THE ONE WORD
YOU SHOULD
NEVER SAY TO A
Aw
m the fridge an
aight from the bottle.
e one question, talked
all night, turned up
t my lip when he tried
ushed me against a wall
empt to seem passion-
ot whiplash in my neck.”
ief pause. “So you really
king?”
Did you not just hear
?”
me,” she says. “I just think
perfect for you.”l, he’s handsome, he’s
e owns his own house,”
culating pleadingly.
going to forgo a boyfriend
sonality or ability to snog
he’s a property owner,” I say.
hink you’re being too picky,”
Sorry, but I do. If you wantand it is
me more and more
mad with every year I get older.
It crops up when I have the
audacity to complain about a date and
usually comes from my smug coupled
friends or my mother (of course).
Sometimes even a few
of my close male friends
feel free to share their
opinions which make
me feel like crap – as if
I have totally misjudged
how high I should be
aiming in life.
The worst thing
about the slur is the
extended assumption
that I should be grateful that anyone
would even want to have a tepid glass of
pinot gris with me. And that the
reason I am still single is because there
is something inherently wrong with my
approach to the dating world.n’t hard enough, I’m
ad about the way I go
nks for your support, guys!
how much of this pickiness is us
g fussy and how much is it us having
high, solid expectations for ourselves?
I think it may be the latter: this
alleged “pickiness” may just be the word
given to describe the fact women have
grown more confidence about what it is
they want. We don’t have to sit around
doing tapestries at home waiting for a
suitor to choose us and ask our parents
for our hand in marriage anymore; we
work, we’re sexually free,
we can ask men out, we
can swipe left and right.
We have the freedom of
being able to choose a
partner, after thousands
of years of being chosen.
Similarly, it can’t just
be a coincidence that our
supposed increase in
fussiness has overlapped
with the increase in popularity of dating
apps. So many of us now meet as
strangers, based solely on looks, rather
than friends of friends or people with
a social context. Maybe it’s possible
we think of dates as being disposable?SINGLE GIRL
“Maybe this word
describes the fact
women have
grown more
confident about
what they want”marieclaire.com.au 89