Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

I can’t believe I used to take this shit seriously. Unsubstantiated claims of my genius, flimsy platitudes of reassurance, unevidenced statements of support—all spoken with this careful, pandering tone as if I am a baby monarch being paraded around my kingdom on a velvet baby throne. It’s so embarrassing.

“I’m not ready for something serious and I don’t think I will be for a while,” said a long-time single, never-married and childless man, aged forty-one, without a hint of doubt. He was clearly unaware of the expiration date marked “thirty-five” that so many women think is slapped on them like a discounted chicken on display in a supermarket.

I didn’t want to know all these words, charged with urgency and crisis. I didn’t feel like they related to me. Hadn’t I just turned twenty-one? Hadn’t I just left university? Hadn’t my life only just begun? I couldn’t fathom how I had got here so quickly and how I could be expected

to make such enormous decisions while I still felt so young. How had this happened?

How his emotions were always more important than mine—that when we had arguments, his feelings were discussed as facts and mine were interrogated as fabrications.