Modern women make relationships seem like hard work, and where’s the fun in that?
BODY LANGUAGE
Julie Burchill
Someone sends me a book called The Art Of Seduction. Oh, please. This is about as clever as sending Stephen Hawking a book called Great Pennine Walks. And 454 pages! They’re having a laugh, aren’t they? (Can you imagine the inroads such reading would make into valuable shagging time?) It’s just not going to happen; I don’t have a seductive bone in my body. And, paradoxically, it’s probably because of this that I haven’t been single since I was 12.
It’s a fact: the more books you read about sex and relationships, the less sex you’re going to get and the longer you’re going to be on the shelf. Because any woman who reads a relationship book inevitably reads another – it’s like a box of chocolates, you never stop at one – and before you know it, you’re not seeing men as individuals, but as types who need to be corralled, named and changed. You will be told to act like a different person from the one you really are (see The Rules – wasn’t it fun to find out that half of the pair of witches who dreamed it up is now divorced from the dream date she met while practising what she preached!).
Then, once you’ve hooked your prey, you will be told that it is perfectly legit to go about changing him into someone different. What all this shadow-boxing, all this dancing in the dark, ends up as, of course, is a colossal case of mistaken identity, and two strangers waking up one morning to discover that they don’t even know, let alone like, the person lying next to them. Besides, once you’ve done such a great job of changing Joe Average into Mr Wonderful, why on earth should he be interested in a dweeb like you?
There is something deeply suspect about pretending to be someone you’re not in order to get a boyfriend. No one really thinks that Cyrano de Bergerac’s mate was right to do what he did, nor that grumpy dad in the Bible who made the kid work for seven years unpaid so he could marry his daughter Rachel, then sent her sister up the aisle in a veil instead. Or those identical boy twins who are always changing into each other’s clothes so they can shag each other’s unsuspecting girlfriends. Yet relationship gurus have never done such a roaring trade in their bid to paint us pink and auction us off to the highest bidder.
It shouldn’t be this way. When women started going out to work, you’d have thought that the matchmaker’s day was over. But the way single girls tell it, meeting men is more difficult now than it was in the days when young ladies were forced to lie on the sofa having vapours all day and lusting after covered-up table legs, and when they weren’t allowed to be alone in the same room as a boy without a chaperone, a priest and a doctor standing by in case of emergency! What went wrong?
Well, single women, for a start. When you meet a woman who has been unwillingly single for a long time (six months), there is this awful smell of desperation coming off her, and it’s not nice. “You don’t want to start from here” is the old line about the Irishman giving directions, but it is a cruel paradox that single people are generally less sexually attractive than attached ones. And the longer this state persists, the truer it gets; apparently, it is twice as easy to marry in your 30s if you’ve been divorced than if you’ve stayed single, because the latter makes you look as if you’ve been sexually tried and rejected by a whole generation. Where women go wrong is in trying too hard. Modern women make relationships seem like hard work, and where’s the fun in that? It’s all very well liking your job, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve got to be “on” 24-7.
Check-lists, commitment issues, personal growth – I’m sorry, it’s just nagging under another name. It’s true that the only time a woman succeeds in changing a man is when he’s in nappies; if he’s wrong for you, dump him and get a new one. Women’s new assertiveness in relationship matters is, in fact, not a triumph of feminism, rather proof of its failure in this department; and proof that there is so much more to be done in the bedroom, and in the boardroom. Smash that glass slipper, not just the glass ceiling.
We are told constantly that it’s men who are in the wrong for wanting a quiet, comfy type of thang, with no arguing and loads of sex, but exactly what is wrong with that? Sounds to me like just the ticket after a hard day’s work. The only type of person who would want their me-time to be a nonstop talking shop about the Wonder Of Us, and how we can possibly improve on it in any way, is obviously some airhead with too much time on her hands and not enough of a hinterland, if you will. Relationships should be the ultimate time-out from struggle and graft, not more of the same.
Above all, love is meant to be fun, and you can’t have fun if you’re always trying to be someone you’re not. Just relax, and remember the advice – substituting relationships for cooking – my friend’s Jewish grandma gave her the night before her wedding: “Don’t make it so awful good – men, the pigs, will eat anything.”