Someone once said to me that women spend their 20s and 30s searching for either a sexual partner, a place to live or a job. In my circle of friends, the struggle was real. One of us always seemed to be on a dogged climb to gain one or the other.
But this week, I had a warming realisation: most of my friends are now happily in relationships, the women that prefer being single are contentedly so and the ones that were hoping and searching for a romantic connection now appear to have found one.
Some of my girlfriends even managed to find romance during the last year, seemingly against the odds. I’m at a loss to explain how they did it, but in any case, they are just . . . glad to be feeling the love again. To be seen again.
Having your friend fall in love is almost as good as falling in love yourself. You can live vicariously through that initial rush of lust, the glorious shove into happiness that a crush causes.
I've lost count of the number of times in my 20s where I sat in cafes with friends and our immediate neighbours would blanch at voluminous talk of some new sexual peccadillo
“I’ve asked a few people recently how did they know they met their true partner,” my friend J says. “Everyone says the same thing. By the second date, they knew this time was different.”
And it’s true. Many of my happily loved-up friends appear to have finally ditched their “type” – a type they tethered themselves to for decades, rightly or wrongly. “He’s actually a bit short/young/old/loud/quiet/weird-looking,” they seem to say, puzzled at the newness of it all. In their darkest moments, they feel as though they might be settling, but it’s probably closer to the truth to believe that these women finally know their own worth.
In going after the alpha males, the good-on-paper guys and the beautiful d**kheads, we really didn’t know or honour our self-worth.
Lord knows, we put the fieldwork in here, and we came of age romantically at a strange, pre-internet time. Ladettes and Sex and the City loomed large in our culture and in our collective conscience. We thought it behoved us to drink, swear and sh*g the way we thought “men” did (that is enthusiastically and with nary a backward glance – yes, we were wrong).
We felt it entirely appropriate, not to mention a sign that we were dating functionally and healthily, to sit around together and talk loudly about our sexual misadventures.
Oversharing
I’ve lost count of the number of times in my 20s where I sat in restaurants or cafes with friends and our immediate neighbours would blanch or smirk at voluminous talk of bad blowjobs or “I can’t help it, I’m a size queen” or some new sexual peccadillo that we had encountered (to be fair to my friends, this was mainly just me). God, the oversharing. The indiscretion.
We would discuss and appraise past form and current performance like bookies at Cheltenham and I’m sad to say, we were occasionally critical and cruel with it. We thought it made us sound like empowered sexual libertines – underneath it all, we were just hoping desperately for a second or third date. We were trying to decode the men we were seeing and hid all of our confusion under bravado. Rejection came thick and fast, and it stung, but we threw it off, ready to launch back into the fray again.
God bless us all, we are on a hiding to nothing.
We would depersonalise the men we were seeing (or trying to see) by inputting them into our phones as “Cinema Guy”. Sometimes we would refer to them blithely in conversation as “Polo neck man” or “Limerick City”, somehow trying to convince ourselves that these men were part of an interchangeable cluster. Why the hell did we even bother? Because we saw it in a film and thought it made us look like we didn’t care, when the truth is that we very, very much did?
We would pin our hopes of happiness on many of them and, in some cases, we allowed men to treat us dismissively and sexually. I can’t be the only woman who was taken well outside her sexual comfort zone, smarted afterwards, hoped that my gameness would stand me in good stead (it rarely did), then refashioned it in my head as some sort of colourful sexual adventure?
To my young mind, falling in love felt like climbing Everest; something huge that other people with far more skill, dedication and talent do, and you can’t ever imagine happening to you. Yet when it happens, you have no words for how or why.
That’s when you know your friends are in love. The shutters come down on the bookies. I can’t say I won’t miss some of those conversations, as they were the glue that bonded my friends and I together for so many years. But the alternative is much, much nicer.