It was a Saturday night, we went out on a girls’ night out (read: s***s’ night out). I was wearing a perfect black dress because you can never go wrong with that. I was you — the shy, little, gorgeous, good girl hiding inside of you, I used to pay attention to one guy at a time. I swear. Things changed, time changed and here I am, regretting all of it. Girls used to have morals once upon a time, there was a difference between temporary and permanent feelings. Now it is all temporary.
Temporary relationships. Temporary friends. Temporary boyfriends. Temporary jobs. Temporary resolutions. Temporary promises. Temporary feelings. Temporary emotions. Temporary. Everything.
Yes this is what it’s come down to. We don’t love anymore, we satisfy ourselves. We have sex but don’t love. We love but don’t have sex. We f**k more often than not but don’t make love. Don’t we get tired? No. We are selfish like that. More so us girls. We have multiple men around and we make sure we make use of them. Someone is a conversationalist, someone’s good in bed and of course the ones who are friend-zoned. Well, they are actually the best. We are never short of the male gender considering the bizarre sex ratio in our country as well.
We don’t cry for men anymore, we make them cry. And boy are we good at it! We tell them, “I’m just not that into you anymore” or “You don’t have a goal in life” or simply “I don’t think it’s working out” and expect them to take it and they take it. They have to. They don’t have a choice you know.
If you accept that this is the kind of girl you’ve become. Good. Congratulations. Do you know how long it takes a person to realize that he or she has completely lost the path? So you’ve achieved 'Acceptance', which means you’re doing better than you think. That is when you think of God and think of how you might have to pay for your sins. Well that is me being over-dramatic. There are more heinous sins than mere cheating or infidelity in real life. That’s what keeps you sane you know. But nonetheless, one thing you need to come to terms with is — don’t expect to be loved anymore. Maybe you don’t deserve it either. Anymore.
You won’t even realize when you turn from a good girl to a bad to an ugly girl in today’s lustrous world. You won’t realize it till the morning you see yourself in the mirror and spend hours staring into your eyes finding the long gone innocence. At that point, you can see tears and in those tears, the lost you. Like it happened to me.
Girls’ night out. Break-up. Men. Hook-up. So we’re at a bar and a couple of guys walk up to us. This is how it works in Modern India. You see a group of single girls means you’ve hit a jackpot. They were French. They approached us casually and the inviting bhartiya naris that we are, we started talking to them — about how they’re liking the country and the capital city and what are their travel plans.
To be honest, I was feeling uncomfortable, my shyness pulled me back from interacting with these random terrific looking men at first. But that was always my problem you see, today was a new day. A different day. I wanted to get over him and this was my only opportunity. Distraction. My biggest enemy.
So about that, I had recently ended my two year long relationship where by the end of it, I felt unattractive, ugly and under-confident. So getting minimal male attention was also a great form of ego boost for me. Fighting the thoughts in my head, in my desperation to act cool and to be a part of the conversation, I say,
“What are you drinking?” “Gin and tonic,” he said. I was impressed but he was too slow with his drink and my brain was working super fast. I was drunk. Basically. “Why are you so slow? Down your drink, we have an after party to attend.” “It’s too cold, you want to try?” he asked.
The brave girl that I was faking at that very moment downed that whole icy bucket of gin and tonic in the month of December in the chilly Delhi weather. Point being he got the signal and fell for what he called my “cheekiness”. What happened after his history but yes it was my first-ever hook-up with a white guy so clearly, it was an experience. He was tall, white and handsome and this much was enough for me to face myself in the mirror the next day. I’m not committed and I wasn’t at that time either. In today’s world, nobody is.
People are into sleeping around with multiple people. Every time. All the time. But I don’t. I didn’t. What was I thinking? I was proud of the person I used to be. I loved playing “Never have I ever” with my friends. People used to look up to me. For being the girl I was in the twenty first century. Don’t know when I started getting embarrassed of that very fact. It just happened. The point is I shouldn’t have tried understanding this hook-up culture and if I tried, I shouldn’t have fallen into the trap and if I did, I should’ve been ready to get hurt. But well, I got so much more than what I bargained for that it makes me want to go back in time and change everything.
Change the fact that I thought I could turn from being ‘the good girl’ to a bad girl in one month. Change the fact that I slept with three different guys within a month and made the mistake of inclining romantically towards one of them, the wrong one no less.
That is the problem with us. The so-called good girls, aka ‘the girls next door’. As much as we want to be sexy, we’re not. Accept it. Move on. You’re cute but you’re not satisfied. That’s the problem, you want to be a part of the crowd.
It’s peer pressure. We want to get drunk and hook up because we can’t do that when we are in our senses. Our stupid morals don’t allow us to do that. We want to smoke because people say it’s the best way to socialize as if otherwise, nobody would look at us. We want to flock with the unscrupulous kids of today when we are actually very different. Last I knew ‘being different’ was a good thing but no, now we want to be a part. Part of every unnecessary, unwanted habit in our lives.
Our insecurities are killing us bit by bit everyday, physically and mentally. But who gives a f***! Right? After my long term relationship ended, like any wild animal, I was unleashed into the jungle of hungry hippos and let’s just say, it didn’t work out too well. Good girls can’t be bad and vice versa. That is the harsh truth of life. For a girl it’s easy. That’s what they said! But they couldn’t have been more honest. IT IS SUPER EASY FOR A GIRL to get a guy wherever and whenever she wants. And this simple trend took a toll on me. It would on anyone, won’t it? Imagine noticing a cute guy at a bar and him buying you a drink instantly. What would you do? There’s a whole sea of fishes right at our fingertips. All we have to do is, take our pick. Yes it’s that easy.
This is how I got over the man I could never imagine to get over in this lifetime. The guy who actually made me believe in the concept of marriage. But well, some things are not meant to be and it took me a while to accept it. To get over my loyal dreamy relationship and the initial stage of me trying to break into the secret of ‘how to be a casanova in a woman’s body’, I was supremely successful.
Really. I met men. Some ugly with extraordinary minds. Some extremely good looking men with no mind. But then, I met the third category and was slapped with the harsh reality of being a good girl. Yes, THAT. Back to that. I was floating in my player's boat for the longest time. Till I met him. Before that, I would meet a guy, there will be one thing I like about him and then, ZIP ZAP ZOOM. Yeah it had become that easy. I was taking a ride on how cold and emotionless I had become after my never-ending perfect relationship finally ended. I was totally boasting about my macho-ness to my friends until I got a reality check.
It was actually my ‘unsettlement’ doing all the talking. It only required an unfortunate moment to snap me out of my dreamy ‘promiscuous land’. All it took was a decent guy with a great sense of humour and an even better aura to bring down my promiscuity. Trust me, the meaningless hook-up times were the best days of my life. Literally. But I soon realised it’s not my thing. I just couldn’t. It is not our thing you know. The sooner you realize it, the better it is. I realized it the hard way. He had a girl on one side who he loved and then there was me. Suddenly I had gotten a promotion from being a loyal girlfriend and ‘the one’ to the ‘other woman’. I didn’t like him that much but it hurt, it hurt more than it should have. I detest that title, it makes me want to puke.
This was my “looking into the mirror and feeling disgusted with yourself” moment. Physical touch was suddenly not enough.
We were not made like that. The female gender. I loved casual hook-ups but I ended up feeling bitchy every time I ignored one guy for another. I had to try hard to not let it affect me. Not like men. They have bigger responsibilities over their heads — they have a “score” to discuss with their friends. Again, I realised sleeping around without feeling anything is a guy thing. Why and how, don’t ask me. But it is.
Yes it doesn’t take us too long to get over a man from the past because options these days are unlimited. However, it takes us a millisecond to feel things. We don’t like to commit either now but falling for the ‘decent’ one you shared your bed with almost always seems like the next best option. It doesn’t matter if you found him on OkCupid or Tinder or next to your house. The point is — he’s a temporary blessing in disguise. We somehow get dragged into the “good morning” romance. Whether it’s a good morning text or a good morning kiss, it’s the ‘good morning’ that counts. Yes that’s what romance is for us silly silly girls. But then, that is not it. We lie. I lied. To my ex boyfriend. We obviously can’t tell the poor soul that while he’s sulking over the ‘good girl’ he lost to nothingness, she has her eyes wandering all over the place and like how just to get over him! But that doesn’t mean I can’t keep him as an option so why tell him. Come on, this is only fair.
“As if he’s living the life of a celibate.” That’s what we tell ourselves. (Shhhh...I’m not consoling myself at all)
Getting out of a serious relationship and falling into the hook-up commitment. Yeah that’s the life we live. Going from a good girl to a bad girl to an ugly girl to a decent to a good girl. It’s a vicious circle. One window of opportunity, ten guys and twenty heartbreaks. Yeah, that’s our thing. We act cool in front of people but secretly only manage to make out with a random guy when we’re drunk. We boast about our su-wee-t flirting skills because using our job to speak with a cute guy is all we can manage. We talk about emotionlessness sex when emotions is all we’re made of. We talk about “no strings attached” casually when it’s the most permanent thing in our mind at that point. We act commitment phobic when we actually have singledom phobia. We want to sleep around and feel nothing but that’s impossible. So we walk away. Or we just stay. There’s no middle ground. We are extremists, yes. We are good girls and that’s why we score the nice men but we don’t know it yet.
This is how we are. Good girls who can never be bad. Even if we try.