The Language of Love – Translator Needed
What is it about the word casual that you women fail to understand?’ demands my friend Mark.
He’s in trouble with his girlfriend. In a rash exchange of information about their previous histories, he mentioned a ‘casual thing’ with a woman. Which he’s been conducting since 1997.
But it wasn’t a relationship, God no. Mark told the woman up-front it was casual. Then he proceeded to see her once a month, when he fancied company, for six years. ‘She knew the score,’ according to Mark. ‘It was a mutually convenient arrangement.’
His new girlfriend, Sheena, is livid. She insists no woman would regard such a liaison as casual, no matter how often she was told. Not after so many years together.
‘There was no together,’ protests Mark. ‘There was no us. We used to have the odd meal and end up in bed. No big deal.’
Mark’s been guilty of self-interest and moral cowardice, maintains Sheena. It’s changed her attitude towards him – basically she doesn’t like him as much as she did, although she still loves him.
She believes he knew perfectly well the other woman viewed their association as a relationship, however unorthodox. It probably deterred her from forming other connections.
Mark is exasperated when taxed with it. ‘I didn’t bring her to family events, spend Christmas with her, she wasn’t my partner at wedding receptions or work parties. I just called over to her house from time to time and spent the night,’ he storms. ‘Casual is casual, no matter how long it lasts.’
He feels unfairly judged – female rules applied to male behaviour. Furthermore he’s aggrieved that Sheena, who’s never met his casual girlfriend - and never will if he has anything to do with it - should automatically take her part. He calls it the oestrogen conspiracy.
I canvassed my friends and there’s definitely a male-female divide on what constitutes casual.
Women generally don’t do casual: they have a takeaway pizza in a new boyfriend’s flat and mentally redesign it for when they’re living together. They go away for a weekend and imagine the honeymoon. They gaze into his eyes and visualise their children.
This is dishonest of them, of course, because it presumes how they feel is how the couple as a unit feels.
Men, equally, delude themselves that sprinkling their conversation with disclaimers about not doing commitment lets them off the hook. Their Pontius Pilate approach is just as dishonest. ‘She was warned in advance and if she didn’t listen it’s hardly my fault,’ they claim.
Any relationship has earned squatter’s rights after six years, no matter how carelessly it was embarked on. I know one woman who divorced, remarried and divorced again in the same time frame.
‘Sheena’s afraid you’re casual about her too,’ I point out to Mark.
‘It would be a whole lot easier if I was,’ he says bitterly. ‘I could walk away from her accusations.’
Perhaps, I suggest, he’s being penalised in this relationship for the deficiencies of his previous one: a casual shuffling of the crime and punishment deck. It fails to console him. Casual only appeals when it’s outward traffic.
