I think that until it's stated to him explicitly, Pete never really has a clue as to how much certain women like him.
That'll be why they've stated it explicitly, then, individually and en masse in the bathroom, Aisleyne included.
He backed off from Lisa pretty fast once she made it clear that she was being more than matey-gropey-laughy with him, and wanted a bit more. I think this was because he genuinely didn't fancy her, and was a bit worried by her advances. As he said, it takes 'a long time' for him to 'fancy' someone, and I think that Lisa ruined her own chances by pushing him too hard.
Well, he backed off from Lisa by getting out of the bed he was sharing with her and climbing into Lea's without saying anything at all - and he sheepishly clambered back into Lisa's bed when ordered (jokily-but-not-really) to do so. It wasn't for a day or so that he actually had The Conversation with her, and that was, if I remember rightly, largely precipitated by others telling him he should do so.
I don't think Lisa ruined her chances by pushing too hard. I don't think she had any chance in the first place, because if she hadn't pushed Pete to share a bed, nothing would've happened anyway. I think she managed the situation fairly adroitly (back in those pre-consuming paranoia days) and it's not entirely fair to frame her as the architect of her own (relationship) downfall. If the signals hadn't been mixed-to-favourable at the outset (and although we are now, with the benefit of hindsight, saying, "that's 'cause he didn't fancy Lisa", at the time it looked like charmingly gauche mutual flirtation), I doubt she'd have put herself out on a limb at all. I think she paid for that.
With Lea on the other hand, I think Pete definitely saw her as a mother figure, what with all the head-stroking and busom cuddles. It took someone telling him to his face that she liked-liked him for him to realise, and he did look pretty shocked, and afterwards they did talk (a lot, by Pete's standards) and he made it clear that he didn't feel that way about her while she was busy swimming in denial. I thought he was pretty unambiguous there, but he really should have stopped putting his face in her tits after that, that's a bit weird.
Well, yes. I'm not sure to what extent Pete actually said explicitly, "I don't feel that way about you" but yes, they certainly did talk. Whatever just-friends message he was attempting to get across was undermined, to a certain extent, by the face-in-tits stuff, and his general willingness to play the part of her little boy.
Nikki though, I reckon he does like. If only when he's drunk, yeah, but he does like her enough to play giggles-in-the-duvet with her after pretty much every party in the house. I haven't seen him deny his attraction to her, I must have missed it (damn real life *shaky fisty*), but I think he was being disingenuous with the truth a bit there.
Okay, so you reckon he genuinely likes Nikki. The psychologists (or head-noddy Geoffrey Beattie, anyway) reckons he has a more brother-sister relationship with her and it's Aisleyne he's after. I'm undecided. The morning after the last-party-but-one, he sat in the garden with Mikey and conveyed that Nikki had come on to him but he wasn't that interested. Mikey (who, if he's good at anything, is good at relationship ethics) told him it was unfair to be leading Nikki on in that way.
Still, where does that leave Jeannie? Curse that uncommunicative man. We'll have to wait to read the exclusive in [insert title of glossy celeb-tat-rag here] when he wins...
As I say, Aisleyne is the shrink's choice - but I don't think Beattie knows any more than anyone else. I don't think Pete knows either, so I'm not sure there'll be an OK exclusive; I think you're right in saying (and he said it himself, early on) that he takes an eternity to decide whether or not to move into 'fancying' gear. I also think that, while he's doing the deciding, he passively goes with the flow to such an extent that, by the time he's made his mind up (which presumably he does if one waits long enough), the female in question has already assumed they're an item. |
