Tempering Times

Tempering Times

I don’t know what possessed me to answer the way I did because it certainly wasn’t what I thought I’d say if ever asked. Whilst the question was one which I’d rehearsed the answer to for virtually all of my 23 years – every girl does – and Angelo was probably the nicest man I’d ever met, the answer was not the one I should have given. There was just something wrong about the way he’d asked it.
“Why?” I said with an apparently blank face – so his friends told me later. Angelo’s mouth dropped immediately. There was a moment of his own blank expression before he broke it into a weak smile.
“Because I love you?”
That was it, he couldn’t have meant what he’d just said. He only asked the question because we’d just made love and he, like all men, never knew what to say at that time. Besides, four years of seeing me was long enough and he probably ought to be moving things along – wasn’t that the way it worked? I wasn’t ready. I’d never been ready. I realised at that moment that all the dreaming of special days and mother’s hats had been just a fairy story to convince girls that they were meant to be for one person. Crap! Getting daughters married was a mother’s way of proving they’d done their job properly. The suddenness of my decision - brought about by the hapless Angelo’s inappropriately timed question – even shocked me slightly; but then such moments of intense pleasure cannot be interrupted by questions of such mundane social importance.

That was twenty years ago. I’ve never regretted the answer I gave to Angelo. We didn’t last very long after that – proof enough that there was no longevity in whatever it was we thought that we had. Besides, he subsequently married some other girl within two years and they divorced four years later. He was ready for all of it.

No, the path of unreserved impurity (well, as my Mother put it so poetically once) that I resolved to follow from that fateful day has just now started to vindicate itself – although there were a few moments when I thought I might have got it wrong. The life of the singleton woman in the early part of the twenty-first century has been a good one for me. A good education (Thanks Dad) meant a good job, good money, and plenty of freedom. No particular man meant sex without boredom (and when I wanted it!), no children (they really just mess everything up) and no jointly owned assets (surely the reason why lawyers have so much fun when it all goes wrong!). I own my own property, I go on holiday when I like and with whom. So can anyone tell me what can be wrong with this life of mine? Doesn’t it tick all the boxes? No one told nature that ‘giving something back’ was the path to happiness. It was the invention of the weak to protect themselves (women have always been clever, see, but now we’ve been allowed to move on). It was freedom I wanted and freedom that I have. The millstone that is a man (they are just so uncomplicated), would never have allowed me the freedom I’ve enjoyed.

The moments of thinking I might have got it wrong were only ever associated with comments from other women – oddly enough, men always say that they think I chose the right path (I guess it’s the one that most of them would have wanted for themselves had they not been brainwashed into thinking that children were a good idea and, surprise, surprise, the true fulfilment of a loving relationship). It could also be that some men would agree with my choice because it might signal their own availability – not necessary because I always decided who was available. The comment that hurt most, though, was that I ‘was letting women down’; a hundred years of female emancipation should have meant that women should be able to have children, have careers and be equal. What did I think I was doing by giving men what they really wanted? – a woman without any commitment requirements!