Why now? What do they want? And how should I respond?

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Hi Hera, 

The weirdest thing has been happening to me over the last 12 months. Multiple times I have been contacted by men who I have not seen or talked to in years – some I worked with or hung out with in a city I used to live in in my early 20s. I’m single, in my early 30s and would really like to be partnered but finding dating really challenging.

Naturally, I think, these messages from men coming out of the woodwork then pique my interest, as even though we are tenuously connected, it does seem like a romantic way to meet someone rather than just insanely swiping. However, when I start to chat with these men and form a deeper connection, date, chat (one guy even came to my city from afar, on the pretence of a holiday he planned before we started chatting, even though he knew I lived here), once we have slept together they seem to disappear in a poof – one even ghosting me.

Am I an idiot for responding in the first place? Are these men just out for a quick lay or a place to stay? But then why all the emotional labour up front, and why not just say that? Am I really bad in bed?? Have they idolised me in some way?? Just the other day, another man messaged me out of the blue asking how I was and am I still single. Should I respond? What is going on here??!!

Yours truly,

Confused

Dear Confused,

Your question puts me in mind of the North American cicada. They spend 13 or 17 years burrowed underground, only to emerge en masse, at the beginning of summer. How do they know when the time is right? The current best guess is that they possess an internal, molecular clock which responds to clues gleaned from the surrounding trees and ambient soil temperature. But even the specialist entomologists don’t know for sure. 

It seems like you’re currently experiencing a rare environmental surplus. The Nile is flooding. Grass is returning to the Savannah. Why it’s happening now is anyone’s best guess. It could be that everyone’s long term relationships are simultaneously imploding. It could be a trend in flirting, prompted by the decline of dating apps. It could be that you’ve recently posted some powerful thirst traps. It could be something as ancient and mysterious as the temperature of the soil. Either way, it’s a flattering problem to have. 

I agree that reconnecting with someone from your past is generally preferable to swiping right. “Crawling out of the woodwork” sounds about as romantic as a borer infestation, but it’s basically just a synonym for biding one’s time, which is the entire premise of the English romance novel. It’s also extremely convenient, especially if you already know a little about each other. There’s nothing more flattering than the idea you’ve been on someone’s mind for over a decade, especially if the feeling is mutual. Not to mention the inherent narrative satisfaction of being able to revisit missed opportunities, and correct past mistakes.

I don’t know why you seem to be summoning so many ghosts. My best guess is that the relationships of people in your age bracket are undergoing a mass extinction event. Breakups seem to come in waves, and your early 30s are a particularly fatal time. So you might as well enjoy it while it lasts. Soon everyone you know will be simultaneously having children, and then a few years later, simultaneously developing rare neurological disorders. 

It’s tempting to look at these guys and wonder if they’re genuinely interested in a relationship, or are simply trying to cross a few names off their romantic bucket list. It’s even possible some of them are sending out targeted email campaigns to every single (and single) woman in their contacts, hoping someone will bite. But I’m tempted to take the generous view, and say most of these guys have always been interested in you, and for whatever reason, currently have the nerve and opportunity to act on it. 

As to why they’re not sticking around, that’s harder to say. I’m curious to know if these men from your past have a higher than usual incidence rate of dropping off the face of the planet after you’ve slept together? Are you getting similar results from Tinder? Is this a wider cultural trend, or is this problem exclusive to the woodwork dwellers? 

Maybe they’ve all come out of long relationships, and aren’t ready to settle down. Maybe some of them have spent the intervening years projecting their fantasies onto you, only to discover you don’t correspond to their carefully curated mental image. Maybe the chemistry just wasn’t right. Personally, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. All dating is fraught, wherever you happen to meet people. In the future, I’d suggest meeting up as soon as possible, so you’re both grounded in the reality of the situation. Sometimes you just don’t know if there’s any real chemistry until you’re standing face to face. 

I’m a big advocate for crawling out of the woodwork. But that doesn’t mean you should just sit around, waiting for the next message to land. Why not take matters into your own hands? Think of all your romantic near-misses, long lost crushes, and people you met at exactly the wrong moment in your life. Are any of them single? Perhaps it’s time to graduate from woodwork crawler, to woodwork crawlee. After all, if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them. 

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz. Read all the previous Help Me Heras here.

Ten artists were funded for a year to go into their communities and create art. What came out of it? Sam Brooks finds out.

When you first hear about it, Whiria te Tāngata sounds utopian. Ten artists, given a living wage for a year, and also given the resource to bring arts, culture and creativity to the many communities that make up the Waikato region. In 2023, the programme supported playwrights, puppeteers, visual artists and musicians to carry out artistic projects that specifically target, engage and uplift those communities.

 That language may sound corporate, but on a base level what it really means is more people in the Waikato engaging with the arts, and having their lives improved as a result.

The genesis of the programme, backed by Creative Waikato and funded through the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Innovation Fund, was multifaceted. It partly came from Creative Waikato’s vision for a region that thrived with diverse and transformative creative energy. 

“For us it means looking for ways to support, create and empower more arts, culture and creativity in all the communities of our region,” says CEO Jeremy Mayall. ”We know the importance of the role that artists play in communities as being enablers of expression, storytelling connection and more.”

The organisation had recently completed research into the impact that arts, culture and creativity had on the wellbeing of people in Waikato, and it showed that people who were engaged in creative activity on a higher level also tended to have a higher wellbeing.

From this thinking and research, Creative Waikato developed the idea for Whiria te Tāngata – an artist-in-residence programme that operated across multiple communities. The idea was that it would exist as a guaranteed income programme (essentially a UBI) that would also include pathways for community outcomes, support for the costs of running community initiatives, with a mentorship component woven through for the artists participating.

Each of the 10 artists on the programme worked in a different way with a different community, ranging from a small rural community in Port Waikato learning about creative process, to a group of mothers and infants exploring their own individual and collective creativity, to multicultural communities sharing their stories through puppetry.

“When we look to the future it’s important that there is ongoing support and investment in communities,” Mayall says. “And also the building of capability in those communities, and accessible pathways for people to find their own connections with the creativity around them.”

Benny Marama, one of the 10 artists who was in the Whiria te Tāngata programme, is an award-winning playwright and founder of the theatre company TAHI TA’I TASI. His goal was to “identify, activate, and enable” young Pasifika playwrights in a region that has historically lacked that representation, especially when compared to other theatre hubs like Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Marama points to the commonly held arts sector refrain of “everybody deserves their story to be told” when talking about his specific trigger for this mahi. He identified that the story of Pasifika people, especially Pasifika youth, wasn’t being told in the region, at least by themselves. “Why wasn’t that happening? What can I do as a Pasifika playwright to enable, and to activate, that?”

“We’re a big enough city, so why aren’t there more of our stories being told?”

Every Monday night at Hamilton’s Meteor Theatre, he gathered five emerging Pasifika writers together with one goal: Talk about themselves, and how they’d tell their stories. By the end of the year, and the programme, his group consisted of five writers who were well on their way to telling their own stories, and the stories of their community. 

“When we started, only one of them had any writing experience, and by the end, they could stand up with something they had created,” he says. “We ended with these five confident Pasifika writers who were eager to continue writing.”

Beyond his initial goal of enabling more writers, it also allowed Marama to grow into dual roles as facilitator and mentor. “[The programme] has helped me to be a more conscious and conscientious creative,” he says. “It’s helped with carrying myself in this direction that I didn’t really think I had.”

“I get to enable opportunities for my people to be seen here, in the Waikato, and it might not mean a whole bunch to everyone, but in the Pacific community? Here, especially, it feels great.”

Fay Purdie-Nicholls had been running creative wellbeing workshops within the region for some time when she joined the Whiria te Tāngata programme. She was running four per week – two for adults and two for kids – around the Coromandel. These workshops covered a range of mediums and forms, including painting, collage, sculpture, stone-carving, and lino printing. “Sessions were run in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere,” she says. “The focus was on process rather than outcome. We were building little creative communities where people come back every week and try new ways to express their creativity.”

“The workshops and retreats are about learning about yourself, exploring your feelings and emotions or memories, and putting those into creative art, in a gentle, encouraging way.”

While she started running these workshops for children, she quickly realised how much the children’s wellbeing was improving, and started to run them for adults as well. Whiria te Tāngata’s support added structure, and more importantly, resources to grow her work. Crucially, it also allowed the workshops to be free for the community to participate in.

“Programmes like this give people something to look forward to in their week,” she says. “They know they’re coming to a safe space with a group of people who are also looking for creative outlets, looking to improve their wellbeing, and wanting to create new connections within their communities.”

The highlight of these workshops, however, were the retreats that Purdie-Nicholls ran. Throughout 2023, she ran five of them at different beaches around the region. Each of them involved spending three days immersed in a creative space, with as much resource as they needed, specifically drawing inspiration from the surroundings. 

That process is extremely important to Purdie-Nicholls, and across these retreats she saw people being able to express themselves through a variety of mediums. “It helps you let go of things that you could have been holding onto, that you might not even be aware you were holding onto,” she says. “It helps you connect with other people and tell your story in a way that’s not so scary.”

“It’s much easier to draw, to paint something, to smush paint around with your hands and let all those thoughts go that way, rather than talk about it.”

Again, at its core, Whiria te Tāngata does a simple, but profound, thing. It puts resources in the hands of artists, artists who belong to various communities, to take their practice to those communities. While professional arts and culture is important, so too is grassroots art, and community access to it.

“Having entities like Creative Waikato is an important component of that ecosystem,” says Mayall. “To support the local artists and community organisations, to build capability and support engagement, and to advocate for the value of arts, culture and creativity to the public good of all communities.”

Purdell-Nicholls, looking back on her year of mahi in 2023, puts it simply: “The opportunity to have something like this to attend is incredibly important … it should be more accessible for everyone.”