Barbara Ellen
BODY LANGUAGE
It seems to be the fate of some women to become relationship universities. What usually happens in these cases is that the woman in question is involved with a man for many, many years. They grow and learn together. Often they will cohabit, and buy lots of “stuff” to cement their union – houses, cushions, smoke alarms, dishwashers.
Very commonly, they will discuss marriage. Or should I say, she will discuss marriage. He will become quieter and quieter as the years pass, staring into space as she, at first gaily, then with increasing hysteria, lists the pros and cons of matrimony.
“I just don’t want to get married,” he might say. “Why spoil what we have?” What he means is: “Why spoil what I have?”
Sooner or later, the couple’s little splash-pool of contentment becomes a poisoned stream. They continue to grow together, to mould each other’s destinies, but there’s an edge. The woman reads certain news reports, like how the old maid, the parish spinster, is dying off, and thinks bitterly: “Not around here, she isn’t.” When they eventually split, he admits: “I’ve learned so much from you.”
He can afford to be gracious – he just graduated from relationship university, where he learned from the best how to be that exquisite combination of lover and friend. Now all he has to do is get out of there, and share it all with the next lucky blonde.
Couples like this are legion – their stories unfold with such dreadful predictability that if they were a movie, you’d walk out. Whereas the traditional “old maid” tended to have one special gentleman slip away, the current breed of “new maids” seems to spend their entire lives dropping the ball. It’s like terminal relationship butterfingers, and it would almost be funny if their pain wasn’t so terrible. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve sat and listened to tales of woe about how such and such a guy left after aeons of cohabiting, only to marry another woman within the space of a year.
What seems to upset the women left behind the most is the time and effort they’ve squandered. All that wasted energy – thumbing through The Rules, taking notes in front of Sex and the City – loosening the top of the jar, only to watch somebody else waltz away with the jam.
I’ve seen such tragic cases that I’m starting to believe that stringing a woman along for years without marrying her should be classified as a form of domestic abuse. There should be fines and prison sentences. “What are you in for?” “Refusing to wear the morning suit.” “Me too – she built her entire case on some crap about me coming from Mars, and her coming from Venus.”
At this stage, maybe I should admit that, for a brief period when I was pregnant, I thought getting married was a “really good idea”. Then again, around the same time, I also thought that eating pickled onion sandwiches and crying because my socks didn’t match were “really good ideas”. So it is that, these days, I automatically associate wanting to get married with feeling insecure, trapped, desperate and downright crazy. Oh, how I long for Mr Right to come along and make me feel that way again.
While some couples obviously belong together, others seem to get married purely to give their co-dependency credibility. Moreover, while it may be true that certain women use sex as a weapon, where marriage is concerned, men seem to have all the bullets.
Women end up chasing men, spoiling them rotten, giving them egos the size of barns, and condemning themselves to an eternity of self-hatred, and for what? A dress? A ring? A future? A past? There was a frightening article recently about a group of women who admitted that it didn’t matter that they were divorced because at least they’d proved to the world – and their sad spinster mates – that somebody had once wanted them “that much”.
Digesting this garbage, you couldn’t help but think: did Emmeline Pankhurst get trampled under the king’s horse for this?
Of course it’s difficult for a woman to see her friends getting married, and feeling that she’s strapped on to the back of a rocket heading in the wrong direction. Difficult but not impossible.
When people say, as they are wont to, “with those attitudes, you will end up alone, with only cats and books for company”, why not reply with feeling: “Yeah, on the other hand, it could all go horribly wrong.” Far better that, surely, than to wait nervously in the shadows of life to be “rescued”, or – worse – join in the flurry of female proposals on February 29.
Some women handle this most masochistic of rituals with great humour and panache, whatever the outcome. With others, it’s like watching lemmings form a needy scrum around H Samuels’s window. Even when these women get their way, it seems like the most pyrrhic of victories. (If lover-boy really was Mr Right, then surely he’d have had the wit and style to propose to her on February 29.)
Bearing all this in mind, no wonder more and more of us prefer to accept our fate as millennial “new maids”. Even sinking ships have the option of going down with dignity.