22 & not a clue

In our grandparent's generation you met someone, fell in love & got married. There was only one experience of love. You did not have many boyfriends or lovers. You met, courted, met the family, fell in love & lived out your life together. That was what happened. In some ways it appears simpler. It seems idyllic. Personally I can't imagine getting married to my first boyfriend as we were children at 15 and I barely know the man he has become now.

There is something to be said for how things used to be in the art of love. If your first love was your only love, and if that was all you had known then surely there's an argument to be made that these people knew less loss. I have yet to experience anything as painful and lasting as the loss of love. Some of my own break ups I will never forget, and will undoubtedly immortalise on a page at some point. If I haven't already. The countless poems, sentences & ruminated thoughts that the average teenage girl collects so early on these days must baffle the older generations. We must appear in constant states of heartache or heartbreak to our grandparents, who ask how that boy you dated 10 months ago is doing.





I can only assume as I no longer have grandparents. But I did introduce my ex to my Grandpa, I don't regret it but I do remember his guffaw at my words 'he's a keeper'. How right you were Grandpa. Do young women now not have the first clue as to what a 'keeper' actually is? Or maybe the concept is just null and void. It's a shame because we are conditioned to want the 'first, my last, my everything' and maybe this vicious hunt causes us to hold ourselves less dear and in doing so we rack up notches on our proverbial bed post.

Either way one thing is clear, we just don't fall in love the way we used to. Not most of us anyway. Even our parents can boast more lovers and a mysterious past. The twentieth century has ruined courtship and classical romance. I should know, I have spent the past three years studying this. I am also a veteran dater and renowned for my terrible taste in men. Until very recently I hasten to add.

The casual use of terminologies such as 'seeing' & 'dating' are alien terms to our grandparents. That's just it I suppose; casual, our relationships, our bodies and our hearts. We are too flippant about all of these things; I feel conflicted as I want to exercise my right as a woman to have casual sex. Yet I feel we may only be doing ourselves and perhaps our sex a damage in the long run as we do not place enough value on ourselves.


I will continue blindly stumbling through love regardless of everything I have just said. But I would say, that it would have been nice if it had happened that way. But in truth what are the chances. We don't wait anymore, least not the way man kind used to. Fewer women know now what it is like to wait for a man to return, not only from war but from life. Why can't two people wait for each other? Why won't we is a better question.

I check this section every day. It is at the back & I flick to it as soon as the bleach blonde punk with stretchers at Melbourne central station hands it to me at 16:50pm.
I read this religiously for two reasons. Firstly it restores my faith in humanity. Secondly I hope that someone has spotted me and wants to send me a message, give me a compliment or ask me out for coffee.

I know this is pathetic. I also know I am loved. But I still, vainly, check it every day. It makes me smile to see all the individual messages of hope and light people send to each other. Without knowing even the other person's name, they send this signal out into this huge city in the hopes that person with whom they had a moment's connection will respond. Occasionally someone will reply with a message, usually asking for more details. I have yet to read a message which tells of what happens next. Were they disappointed? Did they meet under Flinders St clocks at 6pm last Wednesday? Did 'tattooed guy' find his 'asian beauty'? I think that's a book I will write one day.



I read this one when I first arrived in Melbourne and it has stayed with me ever since. I want to be this couple. I want to be the kind of couple who share their fish and chips and hold hands. I think we all do. I also think this section of the MX is the closest most of us get to a 'movie' kind of moment. So reading it every day, for me, restores hope that romance isn't dead and that