Are independent girls mean?

When Lindsay Lohan starred in Mean Girls the setting was an intricate spider-web of high-school hang-outs away from the class room.

I didn’t think that this would apply to a woman like myself embarking on the scary, yet liberating (so I am told) decade of being in your thirties.

But strangely and eerily relevant is this plot.

Are the cool kids the ones that do co-habitation and babies? Are the mean girls the ones that hold steadfast to their independence?

Let’s just clear up one thing now. You can be independent and still be in a relationship. They can exclusively intertwine and become a modern day fairytale.

It is possible to love someone and not move in with them, or have any instinctual womb-like callings to have their children.

Do I have to justify my independence? Or do you think it is a consequence of commitment-phobia?

Women my age have seen their mothers and fathers embark on the conformity of divorce. It is no longer a social no-no. Like swings and round-abouts, the truth be told, it is now an exception to have your parents happily married just the once and still pleasantly be together.

And so with the choices our parents have made to break-free from their parent’s generation of the rigidity of marriage and legal commitment, we too seek to disrupt the conventions our fellow love-seekers aspire to.

Maybe it is all right to consider a future without a partner.

Maybe, just maybe, it is all right to think of having a child without a father. Or having no children at all.

Are independent women okay with having to acknowledge, or maybe through fate having to accept a future of doing things on their own?

I am not so sure.

Society and women have a long way to go. But we are closer to seeing that settling down is a freedom that we now have. The choice has to become ours.

And the challenges are just as challenging. I challenge that you can be single and still be a worthwhile human being. So many people attach their own sense of worth through being attached.

I challenge that a woman can have a mind of her own and still be loved. She is not on her own. I am not. I have friends, family and who knows… maybe a dog.

When did working become so unhealthy?

Like an epidemic it is sweeping across London infecting those who once had a social life and perspective. It is leaving those affected with constant exhaustion, lack of clarity and hunched shoulders.

A temporary cure it seems is short, sharp bouts of intoxication accompanied by monotonous, mundane whinging surrounding the very place they are seeking to escape from. This alcoholic ritual is then ended with a wallet stuffed full of forgotten bar receipts that can or cannot be expensed. The latter usually determined by the ability to get past ‘fuzzy head’ syndrome the morning after.

It is so tempting to account these habitual patterns of escapism as a healthy release. But is it? When nothing is resolved and you’ve lost the ability to resume conversations with normal everyday civilians about the joy of life.

Other more enduring side-effects are general lack of sleep, the lost art of home-cooking, tunnel vision and a stubborn denial that nourishment exists outside the work place.

For some, there are more serious consequences. This can involve a break-down of a relationship – because if your absence is the only thing you can bring to a duo, then surely it is doomed. And potentially more fateful, is the loss of yourself – of who you are and what you do beyond your ‘nine to five’ job.

Its reached epidemic proportions. Like a relentless virus it shows no mercy, even to those of the strongest will. It thrives on the inability of individuals to say no. And when the rest have given in, it is no easy feat to stand alone and not succumb.

So are there any preventative measures one can take? Just the one – don’t get a job in advertising.