Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (13 page)

I get asked various questions about the
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About
page, and quite a few of those questions I get asked frequently. So I've made an inspirational leap. Here's a page where you may find the biting hunger of your thirst for knowledge satisfied. Hold on – 'hunger', 'thirst', that's not right. Damn.
(Supportive Inner Voice: "Quick, Mil – keep going and no one will notice.)
I am not trying to indicate 'Now, stop bothering me with your emails, OK?' here, no, I'm always happy to hear from anyone who doesn't have their bowels in their head. I'm merely providing a service, that's all. I give. That's what I do. I love you all. Send money.

Well, if you're a regular visitor, you might be asking this and the answer is 'I've offloaded it.' It was simply getting too big. Hugely pleasing as a thing that scared the semi-literate, but a bind for everyone else who had to wait ages for it to load. I didn't want to split it over several pages. Why? Um – because I'm quirky, what can I say? If you're
not
a regular visitor, then you're probably asking 'This is only
a bit
of the total page? Oh my wheezing Lord!' Well, yes. You should have turned up earlier, shouldn't you?

Update:

I've now made the removed Things available, but only to those people on the Mailing List. This is because, for technical reasons, I want to keep down the number of hits it gets. Oh – and also to ostentatiously slight the casual page visitors who are, of course, just a bunch of lightweights.

NO, NO, NO, NO.
Nothing
that's in the book has ever appeared on this site – the book's a novel.

Yes, I get asked this an awful lot. And here's the thing... there's no movie-script story to it. She
didn't
crash a truck into my house, we
weren't
matched by a War Games-style 'computer dating' computer that had spontaneously gained sentience and was now pursuing its own agenda, it
wasn't
some kind of Stockholm Syndrome affair where I fell for her after she held me hostage during a bank heist gone wrong. Really, it was all very low-key. Perhaps I'll cover it in one of the Mailing List mails one day, maybe.

Lord yes. As I've said before, the secret of a successful relationship is to become irretrievably embroiled in a bitter struggle to the death. Anyway, if we weren't still together the title of the page would be
Things My Former Girlfriend And I Argued About
. Which, admittedly, would be a shame as it would mean losing the snappy acronym
TMGAIHAA
in favour of the clumsy and crashingly uneuphonic
TMFGAIAA
.

Oddly enough, no.

Tsk, all right then, I suppose so. But just twenty or thirty – and nothing involving goats, understood?

Oh, OK, you can include one with the goats. But just the one and that's it.

No. And yes. And 'haven't we covered this already?' It's absolutely all based on real incidents, but my only concern is to be funny for my own idle amusement: I'm writing humourous anecdotes here, not compiling reports for the news. But then, if you didn't realise that already, then you won't be reading this anyway, because you'll have headed straight to the Guestbook to share you perceptive insights with the world.

Mostly she doesn't bother about it – it's an Internet thing (Margret on the Internet: "It's rubbish."). She does read it every so often, though, and thinks it's funny. Margret, you see, unlike some people, is smart, understands English – subtexts and all – and has a sense of humour. We've only ever had two arguments about the page and they were minor. By which, naturally, I mean that they were screaming, howling rows lasting about three hours each, but they were minor by our standards (they were also about things so tiny and incidental that no one else would have even noticed them, let alone managed to fan them into a row). The last time she read the page her only comment was "You're such a liar." Which she later modified to "Oh. Right. I'd forgotten about that." It is true, however, that lately, after she's done something Margret-like – trying to reverse the car over me or whatever – she has taken to saying, "I suppose you're going to put
that
up on your page now, aren't you?" To which my reply, naturally, is, "Darling – it's not
my
page, it's
our
page."

Nope, it's just about Margret and me. Some of you men might
think
you're in the similar situations, but, well, OK, go back to the earlier days your relationships. Did you ever have an argument with your girlfriend that resulted in her throwing you out of her flat and locking the door? Leaving you in a rather tricky situation regarding how to get home? There you go, then. We're similar there. Now, was it winter? Were you naked apart from a cotton t-shirt? And were you standing somewhere along the Swiss-German border? I do believe, however, that arguments –
about stupid things
– are not simply normal in long-term relationship, but actually a sign of intimacy. People only have these idiot rows with people they are genuinely close to: partners, siblings, parents. It takes time and real love to discover where someone's buttons are: but then you can happily push them until one or the other of you is institutionalised.

But also, it has to be said, regarding generalities – this:

Many
years ago I was sitting watching a music show with my girlfriend of the time. Culture Club came on – it was their first TV performance, I think. After about fifteen seconds, Former Girlfriend punched my arm, hard.

Me: 'Ow – what was
that
for?'

Former Girlfriend: 'Because you fancy her.'

Me: 'Her? Who?'

Former Girlfriend: [pointing] '
Her
.'

Me: 'That's a
him
. It's Boy George.'

Former Girlfriend: 'Oh. Right... Well, you'd fancy him if her
were
a woman – he's just your type.' [She punches my arm again, hard.]