With Facebook now allowing us a frighteningly close insight into the lives of all those forgotten school ‘friends’ allowing us a glance into every minutia of their lives, I’m pretty sure it won’t be long before they will install a bowel update monitor with some Gillian McKeith scale which will instantly inform all your friends of the exact, time, size, weight and colour of your movements.
It was nearly ten years ago that I finished school and I remember thinking to myself that I’d never have to hear from another one of them again. I felt liberated by the fact that I could mentally wipe their names from my head and go off into an environment where being a bit geeky and booky was a good thing. But if only I could have predicted the future back then, to see the state we are now in and I would have never foreseen the exponential growth in my popularity with said ‘friends’ in the past decade. The relentless comparing and contrasting of lives on the Myspaces, Facebooks and Friends Reuniteds of this world are forcing us to look at our own lives that little bit closer and by Christ, I just don’t like it.
Although I have long accepted most of the people that I went to school with are now married and with kids, I still find the whole thing very odd. It seems relatively alien to me that some of them now have kids of nine or ten. I probably find this so strange as I am still finding it a challenge looking after myself with bills and rent and food and all those basic survival techniques you need just to keep yourself going; looking after a human being that breathes and thinks and does stuff is almost unthinkable.
What I’m now finding even more bizarre, is that the people that I call my ‘contemporaries’ (although that sounds like a completely bullshit term, thought up by some pretentious twat, but I’ll use it anyway), the people that I went to university with, are following after those old school ‘friends’. At 25, I am the same age as my mother when she had me but I feel in no way ready to pop out any offspring anytime soon: likewise with marriage. I have a friend who relentlessly drops major hints about marriage; last week she emailed her boyfriend links for diamond ring websites and entitled the email “Only emerald cut will do”. I do feel intensely sorry for her boyfriend as he is always met by questions and interrogation from just about everyone on his plans and intentions, even sometimes from me, but it is really funny to watch him squirm about, not knowing where to look, like an owl on acid. But I can’t ever imagine insisting upon marriage. I can’t ever imagine trying on wedding dresses or working out the logistical nightmare of table settings or choosing a wedding cake that probably requires scaffolding to produce it.
I also have a few friends that are younger than myself and will believe themselves to be a failure unless they get married before 25. They are even desperately wanting kids to the point that they are literally humping potential partners in public to fulfil their need to create mini versions of themselves. Did I mention these friends are male? I, in their eyes, am a complete loser in this respect. No long term relationship, apathetic to the concept of reproduction (isn’t one of me enough?) and happy enough to keep on the way I’m going; I might as well stick my head in the oven now.
When I get asked about my car-crash of a love life, which isn’t so much of a car crash but a bloody great motorway pile up, or ask what I think of marriage and babies, I just shrug. With my relaxed attitude towards such things (you can be assured I’m not always that laid back), I am only met by unprecedented smugness and told that once I’m in a ‘proper relationship’ or once I get a bit older, my ideas will change and blah, blah, blah... It’s at this point my brain takes a rest and mentally wonders around for a bit thinking about what’s on the TV later, or did I lock the front door, or what should I have for tea?
Maybe I’m just too selfish to be like everyone else: I never did like sharing my toys as a child. It is just a matter of time before Facebook launch another application for all those ‘friends’ of yours to see “(insert name here) is still single, never been married, has no kids and you’ll probably still think they are a loser now, as you did when they were in school”.
