I used to love like a man

About 10 years ago I was falling asleep to Bryan Adams ‘All for love’ and ‘Everything I do I do it for you’. On the other side of my double bed (fully clothed) was my mate and at the foot of my bed on a futon was my now husband and our other best mate. We had had a night of dressing up, drinking and dancing for my mother in law’s 50th. I think.

The songs playing was so very poignant to me at the time. You remember what it is like being a teenager who has just discovered her family of choice. It’s special. It’s adult. Thank heavens I chose well. All of those men are still in my life. All are as good, genuine and strong as they were then. I was as strong as they were then. Not physically, of course (two of them are over 6 feet) but I was as uncompromising, as full-on, and stuck to my guns just as well as they did. If not better. I was seen, excluding the tits, as one of the guys.

Things change. We change. I changed. Where I fit in changed. I am no longer one of the guys. I haven’t been for 5 years. Not since I became a girlfriend.

In retrospect more changed when I became a girlfriend than just the status of my relationship with some close male friends. It was the beginning of the taming of the shrew. I began keeping house, learned to bake, channeled my inner Stepford wife, began to compromise. The way I made decisions changed. The way I loved changed.

As one of the guys my love was direct, action orientated and on my terms. It was almost as though it could be turned on and off. But when it was on intense was the only way to describe it. As Bryan Adams puts it “I’d fight for you, I’d lie for you, walk the wire for you, yeah I’d die for you.”

These days I love like a woman. Feminine love is different. Yes we may take actions out of love and offer umpteen gifts of service, but it is in the spirit of constant love, acceptance and support. It is a borderline compulsion. Where the hell is the off switch? I am yet to find one. Feminine love packs lunches and changes nappies. A woman’s love can be wild and fierce, but in my experience feminine love sounds less like a power ballad and more like a lullaby. Sung quietly in the dead of the night.