Love... From Both Sides (A laugh-out-loud romantic comedy) by Nick Spalding Page B

only last week I was able to tell somebody about what happened during my second (and last) date with Laura McIntyre.
    Ryan tried his hardest to stop laughing after an hour, but eventually had to go and splash water on his face to calm down a bit.
    Needless to say I didn’t attempt to contact poor Laura again.
    I mean, what the hell do you say?
    The text would go something like: Hi! Sorry I gave you the galloping shits. Fancy a movie? I’m sure the popcorn won’t be full of salmonella!
    There was a tiny part of me that hoped I might hear from her though… but that hope has thus far come to nothing.
    It’s been over four weeks now and I’m fairly sure Laura (and her intestinal tract) have gotten over the night of the uncontrollable squits . I’m sure she just wants to put the whole thing behind her and move on with her life.
    …which leaves poor old Jamie Newman mired back in the world of the single man again.
     
    To compound my misery I was invited to a dinner party at the weekend.
    Now, I know this makes me sound initially ungrateful. After all, an invite to a party is not to be sniffed at, and at least goes some way to proving that I’m not a complete social pariah.
    However, you have to bear in mind that the people inviting me to the party are a couple.
    Couples invariably invite other couples to parties. This is the way of things. Similarly, single people tend to mainly ask other single people to their shin-digs.
    I’m thinking of ringing up the Natural History Museum and telling them Darwin got it wrong. Not all human beings are the same species, after all.
    There are in fact two distinct types, who only like to mix with their own kind whenever possible: Homo couplus and Homo singlus.
    Sure, there is interaction between species when necessary, but it is often stilted and awkward. It always comes as something of a relief when the other one eventually buggers off.
    As very much a member of the Homo singlus crowd I had to weigh up the pros and cons of being invited to a party that would no doubt consist predominantly of the enemy camp.
    Was it worth the discomfort and possible social inadequacy to avoid another Saturday evening on my own, watching whatever crap Ant and Dec are hosting at the moment on ITV?
    I concluded that it probably was…
     
    It would be bad enough if there had only been a sporadic number of my fellow singlus species at the party, scattered amongst the happy couples, but it turns out I’m the only single person invited.
    Yep, it was three happy partnerships and one miserable Jamie Newman sat round the dinner table eating Chinese food.
     
    Hosts for the party are my mate Dave and his wife Katherine. They’ve been married for seven years, so have reached the stage where the shine has well and truly been rubbed off the apple.
    This suits me fine, as if I’m going to engage with members of the Homo couplus crowd, I’d prefer them not to be enthusiastic about the whole thing. There’s nothing worse than a new relationship being flaunted in front of you when you’re all on your own.
    As for couples two and three, they are the epitome of horrifying middle class self-obsession, and were both ostensibly invited along for the entertainment value.
    One couple are Dave’s friends, the other Katherine’s.
    ‘You’ve got to come mate, it’s going to be hilarious,’ Dave had told me over the phone. ‘You know how bloody awful they both are – especially when they get together.’
    That’s what really swayed it for me. I very much doubted Ant and Dec could come up with anything as potentially amusing as two middle class couples trying to out-do each other in the materialism stakes.
    Angela and Mitchell know Dave and me through work, while Katherine had introduced Sophia and Iain to our social circle about six months ago. Ever since then, whenever they were in the same room together, you could almost feel the tension crackling back and forth between them.
     
    I begged David to let me be the