Until your partner has seen you in the sort of padded cycling shorts that make you look like you’re wearing an industrial-strength nappy over the unshorn legs of Mr Tumnus, I’m afraid you’re still just dating. It’s not a relationship until you stop shaving your armpits. You’re not somebody’s partner until you’ve shared a poorly ventilated bathroom.
All this I have learned only recently, as I undertook a sweaty, hairy, padded, hilly and at times freezing bike ride across Ireland with my boyfriend. It was here, under the sun and occasional hail that I finally let it all hang out. Bobbing down beside a hedge at a canal’s edge to go for an al-fresco pee somewhere outside Mullingar, I felt the last of my single lady mystique gently stream down across my left foot as I stared resolutely into the eyes of a watching sheep. As I squeezed a blackhead the approximate size of a broad bean, until that moment trapped under the rubberised hem of my cycling shorts, I felt a release not just of sebum but also of romantic expectation. While standing behind a tent in my cotton M&S briefs, wet wiping away two days of accumulated grime, I started to hum the Commodores: she’s mighty mighty, just lettin’ it all hang out.
So it was with a gay trill of laughter that I read that a hotel in New Zealand had recently banned Lycra cycling shorts from its public areas as it finds the “bumps and bulges” inappropriate and “unsightly”. I mean, it’s hard to argue. Standing at the counter of a small cafe, opposite the Catholic shrine at Knock, ordering a baked potato, I could feel the eyes of at least one tutting, middle-aged devotee boring into my backside like the unquenchable fire of Gehenna. By the sweat of my face, I will eat bread till I return to the ground, I should have said. Because from it I was taken; for I am dust, and to dust I shall return. Instead, I merely smiled, picked up the giant stainless steel pot of tea and waddled my Maris Piper of arse-padding back to my chair. But we are dust.
Or, at least, the same frail, fungal, sweating, hirsute, spitting, pissing, carbon beasts as men are. And what is love if not the freedom to be appreciated for precisely what you are, without pretending to be something you’re not?
The politics of letting it all hang out has hovered over single women’s WhatsApp groups and dinner parties for years. From Victorian changing screens to modern tubes of Immac, the objects of our existence tell of a lifelong battle to hide, shave, bleach, tuck away, remove, ignore or disguise our mammalian reality. The spots, the wayward eyebrows sprouting unaccountably from your chin, the sweat between your legs, the burps, the wrinkles even, for some the muscles – all are to be hidden from the one you love, in order for them to love you. If the truth of your body is unpalatable, then feed them a lie instead.
Except, of course, you cannot have true intimacy without veracity. Sometimes, you have to show your hand to win the game. You have to admit to the liquid, bulging, stained and straining truth of your own body to keep the emotional energy for empathy, compassion and care. If you’re too busy worrying about the failings of your own leathery bag of bones you don’t leave room to appreciate the glory of someone else’s.
Of course, it’s not just the matter of airing your body in all its glory. There’s also the big question of when, in a relationship, you let your emotional guard down too. When you stop being on “date behaviour” and discuss depression, fertility, previous emotional abuse, anxiety, your parents, politics, phobias and principles.
This one can be even trickier. But, just like an ingrown hair or slack stomach, trying to keep your psychological quirks or past experiences hidden for too long will almost certainly cause them to roar up like an inferno when you, and your partner, least expect it. Even in the best case scenario, you are denying the person you love full access to your inner landscape. Which will, all too often, leave them lost, bewildered, unable to reach you.
As we wheeled along the final few miles, beside the dark and heaving river Liffey, I realised that not only was I a 10-day stranger to the razor, I also hadn’t brushed my hair, put on any make up or worn anything other than padded shorts, leggings and a silver cycling jacket that made me look like Tyres from Spaced with a gusset full of foam, for over a week. I was a state. And yet, it is these very experiences, as well as the dinners, the dresses and the well-groomed sunsets, that knit two strangers together into love. I might have a sock that smelled of pee, I might have burned my nose into something resembling a beetroot and I might be, at that very moment, standing on my pedals to finally let a little blood back into my bottom, but I was there. Entirely in the moment. Entirely as I am. A terrible beauty was born, that week, between the Atlantic and the Irish Sea. Only, this time, it speaks of love, not war.
