Booby prize

My ex boyfriend John got married yesterday. He was the sweet one who got me through uni. Of course we’re still friends, how could we not be? He is reasonable, logical – a nerd with a pretty face. But in the end he wasn’t butch enough for me, despite a black belt in tae kwondo. By which I mean of course, he wasn’t enough of an arsehole.

The problem with nice guys is they bring out the worst in me.

Tom is a case in point. He’s so accommodating he enables me to  be the worst possible version of myself:  the overcritical nag with a garrulous mouth and a tendency to flirt with all and sundry when drunk.

Having a nice partner certainly gets things done, with me acting as creative head chef to his more practical sous. I can be a slavedriver. Tom loves it of course, thrives on it, hankering after the moment when  I’ve cracked the whip so hard I’ve slapped it round my own face so he can wipe my tears and make it all better again.

If you look at it like that, Tom’s the clever one, really. He gives me enough rope to hang myself with, and helps me out of the noose once I beg for mercy…  letting me make my own mistakes and being a hero about them afterwards. In his own way, he’s as much of a sadist as the others, yet he gets away with it by acting like a gent in public – except when he’s so burned out from his nice guy act he parties like there’s no tomorrow. But when he does, does he ever  pay for it the next day.

For most of us ladies, at one point or other in our love lives, there’s nothing better than playing martyr to a bad boy. It makes you feel like a better person when society is constantly telling you you’ve been wronged. (You haven’t, by the way, you’ve just chosen  to accept the dynamic of your relationship because in some respects, you like getting attention from everyone feeling sorry for you) (I’m baiting you, of course). Why ever we do it to ourselves, in the long run, being nice to someone who gets their kicks from making you cry, is exhausting, which is why most of us end up / have kids  with someone who we get on with at least most of the time.

I’m not the only one who’s a sucker for the occasional misogynist. Rachel, long-term friend and part of the weekend’s wedding party is clearly up to her neck in one.

She’ll kill me for writing about it, but it’s illustrative of a wider point, so here goes.

Rachel was engaged to a nice guy once: all family plans, professional career training and gourd planting. Sweet, sociable, a little bit camp, Kai was great company and played with my kids. In the end, she broke it off. Grew her hair long, lost a bit of weight, and found someone with less personality and a bigger wallet. In short, she became more of a trophy, and for a bright girl with her own career, its a revealing metamorphosis  in more ways than one.

The new guy’s all right. In my book, he ‘s not much of a looker and he doesn’t put in the effort with her friends – always a bad sign. But he drives a nice car. Maybe if he turned up the charm, I’d see what she sees in him, but so far, he hasn’t invested much in the old uni crew when we get together at annual social events, and that’s spells bad news to me. Sure,  he’s probably got a life of his own: he’s a big boy, and that’s all right, I suppose, but it doesn’t bode well for the longevity of their relationship.

Rachel turned up at the wedding late, so late she missed the ceremony, which at 1pm was a Four Weddings style dash from London for most of us. Arriving alone, it was clear there’d been something of a scene that wouldn’t have made the final cut into most rom coms.

Exceptionally groomed, as always of late, Rachel looked well, although  her eyes were a little puffy despite the  eyelash perm. Her bloke’d been ill, she said and was coming up separately. Whatever the truth, she looked pissed off and right she might. He arrived after the meal, and had wind so insistent, it was likely true he had a stomach upset. But ill or not, it was not his absence – or to a lesser extent, his farts –  that has made me uncomfortable after the event.

In the interim, Rachel had unleashed her other big news. Grasping my hands to her chest my immediate thought was that she was up the duff, so I did the whole congratulations routine, until I realised I was in completely the wrong arena. She’d had her tits done.

Frankly, I was sad for her. Sarah is beautiful, confident and articulate. With her tiny waist and thick chocolate hair she’s a stunner and always has been, though her weight has fluctuated on a downward trajectory ever since our uni days. She may even, I hope she’ll forgive me for saying, have been a little bottom heavy – I mean, who isn’t? But did she really need a boob job? Having big tits has never made anyone more likeable, that’s for sure, unless you’re hoping to get more through traffic on Chat Roulette on a Friday night.

But then, who am I to denigrate anyone’s lifestyle choice? God knows, I had a nose job with my student loan after I smashed it up at the Alpine Ski Centre in Hemel Hempstead aged 15, and I’m still sensitive about the nouveau ski-slopeness of it now. But my concern is not that she’s done it at all – we all have things we want to fix;  but why she’s gone and done it now?

At 32, and two kids later, mine have long since bitten the dust of better days, and I have to say, I couldn’t care less. I have more important things to worry about than the volume of my cleavage, and if I need a boost to fill an outfit, my handy chicken fillets add comedy value as well as extra stuffing  whenever I need it.

Maybe I care less because I never had a hangup about my boobs. They earned me a fortune in their heyday, and they’re still not half bad to say the least. Breast feeding two kids has been more remarkable for what it didn’t do to my tits than what it did – they haven’t shrunk, emptied, stretch marked or sagged. They are moreorless the same, only with with slightly more perma -erect nipples, which has never gone down badly with any suitor, by which I mainly just mean Tom.

But what breastfeeding did do to my tits was hurt like hell, and I’m not sure what the addition of half a litre of silicon would have done for the process, except make them feel even more fit to burst (plus my own, possibly unfounded concerns about plastic near my milk supply). My own breasts doubled in size over the course of my pregnancy and aftermath. Add to that a couple of rounds of mastitis and 15 months apiece leaking moo juice and I’m just glad they’re still in one piece (or should that be two?) let alone still relatively easy on the eye.

It’s all very well saying you do something like that for yourself (and you might not want babies / don’t want to breastfeed anyway – Oh really? You know this for definite at 32?) But it’s pretty much always someone else who makes you feel like you need to something drastic to your appearance, and in most cases, where us ladies are concerned, it’s a bloke.

The next day, when most of the old uni crew were all hungover to shit, Rachel was looking relatively perky – to say the least – having sloped off early with her new bloke and missed all the fun –  I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of envy – and prodding Tom with a “can I have mine done after number 3?” to which he nodded like a lascivious twerp – he was defo still drunk the next day. But I certainly wouldn’t want to find out what having a baby with plastic tits would be like . And the harsh fact is, that if your bloke didn’t like your tits beforehand, he sure isn’t gonna like what having a baby does for your belly. Or his Sunday morning lie-in.

The point being: changing for a bloke is never a good idea, coz they sure won’t change for you. But then, marrying someone because they’re nice is never the best idea either. Good luck to her – making someone else happy is often half way to making yourself happy, so it might all work out okay in the long run – and if it doesn’t, well, she’s ended up with a cracking pair of tits.

And what of the lucky girl who snared my uni boyfriend? They suit each other. Good luck to them too.