Feature: My Life Through Dating

The way I see it there are two types of people: “Omg you’re gay?!”; and “I knew it!”. I mean we know there is a third type, but let’s keep this a happy article and not get into that…

I come from Estonia where gays are accepted by just about 33% of the population, so for me, naturally, it’s important to hit the criteria of an “Omg you’re gay??” type. Not because I’m ashamed but it’s what I’m used to.

When I was in primary school I was envied by my peers – predominately male – because I was popular with the girls. I just couldn’t understand what was so hard about talking to a girl, they don’t bite… (Well some might, wink wink). As I grew older I developed this fear not for girls, but for boys. That’s when I took a step back and was like “wait, what?”. I didn’t know how to act, I didn’t know if it was normal, I was confused and mortified. I remember trying to “fix” myself by getting a girlfriend, that in itself is funny let alone the fact she then left me for another boy who also turned out to be gay and she turned out to be a lesbian. Love triangles nowadays.

Anyway, nothing really happened in secondary school or college apart from my realisation of my love for males grew stronger and I finally got the courage to come out to some of my friends. So, the real story starts at university…

In the first few months of university, I was full-on feeling the freedom of being a teenager. Nobody knew just how much I was taking advantage of this freedom, I always tell people a different story because they won’t be able to swallow the truth. But you have to understand that it was a whole new world to me. I could do anything I wanted when I wanted and for how long I wanted. And I did.

That isn’t even the best bit, this was all before my discovery of Grindr. Grindr transformed my life, it taught me lessons, it was like the big brother that I never had. You know, that app finds you, friends, for life – in all shapes and sizes. But it all got repetitive and boring after a while. At the end of my first year, I was no longer interested in the Grindr-type men. I wanted to find someone who could understand me and I didn’t want to use the internet to do that.

Yet because of modern-day socialising, it was like playing hide and seek, but without the find. So, as expected, I was left with no choice but to download Tinder. Tinder is more sophisticated than Grindr, but it was full of the same people. But I’ll tell you something, Tinder had some of the best specimens out there. And it didn’t take many “meets and greets” until I found one lucky guy to be my boyfriend.

I was over the moon at that point, I mean I never thought I’d have a boyfriend. It was an experience, to say the least. He was older, more mature and had his life in order. I was younger, a child at heart and had no idea what I wanted to do with mine. But that gave me hope because as people say “opposites attract”. All we did was pretty much walk. I think we might have walked around the whole of London. And I loved it. How could I not? My Fitbit steps were through the roof and I was winning competitions left, right and centre! However, the relationship ended as quickly as it had begun and I was back to being the Captain of the single ship once again.

I wanted to sail on my own for a bit. I needed time to reflect on my past decisions and how they changed me as a person. I became wiser and more careful. I wasn’t that teenager on a sexual rampage anymore. To put it in corporate language: I wanted to show my ex-employee that he was wrong leaving me for another firm.

I had sailed and sailed and finally ended up in Liverpool. Take my advice – if you are single, Liverpool is the place to be. Their Tinder game was on point. I think I was talking to about 15 guys at the same time! And I’m surprised I managed to keep that going.

However, the hardest thing was telling someone that I wasn’t interested anymore. It’s selfish and arrogant but it needed to be done. I simply didn’t want to waste their time or mine. If someone wasn’t interested in me they would gradually stop replying and that is how I dealt with the situation.

Although there was one lad that I couldn’t stop talking to. When we matched, the first thing he said was “Am I going to get lucky tonight? ;)”, I mean how was I supposed to respond to that? In his defence, it was probably a reference to my bio,  which said “If you get lucky, I might show you my six-pack”. Spoiler alert, I had no six-pack. Don’t trust what you read on the internet, kids.

By the time we met face to face, I think he’d lost interest in my six-pack. For some bizarre reason, he found me fascinating. He used to send me coded letters with cute messages. That was it for me. I knew that he was the one. He was ready to be promoted to a boyfriend. This time around I was older and he was younger, but it was the way he managed to convey himself as a very mature young man that won me over. I used to think I was good at Maths until I met him. His brain is probably robotic because nobody is that good at Maths, the guy can calculate any bloody logarithm in his head.

Nine months on he is still working full time as my boyfriend and I couldn’t be happier. I want to thank the wind from the Atlantic that directed my ship to Liverpool because I always thought London produced the best employees.

By Julian Kisselevits

How Art restricted my self-confidence but also presented me with it

Back in the years of taking my GCSEs, I took part in the Duke Of Edinburgh Bronze Award (not sure I even got the certificate in the end). Required to do a certain amount of hours on a skill of our choice, I chose to take the skills of sewing my Nan had tried to teach me for years that one step further. Optimistically and passionately I decided to take on the challenge of creating a dress that would be specifically designed for women of a similar shape to me – think the pears; Beyonce, JLo, Alicia Keys (although, I’d be flattering myself comparing me to them). For most of us, school highlights our biggest flaws, it’s a time of peer pressure and dissatisfaction of not looking a particular way. But, in all honesty, I’ve always been relatively comfortable with my body, still, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I never wished I was taller or slimmer. When it came to beginning my project I was stuck in the same old rut of drawing figures that represented standardised fashion proportions instead of reflecting how I or these other women like me were truly shaped. For me, the designs didn’t look flattering or didn’t look enticing without the figures and their tremendously long legs or prominent cheekbones. It wasn’t until I went to a water-colouring class that I realised the unrealistic bodies I was creating. An older lady approached me to ask what I was doing, after explaining she politely said “why do you make them so thin? Why don’t you draw them like us? we’re the ones buying them.” She was right but, it was my own insecurities and what I dreamed of being that restricted me from creating a piece that complimented who I was. I was trying so hard to create a piece of clothing that celebrated a woman’s real body shape whilst at the same time acting ashamed of it. In reality, this is how the fashion world portrays their designs but I had the opportunity to use my art to change it.

Having wanted to be a fashion illustrator for so long Nuno Dacosta and Sabine Pieper represent a few favourites of mine along with Megan Hess who does pieces for Dior, Prada and Vanity Fair. Their works are produced by solid lines and seem effortlessly perfect, something I hope one day mine will be too. However, as are with things that are so perfect they are almost always far-fetched from reality, yet even now this is what I inspire my drawings to be like. So when it came to taking a life drawing class for the first time at the University I didn’t know how to begin – In awareness of mental health issues, the University were aiming to promote body positivity – I didn’t know how to sketch so freely like everybody else around me. It normally takes me hours to get one side of a face how I want it, let alone be given 3-5 mins to sketch a whole person. This was all down to wanting perfection. I wanted perfect lines of the body to reflect the skills of me as an artist but, I was missing the point, I was trying to draw things that weren’t there. I was trying to alter parts of the people I was seeing because I couldn’t do with the varied proportions on my page, ones that didn’t coincide with what fashion drawing had taught me. Yet as I looked on and a new pose began I started to understand the freedom of sketching without setting restrictions. As I drew the curves of the woman in front of me I realised the beauty of all our bodies. I looked upon her with admiration, aware that what I was producing on a page from looking at a real life woman in front of me was just as gorgeous as the rule-drawn ones in my fashion sketch books. How people held their bodies, how their bodies curved and didn’t curved became so attractive, and one particular artist who represents this same admiration for people just as much as me is Austrian born artist Egon Schiele.

Born in 1890 Schiele only lived to the young age of 28, yet he managed to produce a varied collection of spectacular pieces in his too-short life span. There is not one piece of his work that ceases to fascinate me. That doesn’t draw me to the details of our bodies which we usually criticise. Instead, for me, Schiele’s figurative drawings amplify the beauty of the lines of our bodies, that demonstrate the diversity of our anatomy (Astrid points out a similar point in FEATURE: The Media’s damaging impact on 21st-Century beauty). For years I have been fixated on the steady one-drawn lines used in illustration, the flawlessness and the ideal. Schiele throws all this out the window, he not only strips down his subjects but, with limited mediums he can give more depth to a piece of work than any artist I know. It’s a personal opinion that his pieces strike something inside. When I saw his collection at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, the home of the young artist, it displayed a mixture of emotions. Many of the more detailed paintings looked unhappy and disfigured yet some although, their bodies demonstrated vulnerability at the same time illustrated confidence in a sexual and living nature. His works may not be as exposeing to us now as they were back in the 1920s, however, they still possess a confrontation of body image and sexuality that people are yet unable to face. We shy away from seeing our bodies as they really are, even without media influencing people to find a way to bring themselves down. The variations throughout his collections are unarguable, including his own self-portraits: with his famous-long hands, Shiele depicts himself in so many ways, using himself as a forefront of differences in association with our bodies. Life drawing has taught me the acceptance of loving who we are. Of course, I know there’ll still be days where I dislike how I look but I also believe that the bodies we have as humans, whether we are tall, short, curvy, slim, is the most beautiful thing in the world.

By Founder Lauren Victioria Edwards