How to Be a Woman

  When Courtney wakes up in the night, he moans about how his hair is thinning, until he falls back to sleep again – leaving me restless, depressed and awake. I’d never known how alone you can feel lying next to someone.

  But I am also absolutely determined to be in love. I figure this will probably … knock the edges off me. It’s love as a lesson, and a penance. I don’t think Courtney will kill me, so he will, therefore, probably make me stronger. I will learn from this. I listen to Janis Joplin a lot. I believe in feeling bad for love. I think it is, somehow, glorious. I am stupid. I am so stupid.

  Along with underwear, love is a woman’s work. Women are to be fallen in love with. When we discuss the great tragedies that can possibly befall a woman, once we have discounted war and injury, it is the idea of being unloved, and therefore unwanted, that we wince over the most. Elizabeth I may have laid the groundworks of the British Empire, but she could never marry – poor, pale, mercury-caked queen. Jennifer Aniston is a beautiful, successful millionairess who lives in a beach house in LA and will never have to stand in a queue to post a pair of boots back to Topshop’s online return department with a head cold – and yet her entire thirties were written off as the decade in which she just could not keep hold of first Brad Pitt, and then John Mayer. Princess Diana – so unlucky! Cheryl Cole – lonely! Hilary Swank and Reese Witherspoon – got those Oscars, but their husbands left them!

  Language tells us exactly what we think of the unattached woman – it’s all there, in the difference between ‘bachelors’ and ‘spinsters’. Bachelors have it all to play for. Spinsters must play for it all, and fast. The market demand tells you a woman’s value: if she is single, she is unwanted, and therefore – should this state of affairs go on for any length of time – less desirable.

  So given the importance women know is attached to them being attached, it is little wonder that women are obsessed with the idea of love, and relationships. We think about them all the time. Sometimes, when I tell men about the way women think about potential relationships, they start to look very, very alarmed. Discuss the same thing with women, however, and they will give a shamed bark of recognition.

  Take, for instance, the average office or workplace. Within a mixed-sex staff, there will be obvious flirtations going on, all more or less apparent to the curious observer. We know all this.

  But if you had some manner of Psychic Helmet that you could put on, in order to read the women’s thoughts, any man donning it would be instantly terrified by the previously concealed levels of female insanity it revealed.

  Look at that woman in the corner – a perfectly normal, non-psychotic section manager, with a pleasant and easy demeanour towards everyone she works with. As far as anyone is aware, she doesn’t really fancy anyone in the office. She appears to be writing a long, important email. But do you know what she’s really doing? She thinking about that bloke five desks away that she’s only talked to about ten times.

  ‘If we went away for a mini-break together, we couldn’t go to Paris – he went there with his ex-girlfriend,’ she’s thinking. ‘I know. He mentioned it once. I remember. I’m not going to go tromping around the Louvre if he’s comparing me, in my spring mac, to her, in her spring mac. Not that we’d be going in spring, anyway – given where we are in our relationship now, if he made the first move TODAY, the earliest we’d be going on mini-breaks would be –’ counts up on fingers ‘– November, and it would be really rainy, and my hair would go all flat. I’d need an umbrella.’

  ‘But,’ she continues, typing angrily, ‘if I had an umbrella, then we wouldn’t be able to hold hands because I’d have the brolly in one hand and my handbag in the other. So that would be shit. UNLESS! UNLESS I could fit everything I needed in my pockets! Then I wouldn’t have to take a handbag to the Louvre. But I’d be without spare tights if I got splashed, and I’d have to go bare-legged, and it would be so cold that my legs would look all purple, and I’d be tense when we went back to the hotel to fuck, and I’d be trying to hide them with a towel, and he’d think I was prick-teasing him, and go off me. OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE. WHY IS HE TAKING US TO PARIS IN NOVEMBER? I HATE HIM.’

  She doesn’t even fancy this bloke. She’s barely even spoken to him. If he asked her out for a drink, she’d probably say no. She has no desire to have an actual relationship with him. And yet, next time he talks to her, she’ll be a trifle curt with him and he – in his wildest, most opium-fuelled imaginings – would never come close to guessing why that might be. Maybe he would shruggingly presume she was premenstrual, or just having a bad day.

  He would never alight upon the simple truth: that they went on a very bad imaginary mini-break to Paris together, and broke up over some tights.

  *

  I imagine possible relationships all the time. All the time. My God, in my teens I was fucking tragic for it. I scarcely existed in the real world at all. I lived in some kind of … Sex Narnia. My love life was busy, exciting, and totally imaginary.

  My first serious relationship was conducted with a famous comedian of the time, and took place wholly in my head. I’d never met him, spoken to him, or even been in the same room as him – and yet, during one Inter-City journey from Wolverhampton to London Euston, I had one of the most intense relationship experiences of my life: all daydreamed. We’d obviously meet at a party, I thought. We’d banter, in the manner of His Girl Friday, amuse each other greatly, and become writing partners before, finally, graduating into witty, ardent lovers.

  As the train sped through Coventry, I imagined our house, our dinner party, our social circle, our pets. By the time I reached Rugby, I was imagining the pair of us appearing on Wogan, talking about our new project – a ditzy rom-com, currently smashing box-office records.

  ‘But the period of writing was not without tragedy, was it?’ Terry Wogan asked, leaning forward and doing his ‘sensitive face’.

  ‘No, Terry,’ I said, tearing up. I could feel Camera One zooming in for a close-up. ‘Halfway through writing, we … we lost our first baby. I was devastated. It would have been so loved, and so wanted. Dealing with that kind of loss is just … it’s like having a trapdoor open up in your heart.’

  The famous comedian put his arm around me, silently.

  ‘Caitlin was amazing,’ he said, wiping his eye with his shirt cuff. ‘She would not give up on the script. During the days, she was a lioness. But at night – at night, we’d cry ourselves to sleep.’

  It became one of the most famous interviews of Wogan’s career – not least because the camera caught a tear on his cheek, too, as he wrapped up the interview to go over to PJ & Duncan playing their new single, ‘Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble’.

  Imagining all of this, I became so hysterical with grief that, by the time I got to Euston, I had to go into the Ladies and put my head under the cold tap. Even now – 17 years later – I can still feel quite maudlin remembering it. In many ways, it’s still one of the most memorable relationships of my life. In an hour-and-a-half-long train journey, I’d met the love of my life, won an Oscar, lost a baby, grieved, made Terry Wogan weep on prime-time BBC1, and inspired PJ & Duncan’s second single, ‘Too Many Tears (For A Beautiful Lady)’.

  When it got to Number One, at Christmas, the video featured a classy, black and white picture of me in an ornate frame, looking noble, which PJ & Duncan sang to, in the snow.

  Obviously, I know all this sounds insane. And perhaps it’s a slightly extreme example. Slightly. And it did make finally meeting that comedian at a party quite tricky – a friend, noticing I was drunk, had to bodily drag me from the room, going ‘DON’T SAY ANYTHING TO HIM! TRY TO REMEMBER IT ONLY HAPPENED IN YOUR HEAD! YOU HAVE NOTHING ACTUAL TO REMINISCE ABOUT!’

  But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story – in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never
actually happened.

  On the days where I have to rationalise this insanity to myself, I postulate that these intense crushes are a necessary evolutionary by-product of being a woman. As our fertility window is so short – allowing maybe a handful of serious, reproductively potential relationships before the menopause – these serious fantasies are by way of ‘test runs’, allowing women to run through entire possible relationships in their heads, to see if they’d ultimately work out or not. Like a computer running through algorithms.

  But this febrile ability to have intense, imaginary relationships often spills over into relationships that actually exist, blurring the line between the real relationship and the imagined one. Sometimes, this is wholly benign. Who doesn’t have a friend who worships her lover with a passion that seems baffling to everyone that knows them? Before you met him for the first time, she’d talked him up like he was a cross between Indiana Jones, Barack Obama and The Doctor. When you finally meet him, he’s a quiet little thing who looks like a baked bean in glasses, and actually says ‘harumph’ as spelt.

  ‘I can’t believe I agreed, in advance, to a weekend away with them,’ you think, dolorously pouring a treble into your mug. ‘She is dating the Bony King of Nowhere.com.’

  And other times, of course, this ability to live in an imaginary relationship becomes positively unhelpful in affairs which are, for whatever reason, unsatisfactory, faltering or nugatory.

  As soon as my friends and I start dating for real, we enter an exhausting paradox: a belief that, in love, everything is not as it seems. The conviction that there is a common state of affairs whereby a man can be madly in love with you, and wish to spend the rest of his life with you, but will indicate this in a variety of ways so subtle, only the truly talented and determined will discern his true desires. Like it’s The Da Vinci Code, and that when a man takes you out to dinner, gets off with you, then doesn’t call for two weeks, there’s a secret challenge he’s setting you, which – with enough algebra, consultation of ancient scrolls, and wailing on the phone to your female friends – you can decode, and, eventually, get married, i.e. win.

  ‘Listen to this email,’ a friend will say. ‘He’s put, “Rachel, good to see you! Great night! We should do it again sometime.” That’s really noncommittal, isn’t it?’

  ‘It does sound fairly noncommittal, yes,’ I will agree.

  ‘But then,’ Rachel will go on, using the special ‘slightly mad’ tone of voice all women use during these conversations, ‘he sent it at 4pm.’

  She pauses. I make a confused sound.

  ‘4pm!’ she says, again. ‘So he would still have been at work when he sent it! So maybe he was worried someone might look over his shoulder and see it, so he’s kept it deliberately a little cool. I mean, he put “XXX” at the bottom. That’s his way of making it intimate again, yeah?’

  ‘Rachel,’ I will say. ‘You put “XXX” on the bottom of emails to the Inland Revenue. Everyone does it.’

  ‘I looked at his Facebook page, and he’s changed his Favourite Songs list and included “Here Comes The Hot-stepper” by Ini Kamoze. AND WE WERE TALKING ABOUT INI KAMOZE DURING DINNER!’

  ‘Rachel, I think that, if he liked you, he’d just … spend a lot more time with you, and say things like, “I really like you,”’ I say.

  ‘But don’t you think that’s kind of … significant, though?’ Rachel will plead. ‘I don’t think you change your Facebook playlist FOR NO REASON AT ALL. It’s a message to me.’

  After an hour of this, I give up trying to persuade her that none of this means anything at all. There’s no point in trying. Even shouting ‘HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU’ whilst sounding a klaxon doesn’t work. She’s in the Girl Matrix – trying to catch invisible, slo-mo bullets those of us outside the Matrix can’t see.

  You can always tell when a woman is with the wrong man, because she has so much to say about the fact that nothing’s happening.

  When women find the right person, on the other hand, they just … disappear for six months, and then resurface, eyes shiny, and usually about six pounds heavier.

  ‘So what’s he like?’ you will say, waiting for the usual cloudburst of things he says and things he does, and requests of analysis of what you think it means that his favourite film is Star Wars (‘Trapped in adolescence – or in touch with his inner child?’).

  But she will be oddly quiet.

  ‘It’s just … good,’ she will say. ‘I’m really happy.’

  When – four hours later – she gets really drunk, there will be one, dazzlingly frank, discussion about how good he is in bed. ‘Honestly, the size of his penis makes it a borderline medical emergency,’ she’ll say, with impossible cheeriness.

  And then that will usually be the end of the discussion. Usually forever. You stop talking about things when you’ve worked them out. You’re no longer an observer, but a participant. You’re too busy for this bullshit.

  I am talking about Courtney to everyone. I am a bore. It feels like our relationship is a gigantic puzzle – a huge existential and emotional quiz that, if I apply myself to it enough, I will solve, and gain the result of True Love. After all, all the ingredients for us to be the perfect couple are there: he’s a man, I’m a woman, and we live in the same house. All the other stuff – compatibility, courtesy, tenderness, not wanting to kill each other – are little things I can finesse, if I think about them enough.

  Caz bears the brunt of my attempts to decipher the answer. I found my phone bills from that era recently, and they show, in their column of neat figures, how I called her every night: 11pm to 1am, 2am, 3am. Hours of talking. It’s amazing how much you can find to say when there’s one big thing you’re too afraid to say: ‘This isn’t working.’

  The problem is that I am the problem. Courtney is just unhappy. I know that. I know it in my bones. When I find the way to make him happy, everything will be fine. He’s broken, and I must fix him – and then the good bit of our relationship will start to happen. This is just the tricky, early bit of love, where I undo all the bad stuff, and let him finally be who he is, secretly, inside. Secretly, inside, he does love me. My steadfastness will prove it. If it doesn’t work, it’s simply because I didn’t try hard enough.

  This is all proven when I find his diary, while he’s out. I know I shouldn’t read it – but, in a way, I’m reading it for us. If it is a betrayal, then it’s one of those good betrayals you hear so much about. A love betrayal. Because if I find out what he’s really thinking, then this relationship will finally blossom.

  The entries are fairly unequivocal. ‘She’s mad,’ he writes, of me. ‘When is she going to start taking me to celebrity parties? I’m stuck at home, bored. When is this going to be good for my career?’

  Further entries reveal he’s still in love with a girl from his home town, who sacked him off three years ago.

  Decoding this as Courtney merely feeling ‘insecure’ in our relationship, I redouble my efforts. I buy underwear from Ann Summers that makes me look like a prostitute, but in a bad way. I cook for him – a constant cavalcade of chicken soups, loaves of bread and cakes, to make our house seem like a home. I stroke his head when he complains about how little success his band are having, crushing the music journalist thoughts in my head, like, Well, if you actually played a couple of fucking gigs, you might get somewhere.

  I arrange a date for us, in a restaurant. Look at me! Booking a table! Like a grown-up! – but half an hour before we’re due to arrive, he rings me from a pub.

  ‘We’re having a band meeting. I might be a bit late,’ he says, slurring slightly.

  ‘How late?’ I ask, putting on mascara.

  ‘Two … hours?’ he says.

  ‘Oh, that’s OK!’ I say, brightly. I know which pub he’s in. I go there, and sit on the doorstep, waiting for him, smoking fags.

  When he finally emerges, he explains he’s ‘not hungry’ any more – ‘I had a ham bap’ – and we get the next tube home.


  Sitting on the velour seat next to him, as he rambles slightly incoherently about the ‘meeting’, the imaginary relationship I’m having in my head with him – him being broken and misunderstood, me nursing him back to happiness with all I do and say – is starting to have another set of ‘imaginings’ compete with it. In these new imaginings, I am screaming ‘WHY are you being such an arsehole? If you don’t like me, JUST SAY IT’ at him, whilst throwing things around the room. I crush these thoughts. They are not part of my plan in which we spend the rest of our lives together, blissfully happy.

  In order to hold firmly onto my dream, I buy a litre of whisky on the way home. It’s easy to imagine happy things when you’re very, very drunk.

  I think about trying to explain all this to the police, when they turn up to our house, at 2am. We’re both slaughtered, and Courtney has been following me around the house, screaming at me, trying to kick the door down when I lock myself in the bathroom.

  The policeman is around 55. In his stiff jacket and heavy shoes, he looks so much more adult and together than the people he is staring at: a weeping, pissed teenager in a nightie, and a 26-year-old man in a Paisley shirt and jeans, trembling as he lights a fag. In my drunken state, the policeman looks like he is actually emitting a blue, flashing light – but that is just from the panda car, up on the pavement outside.

  ‘We received a call about a disturbance,’ he says, as his walkie-talkie crackles. ‘Screaming and shouting at 2am. Not very nice for the neighbours. What’s going on?’

  This policeman does not look like my friends. He’s big, and solid, and male, and logical: I can’t explain to him that this is just a difficult phase in my relationship, where I’m trying to turn Courtney into someone else, whilst Courtney projects a lot of his insecurities on me, and tries, somehow, to avenge his mother for fainting when he threw a Flora lid at her that time.