Riding in Cars Without Boys

By Brooke and Olivia

You don’t really spend much time questioning your life choices when you’re 21, until someone visits you from a foreign country and asks, “What is wrong with you two?”

Our lovely friend, Laura, wasn’t being unkind. She had become acquainted with our interests and our preoccupation with aesthetics and the superficial, and was simply expressing understandable perplexity at our apparent obliviousness to the world outside this bubble. I mean, you know, Pretty in Pink is cool and everything, but why aren’t you chasing men?!

It had never occurred to us that there was anything wrong with “us two”. We were cool, right? We’d spend our days driving around in an unreliable, blue Excel, singing along to our latest mix tape creation (a very serious endeavour) and chatting endlessly about things we thought profoundly important; fashion (not the latest), music and film (not the most popular) and the general idle gossip that occupies the minds of those with very little to worry about.

We wore ridiculous outfits that we thought were brilliant. We gasped in delight at ’80s inspired jewellery and ’60s shift dresses. We danced with our friends to dodgy bands (here’s looking at you, Local Pricks) in seedy pubs, pre-refurbishment. We stayed up all night drinking coffee (when we couldn’t afford alcohol) and then we’d stay up all night drinking booze (when we could). We dared to have fantastical ideas about books we might write or films we would make. And like most girls in their early-twenties, we did talk about boys, but in the kind of abstracted way that a scholar might discuss a theorist they’d never actually meet; it’d be interesting, but it didn’t really matter because the idea was there.

Brooke at our local, the Flying Scotsman.

Olivia an ’80s party (OK, it wasn’t a dress up party, but we just dressed up anyway…).

Selfie before selfies were a thing.

Were we living in a perpetual, or at least extended, adolescence, where the decorations of life – fashion, music, pop culture – were not on the periphery, but in fact front and centre, over the pursuit of more adult experiences, like sex and relationships? Well, yes. And that was, and is, totally fine. Our early twenties were for extended discussion of TV shows (think SATC and ANTM), “truth, dare or torture?” (seriously), Han’s Café pig-outs (this perhaps explains the lack of boyfriends), brooch placement, and premiere viewings of Donnie Darko. Men? Meh.

As it turned out, there was more than enough time later to pursue and acquire relationships and then dissect and obsess about them. We actually do ride in cars with boys now, the big and the small. The “front and centre” that we held so dear was pushed slowly and naturally to the side; the trends, styles, things we were so engrossed in became mere waving hitchhikers on the roadside. The unreliable, blue Excel became a reliable blue i30 station wagon, and with it came all the features that life entails. Our lives are packed full of the appropriate and responsible – careers, husbands, mortgages and (gulp) children. And that’s where 2 Fat Housewives comes in…

Like a well-edited mix tape, life is about balance, and this blog is the scales. We will revive our passions of the past and find an equilibrium between the things we love and those we have to love. We can obsess again about fashion and music, as well as our kids, husbands and fat rolls. And through it all, we can ultimately try to discover what truly is wrong with us.