High Maintenance, low maintenance, headcase or..

..Doormat.
NB: There was supposed to be a pic of a doormat here with a highly witty caption saying 'me'. Sadly picture uploading doesn't seem to be a goer for me at the moment.

WARNING: This post may contain mawkish self pity.
If I was entirely honest I would probably start it with ‘Cigarettes 131 this morning (vgood), pounds lost 9 (vbad), overanalysis indulged in 6hrs (improvement)' and just admit to myself that I’m a damn sight closer to being Bridget Jones than I would have hoped.

A week and a half after being dumped, the emotional dust is beginning to settle. My rational side is kicking back in – and finally I can eat again (I wish I was one of those ‘trough ice cream, cry on your friends and watch chick-flicks in your jim-jams’ kind of girls – instead I’m one of those throw up, loiter alone chain smoking and find yourself entirely unable to even get a piece of toast past your teeth types – good for the waistline, bad for the sanity).

Anyway, the majority of the dumping itself was straightforward enough. Slightly odd that he was the one crying – but I can live with that (as he himself said – he’s a blubber guts). The main thrust was predictable - he thought I was lovely, but didn’t love me. Didn’t think he ever would. And at ‘our age’ (clearly dotage-bound) we shouldn’t be wasting time on relationships that we didn’t think would be the one. You can’t really argue with it. You can be gutted – but you can’t argue. However, there was one thing that stuck in my mind:

“I’m looking for somebody that will curb me”.

This came in the context of the ‘you’re lovely’ bit by the way. Apparently my laissez faire approach to his life was a turn-off, my belief that you should make your own decision as to whether that third bottle of wine and a joint is a good idea.. didn’t really work for him. So, I asked him whether he meant I was a doormat. And do you know what – he didn’t really deny it all that convincingly.

Now this is obviously taking it down to its minutia – no doubt he was talking about bigger and deeper issues than drinking or smoking, after all – he has been in therapy (Not that it seems to have helped that much) he doesn’t really know what he’s doing and where he’s going with his life – only that it’s not where he is now (not surprisingly given he’s an Estate Agent) and as I speak he is haring off on a trip to Afghanistan to chase some kind of life fulfilment and a career there..

So maybe this isn’t about me. Maybe it’s his problem and he’s looking for some kind of mother figure who will make his decisions for him. Who he can blame in his old age because he never did half the things he wanted to. Maybe, deep down inside, he wanted me to tell him that he couldn’t go to Afghanistan. That he should stick to being an Estate Agent and grow up. But I’m not built like that.

And so I leapt back to a quandary that has bothered me for years. Am I too low maintenance?

Now we’ve all heard guys talking about how they hate high maintenance girls. How they’d never go near them. How they’re actually self-obsessed headcases. But let’s face it – these girls always seem to end up with their guy wrapped around their little fingers. They get their protestations of undying love by the second month. By six months they’re shacked up with big plans for the future – and once they are living together, these are the boys who on a lads’ night out are home by 8.30pm rubbing their girlfriend’s feet. Any hint of rebellion in the ranks and the gentle suggestion that their relationship might terminate if she doesn’t get her own way pulls the man back into the appropriately slavish devotion she’s accustomed to.

Me? By month six I’m still sending hesitant emails asking what they’re up to this weekend, stuttering over the suggestion that we meet up and asking if it would be too much of an imposition for them to agree to spend my birthday with me.

And I honestly don’t know why this is. The guy meets me. I’m in control, I’m occasionally funny – I look like I can hold my own. But the minute I start to fall for them, something happens. I’m suddenly too eager to please. That sharp wit that took the piss out of them on our first meeting (it’s like an aggressive form of flirtation - promise) which they found so attractive, suddenly becomes a slightly hesitant voice asking them whether they want a cup of tea or not. The text that says ‘it’s fine if you don’t make it home till 4.30am and that you come in wasted – you just make sure you have fun’.

I haven’t lived up to my promise. Suddenly I’m a low maintenance doormat. And they weren’t after that – they were after somebody that would curb them.

And then something challenges my belief that it was my fault. I bump into him exactly one week afterwards (just before the trip to Afghanistan for those paying attention). He’s looking sheepish, his feet are shuffling. He can’t meet my eyes. He is the epitome of schoolboy done wrong. Suddenly I’m back to the belief that this is a guy who isn’t after a relationship of equal partners, that he really is after a mother figure who will keep him under control. That actually, I might have just been having a genuinely ‘meeting of equals’ relationship with him and it was his problem that he couldn’t deal with that. Suddenly I begin to feel a sense of freedom. Did I really want to be in a relationship where I’m telling somebody what to do? Where I put my hand over their glass at dinner parties when they’ve had too much to drink and press them to invite the ‘right kind’ of people to dinner? No.

So rationally I feel better. Admittedly I have to keep an eye out for that subservient streak when I next embark on a relationship but I know, deep down, that it’s not so very bad. I’m more of a living room rug than a doormat and it’s nothing that can’t be dealt with with a bit of stern self talking to.

There's just one little problem - now I need my heart to catch up with my head. Because it is really beginning to get on my nerves that I miss this person who was so very very wrong for me.

When did we stop wanting lifelong relationships?

No. I’m not talking about affairs of the heart (or lack thereof) in a Bridget Jones-esque display of bitterness. I’m talking about relationships with brands. In fact, if the all pervasiveness of brands is as current statistics would suggest, then I’m talking of just about every other interaction in my life apart from those desperatetomakeitwork and maybethisistheone interactions with the opposite sex.

I got sidetracked by this train of thought when I stumbled across Neil Boorman’s blog - http://bonfireofthebrands.blogspot.com/ and found myself pondering cynically whether his desire to live an unbranded life was a genuine exploration of his relationship with labels. Or whether, in fact, he just thought it would make a good plotline and a dead cert for publication.

Now it’s hard for me to be objective in this. Despite working in the Kings Cross streetwalker end of the advertising business (commonly referred to as ‘the below the line agency’) I spend a fair bit of my time thinking about brands. What they stand for. How they can be leveraged to sell mediocre products. Those of you in the small space mono press ad and matching direct mail pack world will know the kind of thing. And, being below the line, my client patter often leads with the need for a brand to have a ‘relationship’ with the consumer.

But I have to consider the possibility that I (and perhaps a few other people) don’t actually want to have a relationship with a brand – or even do some very New York date juggling and see a few at once. My ‘relationships’ with brands seem to be purely transactional. I give them something they want, and they reciprocate. You give me this credit card rate, make me look like I have a clue how to dress myself, or give me that bit of information – and I’ll pass over my hard earned cash, my personal data and permission to try to sell me stuff. No harm done, no pride dented and certainly no hearts broken. If I was talking about personal relationships I would be forced to presume that one of us was a prostitute. And I’m not sure I want to know which one of us it is.

So here’s a possible mission. To find one brand that I really like, that I’d choose to spend a Sunday afternoon with over the option of getting drunk with a mate and bitching about the ex (their’s or mine – doesn’t matter). One I can envision a lifelong relationship with. http://www.superbrands.com/uk/ seems like a good place to start but it doesn’t seem to get me anywhere. Movers and shakers in UK brand world they may be but I don’t feel any form of compulsion towards any of them. I mean sure – Apple is cool. And (like everyone else) I use Google for my searches. But I don’t want to sleep with them. First sign of a guy with a better bottom and a sharper sense of humour and I’ll be off – taking my toothbrush with me and leaving a request that they don’t email, they don’t call and they certainly never write.

Don’t get me wrong, clearly brands are important. In a world of parity products I know that in the end I will go with the logo I know, the logo that I fancy just a little bit or have seen my friends flirting with. The logo that hasn’t treated me badly in the past. But I don’t want to invite them into the house so they can talk while I’m trying to watch TV or stand in front of the screen when I’m checking my personal emails and neither do I feel particularly comfortable with the image of them standing in the corner at a party, wearing the latest gear (the blogs, the podcast, the pages on Myspace) waiting for me to ask them to come over and have a chat.

What I really seem to want is a brand that’s just a little bit at my beck and call but without being a doormat. Who understands if I don’t want to meet up this Sunday because I’ve got plans with someone else. A brand that if I do call them last minute because my plans fall through doesn’t mind – and we end up having a fun time anyway. They’ll drop me the odd note (nothing pushy) just to find out how I’m doing, whether I fancy meeting up or not - and they’ll take the hint if I don’t respond by giving me a bit of space to think about whether I see a long term future for ‘us’.

So. Either this whole thing has in fact been about my personal life – or this singleton is desperately seeking a halfway decent CRM programme with a GSOH.

So what am I doing here anyway?

Well, not here on the planet obviously, that had something to do with a near New Years eve-ish dalliance between my mother and her ex husband sometime over 30 years ago and is pretty irrelevant to any readers I may end up garnering (on the topic of which - hi mum).

No - the question would be "Why am I blogging?" And the answer isn't one that I've really got to the bottom of yet.

Some of it has to do with being on the 'bleeding edge' of advertising (ahem), where we've finally noticed this whole User Generated Content thing. How wondrous we think (about 3 years later) we can get consumers to do our client's work for us - it's like Member Get Member but cheaper. And so we put together some proposals (powerpoint of course), throw in a bit of 'blah blah yaddah yaddah' and if we're feeling particularly edgy we may even chuck together some diagrams with triangles and arrows and - hey presto - here's one we prepared earlier. And then client surprises all of us and goes 'Great - we'll have some of that. Can you sell some mortgages out of it?' and we suddenly realise that our knowledge wasn't as great as we thought it was and that we'd better get our acts in gear and fully understand what this thing is. So, first step - start a blog.

Then there's the friends - the ones who seem to have created fascinatingly interesting, brightly witty blogs reminiscent of reading a set of Dorothy Parker quotes all pulled together under the most intense of un-put-able-down crime thriller plotlines. The blogs that you compulsively check every day for updates, and that would make you envious of their lives - if you didn't know about the stuff that doesn't quite make it in. The bits where they bore you until 3am with irrelevancies relating to their latest conquest (Shall I text? What does this text from him mean? etc) or when they whinge about work politics while you're busy trying to focus on drinking yourself into oblivion after a significant dressing down over some write-offs. And you start to think.. maybe I could look that interesting, maybe I could become a shining and incisive online wit - a resource for amusing anecdotes and one liners. Of course reality strikes soon afterwards and you spend whole minutes trying to make your profile as unassuming as possible (yeah - take a look) in the full knowledge that if you actually keep this going - it's not going to be all that interesting.

And then lastly, the cost and pain of therapy. I was recently in a relationship that ended (yes yes - ok - I was royally dumped) with a guy who spent our meagre four months extolling the virtue of therapy and the fact that he had now 'sorted his head out about what he needed from a relationship'. Now - other than the fact that I now know it obviously wasn't me, this got me pondering at the time. Was my thirty-something singledom up until this point a factor of being incapable at relationships? Should I go running to an extortionately expensive therapist who would probably tell me what I already know (yes - my problems with relationships do, to some extent, stem from my interaction, or lack thereof, with my father) in order that I make a better go of this one?

I got as far as Googling "therapy" and "London". After a significant intake of breath at the results (we're obviously a dysfunctional lot) I narrowed it down to "therapy in SW17". It seems there's a whole host of different specialists in different approaches and they'd all be happy to talk to me about my problems with intimacy. But you know what? That whole problem with intimacy means that I'm just not that comfortable being intimate. Especially not when I’m paying through the nose for it.

So, to drag myself back to the point in hand, perhaps the answer is to be intimate without intimacy – perhaps the ‘blog’ is the answer. And blogs are ‘conversations’ between ‘users’ (no – not the syringe toting type) that set up a ‘dialogue’; or at least that’s what the 3 year out of date copy of Revolution I picked up said and I’m going to choose to believe it.

Perhaps, I think, a bit of cathartic soul baring combined with a few pithy comments telling me to get a hold of myself (probably from my mother) and I’ll stop whining and be cured of all my relationship blindspots - married with 3 kids and half a Labrador, living in the country with no worries about that whole mediocre career thing I used to have, while I drown in nappies and shag the tennis coach. A surprisingly attractive picture now I come to think about it - though perhaps a yoga teacher would be a better bet, my tennis never was up to much.

Anyway, take your pick of the whys. Meanwhile I have to go and explain to my clients why trying to write a blog as though you were a ‘genuine’ consumer while extolling the virtues of their product line in every post won’t be a winner.

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