Monogamy – the solution to life, the universe and everything?

An end to the list

What started out as an immature competition with a fellow blonde seductress has become a rather outdated routine. “What’s your name? Where are you from? What day is it today? Let me just fetch a pen”. As a teenager, every kiss counted and I sought out new nationalities as devotedly as more scholarly friends searched for the last word in a crossword puzzle. Things have changed a bit since then.

Firstly, my arrogant determination to have kissed more people than my class mates in order to prove that I was the most attractive of the bunch has faded into irrelevance. The ease at which one ensnares a guy, I have learnt, is not proportionate to how beautiful you are. It is rather a complex mixture of wearing clothing of the smallest surface area possible and mastering the ‘come get me’ look. Rather than boosting my boasting quota, my fool-proof attempts to attract guys have resulted in snide comments and charges of ‘slut’.

Secondly, my list of conquests is so extensive that a margin of names is barely noticeable; due to the rapidity of its expansion, I round up to the nearest ten to avoid confusion. An extra two won’t make much of a difference any more. If I keep this pace up, soon I’ll be rounding to the nearest fifty so as not to get behind the times.

So we’ve established that collecting men on a slip of paper has become an obsolete past time. What about the act of pulling men in itself? If I’m no longer pulling extensively in order to boast about it to my friends or to prove to myself that I am attractive, why bother? I don’t remember half of them anyway.

People kiss strangers for two reasons: because they want to have fun, or because they feel chemistry and want to give romance a shot. Or both. Regarding the fun aspect, I can safely say that after a considerable amount of successful accomplished missions in the boy department, the fun factor starts to dwindle. You know exactly how to attract them, you know you’ll succeed, and you can assume they won’t kiss significantly differently from those who came before. What was initially daunting and exhilarating eventually becomes predictable and assured.

However, the romance factor of kissing a stranger is still very fresh to me. I used to giggle when boys would text me the morning after asking to meet up as it showed weakness: they were breaking the Code of Debauchery. Things have changed now.

‘Monogamy’. A dreaded term that used to have the power to send me and my fellow ‘cool kids’ running in all directions, is a word I am just coming to terms with. A seemingly alien notion that I previously assigned to those in their late-twenties, reserving yourself to one person, dare I say it, has its merits.

Relationships come with a whole host of experiences inaccessible to adamantly single youths. Sex in your parents’ house, sex on tap and an opportunity to experiment wildly are just a few perks of the ‘taken’ status. It also requires less alcohol.

I never thought this would happen, but after kissing 104 boys from 23 different countries with a personal record of 43 in one year alone, I have settled down with a ginger. With the acquisition of a boyfriend coincides the end of my wild York antics that have fuelled Mademoiselle’s column for over a year now. So it’s goodbye from me, and bad luck to all of you who have not yet experienced the joys of ‘a night with Mademoiselle’.

Until the idea of monogamy gets old that is!

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