Puppy Love Lockdown

When I was 6, I got married to a girl named Molly. The ceremony took place in the playground, next to the woods where, years later, kiss chase would become the more obvious way to spend the lunch-hour.

Sadly, it was never meant to be. Around the same time that my parents got a divorce, so did hers and Molly moved away to the big city and our marriage began to feel the strain. From then on, it consisted purely of fraught small talk at the odd birthday party and before we knew it, we had become just another statistic.

My next memorable relationship was with a girl named Alexis. Alexis was mute to everyone but me, which gave me a fantastic feeling of power and I flaunted it whenever possible. No-one knew Alexis like I did. I was the only one who really knew what her favourite colour was. But alas, it didn’t last. Dating a selective mute makes dinner parties a struggle.

I hadn’t thought about Molly or Alexis for a long time. The only reason they dropped back into my memory was because of something my little brother had said recently. He’s 10 and is turning into quite the womaniser. He had recently told me about ‘dumping’ his most recent girlfriend ‘because he felt like it’. All of this said with a casual shrug of the shoulders.

He had then gone to a birthday party recently and upon entering, grimaced and muttered to my father, ‘Oh God, my ex is here’. Now it’s an understandably tough situation when you arrive at a party and see that your ex is also in attendance but it’s not one that you typically expect to arise when you’re in your first decade. I can just imagine the tension that then pervaded throughout the party that day.

‘I saw you with a new girl by the climbing frame’ or ‘You still have my copy of A Bug’s Life and I NEED it back’ etc.

It frightens me that the word ex and the concept that comes with it is even in my brother's head. Maybe date-speak is more commonplace these days with kids. I can guarantee (divorcee jokes aside) that I was unaware of such complications at the age of 10. I was too busy wearing waistcoats and making my own radio shows.

I'm rather old-fashioned when it comes to what kids should and shouldn't be aware of. Being a kid for as long as possible is paramount in my mind. I'm not talking about being breastfed until 11 or wetting the bed at an age where you can wash your own sheets but just avoiding growing up too fast. Avoiding all the shit that inevitably pours down when you start caring about the way you look and what people think of you.

Although maybe all of this might be a good thing. Maybe I was too much of a kid for too long. My little brother is already more romantically experienced than I was at the age of 18. Maybe this means that when he does start dating proper actual women, he'll be a pro.

I, on the other hand, spent my middle and high school days in the wilderness. As puberty kicked in and I lost the ability to walk 5 metres without tripping over my own shoe, the brief flings of my younger years started to dry out.

In middle school, I spent most school discos awkwardly shuffling from side-to-side and then spending the duration of the 'slow dance' eating strawberry laces with the fat girls as I waited for my mum to pick me up.

Things went from bad to worse in high school. In the 5 years I was there, I got asked out just one time. I'd come from a different area so I carried a certain 'mystery' in the initial stages. This mystery led to me spending many a lunchtime huddled, alone, over a notepad in a classroom, willing the time to pass quicker.

It did also cause some romance. I was approached by a questionable girl from my class who told me that her friend wanted to go out with me. A friend who I later discovered to have the nickname 'Thirsty Cunt' - no kidding. I panicked and said I was too busy with my homework. Even at the age of 13 I was putting my career first; an admirable trait, even if TC didn't quite see it the same way at the time...

All of this meant that when dating finally did begin, I was hopelessly inexperienced. All of the mistakes and heartaches you're supposed to go through as a teenager, I encountered much later. I don't regret it though. It allowed me to spend my high school years relatively untroubled by the problems which plagued many of my classmates. I wasn't worried about anyone calling or not calling or whether I was really shit at kissing, I just pleaded ignorance.

It also meant that I avoided the fake girlfriendery which many homos go through. I didn't break anyone's heart or cause some girl to forever think she turned a man gay. Sure, I made out with enough and, in one head-smashingly embarrassing moment, turned down a bizarre bathroom threesome with two American girls, but I never made it all the way.

From my brother's nonchalant attitude towards 'dating' and the opposite sex, I'm pretty positive that when it really starts to matter, he'll possess all of the cool dating know-how that I didn't learn until much later. He'll be spending his high school years making a list of all the girls he's dated, rather than making a list of all the films he owns.

Anyway, maybe I'm just bitter because I was a 6-year-old divorcee...