There’s strength in vulnerability. Especially at this age, when life moves at a blinding speed, and all we can do is hang on tight and hope you keep your underwear and your dignity (I won’t lie, I have failed spectacularly at both in the last year or so, but I maintain, no matter what anyone tells you, that I’m improving. Tequila accidents notwithstanding.) Recently, a slightly-intoxicated chat with a very dear friend pointed out the plight of someone who I had completely forgotten I was: the young, single woman – you’re damned right in thinking that she doesn’t need anyone, but more often than not, what she needs and what she wants are two very different things.
Amidst all of Lady Gaga’s sometimes-disingenuous disco tracks preaching self-acceptance and celebration of your quirks, Scheiße is one which isn’t going to get anywhere near the attention it deserves, because it stands up for a group it isn’t cool to publically support at the moment. Here it is, for those of you who haven’t heard one of the best offerings on Born This Way; it’s one of those, like a surprising number of Top 40 songs, which has top-notch dance production, so bombastic and strong that the lyrics are almost an afterthought, but if you were to strip all that away and put them to an acoustic guitar/piano with a mopey indie-boy with hair he has issues seeing past and a Ramones t-shirt, they’d be REALLY FUCKING DEPRESSING (see Rihanna’s Only Girl in the World, and Ke$ha’s Tik Tok). -Seriously though, I don’t know why no one’s hearing Rihanna; she’s cool with Eminem burning her house down with her in it, she keeps begging Drake to say her name – the HEIGHT of neediness – and now she wants some nameless rando to MAKE HER FEEL LIKE SHE’S THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WORLD. And judging by the last video, she’s got all that going on, AND she’s on the run from the Jamaican police for shooting an idiot in a string vest. If anyone needs a little holiday in a padded cell and some nice sedative-y drugs, it’s her.)
The whole song’s pretty brilliant, but the line in the title’s the one you really need to think on – “I wish I could be strong without somebody there”. This mythical woman who Gaga’s chanting about, with all her broken GermSpanglish and pseudo-hookerisms, is a ‘high-heeled feminist’ – a powerful image if you think of just how many women out there who demand equal pay and the right to control their own bodies, and yet, in the same breath, claim to not be anything close to a feminist – and now it’s a word that’s appeared on the biggest pop record of the year. Yet, even as this woman, who we’re all a little bit afraid of, is dancing the night away, she wishes she had it in her not to want someone there to hold her hand. Which brings us to the heart of the matter; in a post-feminist, modern-day world, are single women afraid of having to give up part of what makes them happy now, for a chance at something that could make them even happier?
For whatever it’s worth, I’m single. And sometimes it’s hideous, but sometimes it’s exactly what I want for myself. If there’s anything I’ve learned, as my first year at university comes to a close, it’s that I can’t predict shit, no matter how hard I try. All of the sex I’ve had this year has been entirely unplanned and beyond my control, and I never drink as much/as little as I intend to and unfortunately enough, the only thing that seems consistent is that I will end every night out devouring something deep-fried that I will trip over the container of in the morning. THE ONLY THING I CAN COUNT ON IN MY LIFE IS CHIPS. Seeing what a man can turn a woman who’s fallen too fast and too hard into has terrified me to the point where it genuinely makes me feel a bit ill to imagine it happening to me. I’m not alone in this one; what consumes us in a cloud of cigarettes and usually something involving vodka is that we just haven’t figured out whatever secret it is that has people do the normal thing where they meet, they talk, there’s usually some drunken kissing, then somebody asks somebody out and BOOM, relationship. Some of us have a penchant for drama, some of us have sex too quickly, some of us don’t have it soon enough – the list of the number of ways we’ve found to cheat ourselves out of potential relationships goes on and on and fucking on.
And all of this leads to me to wonder why it’s so important to us anyway? We’re so young – we don’t have to do much of anything right now, because odds are, we’ve got flipping decades to make major life decisions. Lots of my single friends have been through a tumultuous year of being confused, being hurt, being horny and usually being drunk in addition to all of the above. And it’s not that any of these young women don’t have anything else to do but obsess over whether [insert generic English boy's name] likes them – they’re on sports teams, they’re involved in theatre, they write – in addition to being beautiful and funny and interesting and all the rest of it, these girls are just pretty brilliant all round. But there’s a distinct sentiment of something being missing, of something they feel like other people have that they just can’t tap into. Trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that drives so many single women to distraction over the men in their lives is something that’s been defying definition since before vampires were cool.
But then, maybe that’s just it. Maybe it’s the neuroticisms and the freaking out and the overthinking and the overcomplication that’s keeping us single – or more often than not, in that hazy space in-between. If we could just exhale, chill the fuck out and consistently put ourselves first, we might just be in a better place for when whoever it is comes along. Either way, if the road paved with cigarettes and gin and buying pregnancy test multi-packs to share isn’t cutting it, it’ll do us no harm to go down a different one for a little while. Everyone’s elderly relative says something along the lines of ‘it’ll happen when you least expect it”* – maybe we should give it a shot.
So I’m going to go out tonight. I’m going to dance on a single prayer – not sure what it means, but it’s a pleasant image. And I’m going to try my very best to be strong without somebody there. That does not, however, mean that I won’t be enlisting a male friend to carry my shoes home. And my chips, obviously.
*My personal elderly relative says that the reason I’m not married already is because I don’t know how to cook rice. So those of you who can do that can apparently just sit back and wait for Alcide from True Blood to show up; your work is done.
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