Everything my Uber driver taught me about love
A friend I had grown up with, but gradually fell out of contact with messaged me out of the blue to invite me up to her wedding. It was the first friend wedding I'd ever attended and it was beautiful, I cried a little as I said goodbye to her and then promptly re-downloaded Tinder on my long train journey home. I got home after midnight and had to take an Uber back, and that was when I met Humer - my driver for the night, stellar human and love guru extraordinaire.
He asked me what I had been doing that day and I explained that I'd been at a wedding, then he quizzed me about what I had in mind for my own nuptials. When I told him I was single as all hell, he made it his personal mission to lay down some knowledge. LOVE YOU HUMER, taking your advice to heart and will be naming my firstdog after you.
“You should have a big wedding....you know at my wedding, I went back to Pakistan and we had guys with massive AK47s because that’s the culture, innit? And it’s a tradition to shoot guns into the sky and also for protection because people knew I was British and our women at our weddings wear 22-24 karat gold for four days.
And it was incredible, for four days I lived like a pop star. I was like David Beckham. I know you’re saying that you want to save your money and buy a house, but have the big wedding. If I told you you had all the money but you had one minute to live, you wouldn’t be able to spend it.”
“Just get off Tinder and go to a bar. Find a man what you think looks nice, then go talk to him. Look, if I wasn’t a married man then I’d be here asking you for your number. But as it is, I’ve got the missus at home and we’ve been married for fourteen years and have three children.”
“‘You see with Tinder, your brother and I are going to have a really hard time because we’re Asian. It’s just the way it is. But I bet you and all the other girls are going to have an easy time because with guys, we just try all our chances. We swipe everybody.
A guy got into my cab the other day what looked like a supermodel, talking about Tinder, and he said women always ask him for more photographs. I told him to take all his photographs down. You don’t know if a person is right for you from a picture.”
“So yeah, you’ve got to remember that no man is perfect. And also no woman is perfect. But when you find the right one, you work together to make each other perfect. Understand?”
“You can’t judge a book by its cover. A book can be fat or thin, a book can be Pakistani, Asian, rich, poor, but we all want a book what looks after us and loves us really.”
When Humer pulled up to my neighbourhood thirty minutes later, he turned around and grinned at me. He said, 'I bet you didn't think you'd be having a lesson from an Uber driver. I know things.'
YOU SURE DO, PAL. Here's hoping we run into each other again.
Photography by my queen Esme Anderson