JJ’s Journal: all grown up now

A regular appointment with a girl’s best friend: her gay boyfriend

The end of the stamp and flounce – why you’re so much better off being mature

The thing I like best about having grown up girlfriends? The lack of drama.

It’s true. There’s nothing so liberating as the day one gives up needing histrionics to make a point, as a few friends and I noted over a couple of cocktails one recent chilly Friday evening. (Caesars – the perfect antidote…to anything.)

“I just heard the most terrible story,” said S. “A young woman I work with confided in me about a scene she’d caused the night before. An argument with her boyfriend over a couple of glasses of wine escalated into a public embarrassment; apparently she thought he was flirting with another girl or something, and she suddenly decided to recreate some sort of Joan Collins Dynasty-style screaming match, and ended up by throwing a drink in his face.”

“Wow,” I said. “Love your reference. I always adored Joan – but think about it: a lot of her stuff was just Lindsey Lohan with bigger shoulder pads and a hat. But I know what you mean. I have a few memories from my misspent youth that I can still raise a sweat thinking about. Ugh.”

I raised my glass in a toast. “To the end of public drama!”

We all toasted – the other two women, shaking their heads in shared horror and relief. Seems we’d all been down that road…

“Of course she woke up this morning with a hideous memory of what she’d done and she’s convinced she screwed up the relationship permanently. I don’t know,” S continued. “She may have done. God, I’m glad I’m not 23 anymore.”

We all contemplated that for a while then moved on to something else timely. But the conversation stuck with me and a couple of days later I called S; I couldn’t get the image of my own forays into bad behaviour out of my head and I wanted to hear about her experience. I suspected it was juicy – but I just couldn’t imagine S, a successful, sophisticated real estate agent and mother of three, ever doing something so déclassé as stamping her foot or raising her voice above a well-modulated murmur.

“Yes, I did,” she said. “And I am ashamed to say I did it more than once. But the worst was the time I did it to a man I really liked. I don’t know what came over me – I hadn’t had a drink, we’d just barely ordered our food and suddenly I felt myself puffing up like a cartoon character and working myself into a little tantrum. When he didn’t give me an answer I liked, I stood up, knocked over my chair, threw down my napkin and swept out of the restaurant.”

“Wow,” says I.

“Yes,” says S. “And as I was doing it, I was sort of watching myself too. And I knew it was disastrous – but it was just so exciting.”

“What was the question?” I asked.

She paused and smiled wryly. “I asked if he thought I was the kind of woman he could see himself married to.”

“Wow” I said again. (I really must learn another exclamation or two.) [At least it's not "I was, like, wow! Editor]

“I’ve regretted it so many times,” she said. “I mean I’m not sorry I married someone else and I’m not sorry my life has turned out the way it has, but I’ll always have that memory of giving in to that weirdly delicious sense of letting go and being my worst possible self. And it was mean. And undeserved. And of course, in the end, simply embarrassing. The self-indulgence of it – the lack of control.”

I could never have imagined S. in this sort of situation, but then again it isn’t part of my repertoire any more either. Whatever else comes of getting older, being able to exert a modicum of control over one’s emotions is a skill well worth earning.

“So after that night you gave up drama completely?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and laughed. “But the shoulder pads? That took a little longer – and I still regret the hat.”

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