Middle-aged and unmarried, Bambi Smyth went on an international romance-seeking mission, dating dozens of men across five continents – from a Spanish gigolo to a Vatican City seminarian, and everything in between. After testing the cultural stereotypes, she tells The Weekly that men the world over all just want the same thing.
In her bold quest to find The One, Bambi Smyth went on a man-meeting marathon that involved 75 dates in 81 days across 22 countries – and required her to dine on raw prawn brains and a pig’s penis. No one could accuse Bambi of not putting herself out there.
Indeed, Bambi went the extra mile – make that 52,794km – to sample a smorgasbord of men aged 21 to 61, including a Scottish bagpiper, Brazilian concierge and Russian billionaire banker. There were some clangers – like the Rio professor who repeatedly insulted her but still expected sex, and the Dubai businessman who demanded she wear his mother’s all-enveloping blackabayaand walk six paces behind him – but most of the men turned out to be pleasant company. And a few, like Italian naval architect Stefano, were intoxicating.
The majority of men, Bambi learned, were “just as vulnerable, clumsy, insecure and lost” as her. Says the 55-year-old children’s author and illustrator, “At the end of the day, they all want love – and their cultural differences bring that out in different ways. I’d had some bad experiences in the past, and I came away – and this sounds awful – but forgiving men. They’re just blokes, trying to get along, trying to find love, and most of them are pretty decent.”
By the way, before we go any further, Bambi is her is her actual name. The fourth daughter (after Bronwyn, Belinda and Bonita) of a decorated naval commodore, Bambi admits her name “does sound a bit like a pole-dancer, but it’s character-building” – and with ancestors that include the likes of explorer John Smith (ofPocahontasfame), Scout Movement founder Robert Baden-Powell and adventure novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard (who wroteKing Solomon’s Mines), she can also thank her family for her thrill-seeking spirit.
Almost six-feet tall, Bambi describes herself as a cross between Olive Oyl and Cruella de Vil, but she’s more a warm, leggy Rachel Griffiths lookalike. Chatting in the living room of her inner-Melbourne townhouse, she is surrounded by the old naval trunks of her beloved father and dozens of curios she has collected over the years – from an Omani camel bell to a Massai warrior’s honey pot. An inveterate traveler, Bambi has played with orangutans in the forests of Borneo, swum with humpback whales in Tonga and slept under the stars in the Tunisian desert.
She has always sought overseas adventures, but a few years ago the urge to escape became personal. Aged 47 and fresh out of an eight-year relationship with a man who wouldn’t commit, Bambi found herself “unmarried, unbabied and now unloved”. Her confidence was shredded, but she vowed to combine her three big loves – food, travel and men – to write a memoir Men on the Menu, matching each foreign date to a local dish. (Carlos, the dodgy Portuguese nightclub owner, for example, issardinha assada, or grilled sardines: “oily, rich and decidedly fishy”.)
The trip was all about being proactive. “There’s no use looking at yourself in the mirror,” she says, “seeing a portrait of Dorian Gray, and thinking it’s just getting worse.” As a friend advised her, “You have to mix the pot. You can’t sit in the same stew forever.”
Born in Scotland, the wild fourth of five kids, Bambi spent her childhood moving around the world with her family, but has lived all her adult life in Melbourne. By the time she embarked on her global romance-seeking mission, she felt she had trawled the local talent pool for 30 years with little success. “I’d been looking for someone with the same background, same morals, same political persuasions,” she says, “but it just didn’t work for me because I scared those men – because I’m loud and colourful and they thought, she’s a bit too much to handle…
“I think Australians, or the ones I’ve been out with, are a little bit stitched-up, a little bit English in their sensibilities. They’re a little scared to show emotion, as if it’s not manly, whereas in Italy it’s all about flirting and charming, and it doesn’t reduce them at all or make them wimpish – it just makes them fabulous.”
If a tad unfaithful. A recurring theme in Bambi’s book seems to be the men’s loose approach to loyalty. In fact, one of her Middle Eastern dates has a modern-day harem, with five girlfriends on the go. “The men get away with fooling around, but when it comes to the women, forget it,” says Bambi. “They’re shameless.”
Men On The Menu
Still, she defends the French and Italians. “They might be chauvinistic, but they’re not misogynistic,” explains Bambi. “They actually love women, and it’s quite different.” Besides, she was more interested in quizzing the men rather than judging them. “I was fascinated,” says Bambi, who teed up half the dates through contacts before she left Australia. “Eighty percent were single, but some were married and just wanted to come along and talk about themselves. I think they wanted to have a voice. Some of them were in unhappy marriages and talking to me empowered them and made them feel good about themselves again – because I was valuing them and wanting to find out what made them tick.”
If you look hard enough, she insists, there is good in everyone – although there were a few notable exceptions. Prince Albert’s surly minder in Monaco, for example, told her she was no better than a prostitute (even though she offered to pay for all her dates – and coughed up for roughly a third), while a London hedge-fund manager implied she was stupid no less than 37 times in the course of their conversation. “Some of the dates were horrific,” Bambi admits, “but I almost started to enjoy them because they were so awful!”
On the upside, though, there was also a romantic night on the Seine in a charming Parisian’s houseboat, a (rare) raunchy dalliance with a paediatric heart surgeon in Zurich, and pizza with a down-to-earth Neopolitan prince. And then there was Stefano. “Our date went from lunch to four o’clock the next morning,” she recalls. “I just wanted to soak him up. I was already naming the kids.”
It’s encounters like that, of course, that keep the romantic dream alive. Before every date, says Bambi, she’d take a deep breath, hope for the best, and try to have fun. She learned to give each man a chance, even if he didn’t make a stellar first impression.
These days, she realises men are mere mortals, and they no longer have the same power to intimidate her. She says she’s more forgiving and less interested in a checklist. “I know I’m not perfect, so why should anyone else be?”
When she started the trip, Bambi felt left on the shelf, but as she racked up the dates, she discovered she could engage with almost any man and mean something to him, even if it was fleeting. Ironically, her unorthodox search for The One made her more content to be single.
“I don’t need a man anymore, having done all that!” says Bambi, who currently has a boyfriend. “It’s nice to have them around, but it has to be for the right reasons. I don’t need to get married, I’m too old to have kids now, so I feel liberated.”
To other women who feel stuck in a rut, she insists it’s never too late to become the person you want to be. “Be brave,” she says. “Don’t run away from your fears and insecurities – run towards them. You might be surprised that they’re not all that scary after all.”
Then again, you might prefer to leave the pig penis on your plate.
