost would have been good from the start, I think, but she couldn't do it. Why? I don't know. Why doesn't anyone? Because it's easier to avoid a problem than face it head on.

It's the stick your head in the sand and hope it will go away technique - and we've all done it at some point.

Another of my friends - and yes, I know there's a worrying pattern emerging here - refused to speak to one boyfriend for so long after a particularly bad fall-out that his mum rang the office to speak to her instead.

She'd sneakily got a colleague to answer her extension and screen her calls but the early warning system failed miserably when his mum caught them off guard and got through. Drat.

Thing was, she'd never actually met the woman in all the time she'd been going out with her son and so didn't expect her to ring out of the blue for a mid-afternoon heart-to-heart, you know. Neither did the colleague who mistakenly put her through and then preceded to hoot loudly in the background all the way through the call.

There was another bloke who got temporarily involved with another of my friends at one point and he wouldn't take the hint either if I remember right.

I don't know why she went out with him in the first place because he tucked his jogging bottoms in his socks and carried an luminous yellow purse, but she did - and could she get rid of him? Eventually, yes, but not for a while.

In fact, it took three weeks of ordering pints of Theakston's and whisky chasers instead of her usual red wine tipple at the bar - and even then it was only a particularly fearsome burp which finally saw him off.

Anyway by now you must think my mates and I all go for particularly sad characters or that blokes in Rossendale are especially thick-skinned, though I'm not sure I know myself.

I don't know. Why do we bother?

Well, I for one, from now on, don't.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.