Love hurts, shopping helps ...


I was standing on a corner in the city, trying not to choke on exhaust fumes, when I saw the slogan on the side of a bus.

Love hurts, shopping helps.

Has the ring of truth, huh?

Especially to someone like me, who thinks retail therapy is not only cheaper than real therapy in the long run, but actually leaves you with something tangible at the end of it. But when I finished laughing, I found myself wondering how much money I'd blown over the years in various love-induced shopping frenzies.

I mean, there is no heartbreak so intense that it can't be assuaged, at least momentarily, by a new pair of Italian shoes. No fury a really good haircut can't diminish. No disappointment that can't be eased by a new Chanel lipstick.

No wonder I haven't made it onto the Rich List.

I remember when the ex and I started, and I was forced to come to grips for the first time with the concept of a custody weekend, or access weekend, or whatever the hell the politically correct terminology for it is these days.

You know, the weekend you really want to spend together in bed, or wandering around hand-in-hand with the dazzle of new love making everything seem sparkly and new. The weekend that - in your mind - is made for wandering around flower markets and having coffee in little cafes and taking drives in the country and you know, doing all that stuff.

The weekend you now discover involves playing hostess to two hostile children intent on pointing out the hundreds of ways in which you don't compare to their Mother.

The weekend designed to test the limit of your tolerance.

Of course, in the beginning you have all these bizarre little Brady Bunch fantasies that the adults in this unfortunate and unwilling menage a trois will behave like - well, adults. And you swear to yourself that you are too smart (and too young for chrissakes) to be motherly with your lover's kids. You envisage you and your newly divorced bloke in jeans and white linen, reading the weekend Sydney Morning Herald over a latte and making erudite conversation while his adorable children sip babycinos like something out of a Ralph Lauren commercial.

What you don't realise at this early, deluded stage of the game is that these kids will drive you to the very border of bankruptcy.

Not to mention absolutely fucking insane.

Because, of course, what really happens, is that you start trying to make the fantasy real. You organise outings to fun places that are met with sullenness. You slave over meals that are destined to go uneaten because they're not cooked quite the same way their mother cooks them. You wash and fold clothes, and you pick up toys, and you get used to being asked embarrassing questions about your sex life with their Dad in the middle of restaurants.
You suffer hour after hour of Nickelodeon, or the Disney Channel, because you know if their minds are sullied by one split second of a television program rated M you will have lots of explaining to do to their mother.

And on that day when you trip over a child's skateboard left in the stairwell and practically break your ankle, and are overwhelmed by a wave of pain so intense that a small, practically inaudible fuck escapes through your gritted teeth, you will even dial the home telephone number for the youngest member of the junior obscenity squad so he can report to his mother that he doesn't want to stay in your house any longer because you said ... drum roll ... a bad word.

On that day you have a brain snap, and you swear to yourself that no longer are you prepared to serve as whipping girl for the fact that your beloved's marriage failed and he and his ex-wife have some serious custody issues to sort out.

No problem. You are a smart woman. And you know how to deal.

And so you shop.

About an hour before the kids are due to arrive for a little Daddy time every second weekend, you stand innocently at the door, tossing the car keys nonchalantly in your hand, murmuring something about picking up the dry-cleaning and meeting the girls for coffee and giving the plastic in your wallet a little workout. And you escape to Boutique Land where you congratulate yourself on being so together. You rationalise your behaviour and your guilt by telling yourself that right now, your credit rating and your sanity are probably mutually exclusive concepts.

Six or seven hours later, weighed down with new shoes and suits and various things for the house, plus a little something for him because you feel dead guilty about that fact that you secretly suspect his children are spawn of the devil, you breeze back into the house, lightened not only of your load of angst but significant amounts of your savings. And you look around you at the disaster zone created by two children and a grown man, and your lips get tight and you set about picking things up and stacking the dishwasher.

At this time you suddenly remember that every second weekend also includes No-Sex-Saturday night, because at least one of the kids is sleeping in the next room and he doesn't want to give his ex-wife any chance to call Children's Services and demand an amended child support agreement due to his - and by extension your - extreme moral turpitude. So on Sunday you spend again, this time maybe at the salon where you get a massage to ease the resentment kinks from your shoulders.

Dumber people than me figured out a long time ago that Divorce = Debt. It was just that in my naiveté, I thought that the debt part of the scenario related to the couple who had actually divorced - not the ex-single girl now sharing bed and board with the ex-husband.

That's one side of the coin, but this shopping thing will get you coming as well as going, in my experience. I mean, you can tell the two of you are getting serious when you feel the urge to buy him a new sweater. Or when he only complains a little bit after several hours of trailing around after you, carrying packages and solemnly assuring you that no, that outfit doesn't make you look fat. Even happy cohabitation can lead to hours spent cruising homeware stores, comparing kitchen storage gadgets and inexpensive design knockoffs.

And am I the only woman whose relationships can be traced through her wardrobe? Not to mention my lingerie drawer, because I suspect a psychologist would have a lot to say about my smalls. When you're on the upswing of the lurrrrve rollercoaster, it's all La Perla and matching bra sets and suspender belts and the sheerest wisp of black stocking. By the time you settle into the relationship, there's still coordinated lace underthings. But you know you've begun to mistake each other for part of the furniture once the lace has been pushed to the back of the drawer and your underwear of choice is primarily designed not to leave a Visible Panty-Line.

So you break up. And then the whole spending cycle starts over, with your emotional crises marked by the ker-ching! of cash registers.

It's a love-led economy y'all, and we shopaholics are just out here in the malls of the world, doing our bit.