I’ve just sent a link to Lily Allen’s new album, West End Girl, to every woman I know – along with the message: “Listen to this from start to finish, like an audiobook. Every woman should have this album number one on their playlist! Absolute fire.” To say I feel “seen” would be an understatement.
Not only does the album cover the ignominy of being cheated on in plain sight in the name of “ethical non-monogamy” – and the simple, brutal indignity of dating – but it unravels the pain of the breakdown of a marriage when you have children.
Allen hasn’t said specifically which bits are fact, which fiction, but we know it refers heavily to her split from her husband, the Stranger Things star David Harbour, in February after four years of marriage. In interviews, the singer has said the album “is inspired by what went on in the relationship”. In short, as my colleague, the brilliant Roisin O’Connor, puts it in her piece: “We have no way of knowing what’s real and what’s invented.” But boy, can we guess.
We also have her in her own words, after Allen, who’s now 40, told Perfect magazine that looking for love is “much harder” than it was when she was younger. In fact, she says, it is “bitterly disappointing”. “There’s an element of humiliation and shame around it,” she said. “The world doesn’t portray women of my age as being desirable. And it just feels like climbing up a mountain." “I’m exhausted by it,” she added. And I thought it was done. I thought it was happily ever after, you know?”
Oh Lily, I know. I know. When I listened to the album from start to finish for the first time – and then a second, a third – I couldn’t have related harder. Not only does she talk directly about the bed-of-nails experience that is dating in mid-life in the acerbic and biting (but achingly sad) “Nonmonogamummy”, singing: “And now I’m looking at my Tinder, well, maybe I’m more of a Hinger/ He wants to take me out to dinner, hope he looks better than his picture (I love you)”, but it is in “Dallas Major” that she really nails the “dating with kids” experience: “I hate it here,” she croons. “I’m almost nearly 40, I’m just shy of five feet two, I’m a mum to teenage children – does that sound like fun to you?”
It is not fun for us over-40 daters with kids, believe you me. My experiences alone are enough to write a book about, but it would be filed away in the “horror” section, read to kids to scare them silly on Halloween. It would include, in no chronological order, the man who was leading a double life and living with his long-term girlfriend the entire time we were together; then the first man I braved dating after that, who sent me, inexplicably, links to articles about “not feeling a spark”.
It would talk about the guy who went in for a hug at the end of a first date and whispered, “You’ll get a lot more than that, next time”; the guy who’d just got out of prison; the one who turned up on our date with a mate. Then, there was the catfish 10 years older (at least) than the photos on his profile; the 50-year-old man who took me to the anarchy bookshop in Whitechapel and called me “comrade”; the doctor who let us get to a third date – and everything was going well, everything was peachy – before he told me he “wasn’t looking to date anyone with kids”, but that we could be “friends with benefits”, if I liked. And I did not like.
There was the guy who took me for a first date in a graveyard; the one who cried as he told me how he had lost the love of his life (by cheating on her); the man who admitted his last relationship had been “an affair”, but he “couldn’t help it – I did try, but I couldn’t not”. The lawyer who turned out to be married with three children; the man who – when I said I didn’t want to come back to his place, asked me if I “hated sex”; the prominent journalist who told me there were two women “in the queue” ahead of me, but if it didn’t work out with them we could go on a date (oh, can we please!).
There have been the men over 50 who are still “not sure” if they want kids; the “only looking for casual” f***bois; the work situationships; the ones who act interested but then ask for advice on dating other women. The man who told me I was too much of a catch for him to date, because I am “so sorted” – with a job, with kids and with my own house, like what he really wanted was someone to rely on him. One ex-boyfriend, on the other hand, thought that the fact I had those things meant he was sorted, too; that it meant he could give up work and become a house husband “like I’ve always dreamed about”.
Bad behaviour isn’t only reserved for men, either: there was the woman who was still married, but dating because her wife was unwell; the girl who told me – a mother – that she believed “mothers take up all the space”; the woman who spent 10 minutes shouting at me because I hadn’t messaged her to confirm on the day of the date but had instead... turned up, exactly like I was supposed to.
There’s a special place in hell reserved for the kind of people who practice what they call “ethical non-monogamy”, too, as Allen writes so bitingly about. The man who told a friend he just “needs novelty”; the one who said he’s “just born this way”, as though commitment isn’t a choice – for everyone. The ghosts, the gropers, the ghouls who don’t ask women a single question on a date – and you have to make all the plans for them, because they don’t seem to want partners at all, but mothers.
Allen’s latest album is about (among other themes) cheating, gaslighting, open relationships and sex addiction. It will “p*** people off”, she concedes, unapologetically. Good. You know who should be really p***ed off? Women.
