Still waiting for Mr Darcy? He might be closer than you think
Countless rules and tricks and loopholes – did Lizzy Bennet have to put up with all of this? Would she have? Or would she have hitched up her skirts, told Darcy to shove it, and gone off to get a job in a laundry somewhere, instead of suffering the seemingly inescapable indignities of modern dating?
As this winter turns bitter and the instinct to burrow dials up to 11, most Friday nights, you can find me swaddled in a fleece blanket burrito on the couch, getting all my romantic fulfilment from fictional men written by women.
'I'm not into Uber sex,' says Agathe, the protagonist of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life: a French film in which an idealistic writer gets swept into her own Austen-style romance in the English countryside. 'I'm not living in the right century.'
As if on cue, my phone lights up beside me. It's a picture message from this guy I met on an app more than a decade ago, but never got around to meeting in person. I know without even unlocking my phone that he has sent me a photo of his semi-erect penis.
I turn my phone over.
I turn the movie up.
It can be tempting, in the ashes of yet another failed talking stage or mildly traumatic situationship, to want to retreat into fiction. Romcoms never leave you on 'read'. Romance novels never gave anyone an antibiotic-resistant UTI. Stay lost in a world of costume dramas long enough, and you begin to wonder if dating wasn't easier two centuries ago. Back then, all you had to do to be some hunky aristocrat's manic pixie dream girl was to be refreshingly outspoken, broke, and crap at the pianoforte. The whole criteria for being someone's Prince Charming was to simply not have a secret fiancee. The thought of purchasing a love spell from an Etsy witch would send half these characters into a coma.
But some nagging familiarity dogs me as I enter my fourth hour of Regency-era romance, and it's not because I've seen these films before. It's because I've lived them. When I was 18, I met some version of Captain Wentworth, the main love interest in Persuasion. My Wentworth was as gorgeous and impulsive as the original, with a Brummie accent that made him read dangerous and sexy, and tattoos from his ankles to his earlobes to guarantee that my mother would never approve.
Dating in Melbourne in 2025 is brutal, but it wasn't much better two centuries ago.
When we couldn't make our relationship work, young love and gap years as fleeting as they are, I put an ocean between us and yearned from afar for a decade. Life may have moved on for us both, but a part of me is still waiting for my Wentworth's return; braced, I think, for a long, long email from him that never comes.
And throughout the second half of my 20s, I found myself tangled up in an emotional affair with a man who belonged to someone else. Though it hadn't started nefariously – it was a friends-to-lovers trope if I ever saw one – it dragged on too long, and now, each time I revisit Sense and Sensibility, Mr Ferrars' stuttering charm recalls late-night conversations I'd sooner forget. I wish I could sit down for brunch and mimosas with Ms Steele and have both of us deflate with the relief that neither of us ended up with the wrong guy.
Say nothing of the countless Mr Wickhams in my rearview mirror: roguish, dashing, manipulative, the perfect person to project all my limerence onto. Don't even mention all the grinning, smooth-brained Mr Bingleys I've swiped through: the golden retriever boyfriend personified, most content when chasing a ball or his family's approval. The flighty and deceitful Mr Willoughbys with their hidden agendas, the charming and scheming Mr Elliots – and all the many, many, many earnest and embarrassing Mr Collinses who fancy themselves a Darcy. I've tried it on with them all, learning nothing except that when it's not right, it's always wrong. Hey Siri, play Manchild by Sabrina Carpenter.
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This year is Jane Austen's 250th birthday, and somehow, she is as relevant as she has ever been. Each modern adaptation proves it: Bridget Jones' Diary and all her sequels, Clueless, and – because I have no taste (see my romantic history above) – even Netflix's Persuasion are delicious little treats on which I can't keep from bingeing. Like Taylor Swift songs and horoscopes, it's so easy to take Austen's work and lay it like a filter over your own life, tracing the similarities and disregarding the differences, until it feels as though it was written just for you.
Because dating in Melbourne in 2025 is brutal, but it wasn't much better two centuries ago. At least women's ability to stay out of poverty is no longer tied to how well they cater to the male gaze. At least we can vote. Now, eloping with a hot scoundrel won't ruin your life; it's just fodder for your writing career. (Just kidding.) (Kind of.)
But I have a confession to make: deep down, the misguided romantic in me still wants something phenomenally unrealistic.
Despite a decade of disappointment and mortifying stories, despite living my life according to the Bechdel Test, despite endless anecdata about unsatisfying (if not downright dangerous) heterosexual relationships, sometimes I eschew all my hyper-independence and can admit – to you and only you – that I would really like a romantic hero to stride across a foggy moor and rescue me from myself.
I want Paul Rudd to call me gorgeous and annoying, then kiss me on a staircase, like he did to Alicia Silverstone in Clueless. Sometimes, when my dopamine drops and nobody is looking, I even get lonely enough to fall back into the embrace of that unholy trio: Tinder, Bumble and Hinge.
All the archetypes are there, too.
Fred Wentworth, 31
Six foot with a six-pack on six figures, since apparently that matters.
George Wickham, 26
Looking for my Tinderella. NO GOLDDIGGERS (I do not have any gold to dig).
Eddie Ferrars, 24
Ethically non-monogamist entrepreneur. Me and my missus are looking for a third.
Colonel Brandon is there too. In Sense and Sensibility, he's an older gentleman who falls in love with giddy, flighty Marianne, and waits patiently for her to see through Mr Willoughby's charade. These days, he's the leathery fifty-something who exclusively dates 20-year-olds because they're 'less complicated' and 'more sexually adventurous' than women his own age. Robert Ferrars, from the same novel, was always second best to his brother. Now, his profile pictures are exclusively group shots, leaving you to wonder – hope – if he's the good-looking one in the crowd. William Elliot, sexy layabout and heir to the Elliot estate in Persuasion, would have half a dozen catfish profiles on sugar baby websites, seeking a wealthy Mrs Robinson figure to fund his comfortable lifestyle.
Women aren't immune to this, by the way. Every delusional, self-important woman – including me – believes herself to be a sensible and headstrong Lizzy Bennet but is actually a giddy Lydia, or a socially inept Miss Bates who mistakes herself for an it-girl like Emma Woodhouse. We all know a Charlotte Lucas or two or 10, who, despite deserving the world, wound up deep in the suburbs, cleaning up after Mr Collins. Like Anne Elliot before us, we've all wondered if our first love might show up on our wedding day to speak now or forever hold his peace. You either die an Emma or you live long enough to see yourself become a Mrs Bennet. I'm sure that if I'd ever made it through Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey, I'd spot parallels between Fanny Price and Catherine Morland and all the women I know, too.
Times may change, but people rarely do.
Funny how the red-pilled hivemind fantasise about returning to traditional values. You can't get much more traditional than the 18th century, and all those women ever did was marry for money and status. If I match with Kevin, 33, do I get an estate in Toorak and 4000 a year, too?
But no matter how many of these characters I meet in real life, no matter how many times I've found myself living out the plot of Austen's novels, it never ends the way I've been taught to expect it to. That's the thing about books and films: they make you forget that the story doesn't end after the acknowledgments.
Surely Lizzy and Darcy would be at one another's throats within a week. Emma and Knightley's lust would fade and they would fall right back into their bickering sibling dynamic soon enough, depressing them and creeping everyone else out. Wentworth, red-pilled and resentful, would throw his hard-earned success and Anne's passive classism back in her face each time she asked him to unload the dishwasher. There are happy endings, and then there are happily ever afters. So why do I still believe?
My relationships with all of Austen's archetypes may have eventually broken down, but not because those guys were awful (although most of them were), or because I was the whole problem (although often I was). It wasn't because they were frogs playing princes, or because I'm a sidekick convinced she's a protagonist. I'm not sensible, patient Anne Elliot. I'm not an effervescent Emma Woodhouse, or rational and cautious Elinor Dashwood. There's nothing I wouldn't give to be Cher Horowitz, but then, I'm not as endearingly messy as Bridget Jones, either – but someone is. My Wickham is someone else's Wentworth. For every Mr Elton seeking his Miss Hawkins, there's a serious and steady Knightley waiting to be scandalised and delighted by his Emma.
Isn't it so nice to believe, however foolishly, that the great big romance of our lives is just a swipe and a few plot twists away?
I saw a psychic last week and she confirmed that I still have a few big love stories ahead of me. She also told me that I'm about to come into great wealth and that my late dog is running around the afterlife in a bow tie, so I'm wont to trust every word out of her mouth.
Argumentative and judgmental as I am – in an endearing way, I swear – I'd like to believe that the universe has laid a path for me that leads to Mr Darcy. I've been waiting 30 years. Someone tall and awkward, moody and quippy, difficult to impress but unendingly loyal, socially confused, terrible at parties – wait, am I describing my dream man, or myself?
While I wait for him to show up, if he ever does, there are endless adaptations and modern retellings to occupy my Friday nights. A little delusion keeps hope alive.
Here's the real silver lining.
Although my life doesn't much resemble those of Austen's protagonists – no bonnets, no trips to Bath for the sea cure – I do have something better; something her heroines dreamed of.
Despite disappointments and unsolicited dick pics, my story belongs to me. I have my own money, my own home, a full and wonderful life that doesn't hinge on marriage or inherited wealth. I'm not a piece of fruit left rotting in the sun just because I haven't made my way to Pemberley yet. Whether I meet 'the one' tomorrow or spend my whole life fostering dogs and watching period pieces, I'll be fine, and so will you. I can be – I have always been – my very own Mr Darcy.
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