What Women Want?
One night after coming home from the pub before Meeester and I were hitched, we sat channel surfing the then four television channels and found one of those worthy late night discussion shows on Channel Four. The topic was “What Women Want”. This is the kind of bollocks Channel Four used to force feed us before satellite TV came along to provide some competition and made them buck up their ideas a bit and put daft slutty lassies getting pissed in Ibiza on for our viewing pleasure.
This kind of show would normally have been flicked over immediately to some more mindless nonsense on a rival channel but for the fact that one of the pundits on the studio couch was a girl I went to university with.
At university she had been one of those smug, overbearing high-achieving girls that you couldn’t hate outright because there was nothing overtly nasty about her. She was pretty, intelligent, mature, right on, and totally superior. Me and my underachieving, immature, gawky mates hated her.
She was equally loathsome on telly and she had some bollocks pressure group type position befitting her general smugness and superior disposition. I couldn’t bear her but felt compelled to watch as she pontificated on “What women want” with the sort of authority that a 23 year old just shouldn’t have. What did she know what I or anyone else wanted? Who was she to sit there with her privileged background, perfect hair and complexion and lecture anyone on anything?
Even through the cathode ray she managed to make me feel small and insignificant in my own living room a world away from the bizarro world of uni. There she was on actual telly being all smart and important whilst I was struggling to get out of a theatre box office filler job and get on with the career I thought I would have had by now. The sight of her on that show plagued me for weeks.
Two years previously at university I had gone out with a bloke who had at an earlier point been her live in boyfriend. Irritatingly he was still friends with her and she would routinely turn up at his flat unannounced to remind him how much more worthy of his affection she was compared to me, and simultaneously how he wasn’t going to get any, even if he wanted it. Not by saying so, just by being there. In my paranoid mind, anyway. My relationship with the bloke didn’t last long. My insecurity was the reason looking back. How could someone like me compete with someone like her?
I don’t know how you would categorise how I felt about her. Envy and jealousy are the obvious ones, but they don’t quite cut it on their own. There was more in there. The woman brought me out in hives.
It’s funny how people like that stick in your mind years on and bring all the worst traits in your personality surging to the surface. Even twenty years on as I read her pontificating again in a magazine this week about work and motherhood.
Over achieving cow.
