Life in the Supermarket Lane -guest blog

 

This article is a guest blog written by an anonymous author whom I don’t know. She goes by the name of Virginia or ginantonic. Every time, her pieces have me in fits of laughter , nodding in agreement, or shaking my head in dismay.  Now I’m honoured to have her permission to share her latest piece with my readers. Enjoy.

This piece was first published on Pink Magazine – December 2011 issue in the series of  GirlTalk – The Virginia Monologues

I have a male friend who was once a little bit more than just a friend. We were friends with privileges, as the Yankees like to put it. He was actually quite besotted with me, and when someone is that enamoured with someone else, the recipient instinctively knows this and can henceforth take a back seat and assume a very passive sort of role in the relationship. Love is strange like that.

You’d think that when you’re getting so much of it, you can afford to give a lot back, or at least some of it. But oddly enough, when you’re getting it in abundance, you become strangely reticent and withdrawn, even slightly miserly and mean. You tend to hold out on dishing it out yourself. So, there I was, with all this love being lavished on me generously and taking it all in my stride. I’d frequently cancel, or postpone meeting him, and this seemed to reignite his passion further.

And then one day, I remember him saying something I never quite forgot. He said something to the effect that he was so profoundly in love with me that he didn’t just want to share my bed. He wanted to do everything else with me. He especially wanted to participate in the boring and miserable bits that he wouldn’t dream of doing with anyone else and that he’d even try to avoid doing for himself. He loved me enough to want to push a trolley down a supermarket aisle with me. It was that deep.

I remember laughing it off at the time, probably because I was a little frightened of the way he was homing in on me, but when we eventually stopped seeing one another, I could never quite shake off the little supermarket conversation. It stayed with me forever. And of course, I now completely understand where he was coming from, because I too subscribe to the same supermarket sort of logic and reasoning. [Perhaps illogic would describe the reasoning better.] It’s a very subtle point, but a very interesting one.

You would think sharing a bed with someone is the be all and end all of love. But it definitely isn’t. You can sleep with anyone and everyone you find reasonably attractive. Any man with enough blood running through his veins could find it in him to pick up an attractive woman, chat her up and take her to bed, if he were in the right sort of mood. But also wanting to see that woman the next morning and to then extend the night-time goings-on into the next day is pretty damn huge.

You see, most people want space to do their own thing. Space – there was a time when I thought this was such a stupid and overrated utterance, but I have come to comprehend the meaningful and useful implications of this lovely five-letter word. Because although there’s a myth surrounding relationships that says two people should henceforth become one and should start eating off the same plate, I can’t say I am of the same opinion. I believe that too much togetherness is never a good thing.

A couple needs three lives – one for him, one for her and one for them together.

I was talking to someone the other day about the whole business of coupling, and I put forward my theory about togetherness. I asked this woman to imagine what would annoy her most if her husband were to leave her for another woman. And before she could even answer the question, I answered it myself. I told her the chances were that she would get much more irritated at the most seemingly innocuous and insignificant little things than at the fact that another woman was sharing her husband’s bed. At first, she couldn’t imagine there could be anything worse and more personal than that, but I proceeded to elaborate. I asked how she’d feel is she saw the two of them sharing an ice cream, or an intimate dinner, or in the rice section of the supermarket, debating whether to go for basmati, or long grain.

Then, I upped the ante and asked her how she’d feel if she suddenly discovered they had bought ‘his’ and ‘hers’ vehicles and had opted to personalise the plates with their own initials. And she slowly began to realise what I meant.

You see, you can catch your husband in bed with any woman and still feel that you are the woman of his life because, ultimately, sex is sex. It’s distinct from love. People screw up and they may well suspend monogamy for a while. Sharing a bed with someone does not suddenly elevate them to significant other. But you would never share a number plate with someone, unless you considered yourselves anything but inseparable. The unit aspect is that much stronger.

Oddly enough, when it comes to my relationships, it’s the unlikeliest things that would upset me. I’m more likely to be jealous of the women my partner finds funny, or interesting, rather than the ones he finds sexy. Because once again, finding someone sexy is an act of lust and is cheaper by the dozen. But going as far as to find someone funny and to be willing and able to sit down for hours in the company of a woman you are not going to have sex with – and you don’t even want to have sex with – is somehow so much more special… perhaps because it is so rare. Having a purely animalistic agenda detracts from the sanctity of the relationship.

It is for this reason that most married women are equally jealous of their husband’s female friendships. You see, women don’t need to make the distinction in their minds. Men are much simpler. If you tell your partner you like your boss and that you get on well with him, but you assure him you have no desire to take it further, he will take this at face value and will not feel threatened. A woman, however, will not feel the same security if her husband spends the best part of one hour cooped up in a corner, chatting another woman up at a party, even if she happens to be married to someone else, or not interested in him. The simple fact that he finds her interesting enough to hijack her for an hour, during which time you are left standing in the lurch like a moron, is quite enough to make you distrust him and dislike the woman instantly.

Yes, sometimes innocent friendships are much harder to stomach than passionate sexual ones. I know for sure that although it would probably kill me to walk in on my partner making out with another woman, catching him giggling in a corner at a party would provoke the exact same reaction in me and would cause me as much distress. Perhaps even more, I dare say.

ginantonic@live.com