Sex, Sex and More Sex!

WELL! Here I am back in Melbourne. Holiday over. Winter well and truly decided to make me aware of her chilly presence. I say 'her' because I can more easily picture winter as a female (Ice Queen, White Witch and so forth) than a male (because somehow, even if a man seems cold, it only - at least for me - seems to make him more damn attractive - Mr Darcy from Pride & Prejudice a notable case in point).

But perhaps I should also write holiday as 'holiday' here. The reason, as the intuitive among you have probably already figured out, is that if it was a holiday without the apostrophes, if it was a proper, apostropheless holiday, then by now you should have seen, on hitting TheAppleDrawer-dot-com, enviously gorgeous pictures of amazing Greek islands or majestic ancient buildings with scary big columns and huge pieces of marble scattered all around them; each barrage of photographs punctuating a different stage in this journey I - for reasons I will never clearly understand but that will never fail to prove a vital life lesson to me or others - naively took ... with my parents.

Let me start with this word of advice (especially to all you 'good girls and boys' out there, cos you're the ones most at risk): Are you listening? Okay. Are you sure? Right. Here is the advice: Don't travel with your parents if you want to have an apostropheless holiday.

I don't think I need to say any more. Sooner or later the young adult grows up. It's not when you get your licence, when you sleep with someone for the first time or even when you have your first baby that you grow up. It's not about the physical part of your life at all. It's the point at which you say to yourself, "From now on, I choose to be held responsible for my own decisions, actions and lifestyle." It's the moment at which you decide to stop trying to live the life that was cut out for you by others and start cutting out your own life in the shape that you want it to have. It's having the guts to go after your dream when everything in your past is screaming at you that it's nothing but a stupid fantasy. It's having the chutzpah to try on a dress that looks doubtful on the rack because you believe it will look good on you. It's drawing a picture and showing it to the world and knowing that the world could think it incongruous or ugly and drawing it nonetheless. It's doing something for no great reason at all except.... that you thought to do it. It's having the confidence to do something because you want to do it. It's the moment at which you start valuing yourself. It's the moment at which you become a person. You develop a spine. Your inside becomes something different to your outside, a place where others can afterwards find shelter. Your spiritual umbilical cord to your parents is cut and you become capable of forming and maintaining your own family, whether through marriage or great friendship groups.

Unfortunately it took a bad trip away for me to go through this process. Until now, I hadn't realised how attached to my parents I'd been, how hungry for their approval. How much I had constantly, again and again, put my dreams and hopes on the shelf just to win imaginary stars from their school of rational, wise, responsible decision-making. I realised it because the trip home was a small death. It wasn't so much that I wanted to live in Greece. It was that I was given a chance to make it on my own and I didn't take it.

Well - I could dwell on such heavy thoughts on this blog or I could remember the positives. Positives such as the amazingly friendly people I encountered and the feeling that everything and everyone is connected to each other and the land. Positives like shopping. Somehow, every time I've been in Greece, though short on money, I've always found theee perfect thing just when I needed it. It seems to be a Providential compensation for the fact that you have 4 times less there than in Spoil-Me-Rotten, 5-Of-Everything, 2-Showers-a-Day, Convenience-Oozing, Tim Tam-munching Australia. Maybe it's because you have less that what you do have is such a treasure. But there are also those times when you can't help but feel blessed with unnatural good luck. For example, in Australia, I can never seem to find shoes I like. Athens: I walked into a shoe shop and immediately found a pair of blingy sandals that were perfect for me, in looks and comfort. I'm talking Cinderella Glass Slipper level of comfort. As in I was made for those sandals and nobody else could look as good in them as me. That scary. Just for some background, I look at the activity of buying shoes kind of like studying for a really boring and difficult university exam: I hate it. And especially strappy, open, flimsy numbers.... not me! So to buy a pair of summery, glittery, sexy, hardly-there sandals in downtown Athens within 10 minutes of walking hesitantly into a store full of summery, glittery, sexy, hardly-there shoes that make my ingrown toenails twinge at the mere sight of them... it gave me hope, dear reader. In modern-day terms, I would say it's better than sex. Because I could realistically expect a good pair of shoes to be with me longer than a man in this day and age.

And that brings me to my main topic. Sex. Yes, it was inevitable that, as a 20-something female, unhitched, I would go to see the Sex and the City movie. I went tonight with my best girlfriend who is the ultimate chick-flick companion (as all best girlfriends are). I had always thought the show Sex and the City beyond me, culturally. Too New York. Too fast. Too much sex. But I was surprised to find myself tearing up at certain points in the movie and I don't tear up easily. It hit a chord. The fact is that the film touched on a major question I've been asking the universe for the past few years, as couples and friends have drifted in and out of my life. What is it that makes a man ask a woman to marry him?

I mean, I think of many young married couples I know. People who married because of preference, not parental coercion or circumstances or what we call in Greek proxenió. I think of these people who in many ways remind me of myself and the whole fact of these people being in a committed relationship fascinates me. The idea of the man being at work and knowing that he will be coming home to his wife, who may also be working, and they will both be together and be primarily with each other in the evening, is strange to me. The nature of the marital relationship is strange to me. What is it that makes two people say forever? Is it that they love each other so much that they can't bear to be away from each other for more than 12 hours at a time, or is it that they've never found a better person to be with and have settled for a person who they at least know will care about them when the rest of the world tells them it couldn't give a rat's?

As this thought whirrs the wheels of my mind, another thought butts in equally as forcefully from time to time. Why aren't I, at 29, married? Most of the people I know got hitched at 28 or younger. The rest are mostly in committed relationships, or at least long-term ones. A smattering is drifting about looking for a loving relationship. Now here's the thing: I used to always assume I wasn't married or in a long-term relationship because I was ugly. It had been drummed into me at school. I was awkward, I was ugly, I did not look like the other girls, I would never fit in and bla bla bla. So I believed that was why I hadn't found anybody yet. But that theory was thrown out a while ago when, in the same week, 2 men, salespeople I was chatting to in the city, asked me why I didn't have a boyfriend. And actually wanted to know the answer, as if there was an explanation there that they couldn't access just by looking at me. So I decided the problem couldn't be physical. Apparently Cleopatra of Egypt was an unattractive woman physically. Yet she twitched and powerful, handsome men came running.

So it's not the looks that get the man. What is it then? I happen to know women who can get a boyfriend as easily as most of us can get take-away pizza. I have never known them to be out of a relationship. And long relationships too. Sometimes with marriage included. All the time, the men with them seem blissfully and contentedly happy. These women, when I think about it, have always been the ones who have never ever said anything to me to hurt or offend me. They don't talk much and rarely insist on having things their own way. In fact, they seem to live to please others. Yet they drift from one relationship to another, endlessly searching. I also know other women who have been the opposite: demanding, loud, individualistic, take-me-or-leave-me types... and they have found one man and stayed with that one man; the only man, perhaps, who has been able to live with them and accept them for who they are.

One of my favourite pastimes is to ask how older generation women met and fell in love with their husbands. I'm getting the feeling that the most important element of their stories is the one they leave out. The element that made them commit. I'm starting to think it has a little something to do with danger. Strife. Difficulty. Fighting. Struggle. Because for some weird reason, I think the only thing that could make me want to commit to somebody for life and tie that knot is something that would test me and that other person to such an extent that to live our life afterwards without each other would be meaningless.

I wish I could go on but my brain is starting to fog up. I will leave with this small conviction. After watching Sarah Jessica Parker in all her vital life force finery tonight, I am sure there is love out there. I mean miracle love. The kind of love that makes a man stay with the same woman for 5 years claiming he's not interested in marriage, but makes him walk down the aisle 6 months after their break-up to marry a woman he's virtually just met. The miraculous force that makes two people notice each other across a room and know that, marriage or not, their futures will be somehow entwined. I believe in this. I know this force is divine. The love part is divine; everything else revolving around this - marriage, de facto, make-up-break-up circles - is all man-made. It's all decorations. It's only the love part that's real. And it seems to me that whenever people put the love part first, everything else just falls into place.