Valley of the Dolls

When I was eleven years old, my massive city of Barbies – a sprawling community which had previously lived in happiness, and in some cases even splendour, across my bedroom – were forcibly driven from their homes, in scenes of terrifying devastation.

Most were driven into the savagely crowded ghetto of a very large cupboard in the spare room. Others, more fortunate - including those glamorous luminaries Rock Star Barbie, Rock Star Ken and Rock Star Skipper – fled to the sanctuary of my seven year old cousin’s house.

Their homes and possessions were sold, or handed over as lavish gifts to the faithful (the seven-year-old cousin again). All apart from one once-vibrant tenement block, which took up its previous function as a bookcase.

It was fucking traumatic.

My reason for perpetrating this horror? Not because I genuinely felt that I’d outgrown the dolls in question. I adored those dolls and the endless high-drama soap opera of their lives. My school life was so horrible – and my home life so crap – that my time with those dolls were pretty much the only thing I lived for.

Yet at the same time, the realization of what any of my peers would think if they saw my doll-infested bedroom squatted there in the back of my mind, and became increasingly impossible to ignore.

A terrible sense of lurking guilt and paranoia began to haunt me day and night. In the middle of assembly or double maths, I remembered those dolls in my bedroom with a shiver of guilt, paranoia and dismayed unease. What if someone found out about them? And my mother had no idea how to keep her mouth shut about anything. All that it would take would be for her to start talking to the wrong girl’s mum when she came to pick me up, and it was goodnight Vienna.

And it was far too easy to imagine my peers’ reaction of almost ecstatic disbelief if it got out at school that I still played with Barbies at the age of eleven. I’d never hear the end of it in my lifetime. I was already right at the bottom of the social scale. A revelation like that would take me to a whole new nadir nobody had ever previously equalled in the entire history of my school, my country and the human race - completely redefining the depths of unpopularity it was possible for one eleven year old child to attain.

Which could have done strange and nasty things to the space-time continuum, and nobody wants that.

I owed it to humanity en masse to lose those fucking Barbies.

And when the heartbreaking exodus had finished, I looked at my newly doll-free bedroom with mixed emotions. Relief, because I was now relatively normal at last, on a par with the rest of my peer group, with nothing to hide. Even in the unlikely and nightmarish event that the most vicious and popular girl in the year somehow came into my bedroom, she’d no longer see something as instantaneously damning as a severed head on the bedside table.

But beneath that relief, there was nothing but a deep aching feeling of disappointment and loss. Because for my own sake, I hadn’t wanted to get rid of my Barbies at all. If only the cold and judgmental wider world could have vanished into thin air, I’d have kept those dolls and cherished them, because I loved them very dearly indeed.

And their conventional socially-acceptable replacements - boy band paraphernalia, teenage magazines, lipsticks - seemed too pallid, dull and inadequate for words.

I’m reminded of this sad little story because – more than 20 years later – I’m feeling exactly the same way.

Except on this occasion, I’m not packing away Barbies, but dreams.

Dreams of the man I want and the relationship I want and the life I want. Dreams I know – but don’t feel – I’m much too old for. Dreams that people would laugh at if they knew.

Maybe the time’s come to embrace that dull empty unjudgeable doll-free room. And to dutifully fill the freed-up space with those normal socially-acceptable things you’re supposed to want, but just plain don’t.

I’ve been in a relationship for a while now. I haven’t written about it before, because I simply couldn’t find anything funny or relevant or thought-provoking to say about it.

He’s nice. He’s boring.

I hasten to add, lest you misunderstand me, he’s not boring because he’s nice. He wouldn’t be any more interesting if he was a total prick. I wouldn’t find him more sexy and fascinating if he stopped phoning me for two weeks, or if he called me drunk from a bar at two in the morning, or if he picked me up three hours late one evening smelling of skank.

Although part of me would actually be quite happy if this happened, because then my problems would be immediately solved. He’d lose his one and only selling point, and I’d dump him. And that would be all she wrote. As good old Joe Stalin once said in his wisdom, no man, no problem.

Briefly off-topic, the popular idea that women find niceness to be sexual Kryptonite (while the dicks have a monopoly on sexual charisma) is, for my money, the lamest thing since Shallow Hal attempted to convince us that beautiful women were evil monsters under the surface, while morbidly obese munters had true kindness and inner beauty. From this, I can deduce that the Farrelly brothers have clearly never been to the Croydon McDonalds on a Saturday afternoon, or they would have learned it’s eminently possible to be both butt-ugly and completely vile. You just have to apply yourself a little, that’s all.

Equally, it’s possible for a man to be nastier than Hitler’s evil twin and simultaneously duller than a wet weekend in Wolverhampton. Don’t believe me, look at the entire male cast of The Apprentice.

This man’s not boring because he’s nice. He’s boring because he’s boring.

We have conversations of awe-inspiring, John and Norma Major-esque banality. On one memorable occasion, we spent some time comparing the merits of brown and white bread.

He would never, ever, ever get the point of Bill Hicks, American Dad, Christopher Brookmyre, The Wire or Bizarre magazine.

Sexually, my will to live is crawling out of the bedroom window and abseiling down the wall outside a la Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Having said that, I’m not one of those women who gets conveniently-timed headaches and says things like ‘oh, we haven’t had sex for a year, I just don’t have the desire any more’ – and I think that such women are frankly taking the piss. If you can get up at six on a freezing cold rainy morning to drag your arse into some poxy job you hate every minute of, you can bloody well shag your other half when it’s expected of you. It’s not rocket science.

Despite a depressingly high sex drive, he’s as vanilla as it gets - if sex was food, he’d want to eat a hearty meal three times a day, but would regard anything more exotic than shepherd’s pie with intense suspicion. I can guarantee you that any proposal to introduce any tip-of-the-iceberg stuff like handcuffs or nipple clamps would be greeted like a proposal to introduce dead bodies or kidnapped hitch-hikers.

And it’s not just that he wouldn’t be up for it, although I’m damn sure of that much too. Just as you don’t need to see Joe Pasquale playing Othello to realize it’s a terrible, horrible mistake best left unseen for all eternity, you don’t need to see this guy playing a dom. It’s just bad casting.

What’s on the table is reliability, stability and permanence. A decent conscientious hardworking man who doesn’t smoke, drink heavily, gamble or take drugs. Good, but not amazing, job. Nice, but not amazing, house. Not some dazzling edifice of wealth and glamour based on a rocking stack of debts, credit cards, second mortgages and dodgy investments, but a sturdy four-square structure built on rock. BMW as opposed to Ferrari. Hobbs as opposed to Chanel.

No dependent rug-rats making the place look untidy. Just enough baggage to show that he’s not a commitment-phobe. And keener on moving things along than me. And genuinely and actively looking to get serious.

The most seductive aspect of continuing this deeply dull and uninspiring relationship is simply this - not feeling constantly left out and the only one I know in my age group who’s still single. And having everyone visibly wondering what the hell’s wrong with me that I’m still on the shelf, when even the Karen Matthews lookalikes have managed to snag themselves a bloke by now.

And no more need to ever go on another sodding dating site – or go on another first date. Christ, that’s an alluring prospect.

No more giddy elation when Mr Glamorous, Romantic and Wonderful sweeps you off for a dream date at the Ivy, and that’s too bad.

But also, no more suicidal despair when you never hear from Mr Glamorous, Romantic and Wonderful after the second or third date. And that is not too bad.

Christ, what a depressing state of affairs. When the absolute best-case outcome you can imagine in life is ‘well, maybe this way I’ll have a bit less dramatically depressing shit to worry about. I’ll just have flat boring mediocre shit to worry about instead. Wahoo.’

Peter Pan knew what he was talking about.

Being a grown-up sucks.

J x