As an only child, one of the lazy cliches I’ve had to withstand about my kind over the years is that we don’t share. This is outrageous; I’ve always encouraged my husbands to commit adultery – especially if I can watch – and I’m a notorious picker-up of tabs, spending a fortune down the decades on people I’ve invited to share my largesse.
I love to “overshare” too – that is, “reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life” – but with the proviso that this occurrence has to be at least amusing, at best shocking.
Often, especially if it concerns health, oversharing can be wearing; as a child I grew fearful of coming home from school to find my mother assembled with her cronies, as I knew that they would be spending several hours discussing their own and their friends’ various health travails in lip-licking detail – the best/worst one being: “And then her womb fell out as she got on the bus!”
That’s what Facebook’s like these days – a bunch of moaning women one-upping each other on minor ailments. “I’ve got a cyst on my ovary!” remarked one the other day. “I’ve got two – one on each!” another instantly crowed.
A sexed-up kissing-cousin of such revelations happens when a bunch of broads – often after a gallon of white wine each – get together to carp about men, preferably their sexual shortcomings. Although I’ve been an absolute ocean-going bitch all my life, I don’t recall ever indulging in this. There’s something so sad about it, despite all the attempts on screens small and large to make it some sort of feminist bonding project. We would despise men who sat around comparing sexual notes about women; it’s no different when we do it to them. Besides, if you spent any amount of time with a man who didn’t please you, it’s you who looks like the prize booby – not him who looks like the booby prize.
No, the oversharing I like is the more grandstanding, flamboyant, skilful kind. I’ve earned it. Growing up as a shy, working-class, provincial girl in the 70s, I didn’t dream of true love; I dreamt of being a divorcee and a wit. My heroines weren’t Olivia Newton-John and Pan’s People but Tallulah Bankhead (“I’ve been to bed with men, women and odd pieces of furniture”) and Dorothy Parker (“Ducking for apples – change one letter and that’s the story of my life”).
I remember as a youngster reading a flapper in an F Scott Fitzgerald story saying, “You’ve either got to feed people or shock them,” and it really stuck in my mind. A variation of this is “the clever one talks and the rich one pays” which a rich, clever man who took an interest in my writing when I was a dumb and impoverished teenager used to say, and I’ve done my best to become both.
In my experience, it doesn’t take much oversharing to shock people. There was that time when, as the hostess of a very dull dinner in a very expensive restaurant, I felt moved to posit the question: “If you had to chose, which kind of dogs are best at sex, do you think? I’d wager Alsatians.” Things certainly livened up after that. But it’s often emotional rather than sexual oversharing which can set the cat among the pigeons.
I’m fond of quoting the late Peter Ustinov, who famously said of friendship: “Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who get there first.” I’ve always believed that this is even truer of those with whom we become romantically involved; forget all that moony-eyed swill about “The One”, it’s more like “The Queue”, as we work our way through the people we fancy until we find one we don’t have the inclination to leave.
You would be amazed at the appalled reaction which my sharing this honestly-held belief gets from seemingly sensible adults, whereas it seems perfectly obvious to me; maybe it’s an only child thing. So to conclude, I’d state that oversharing is only a good thing when done by amusing people; otherwise, the emotion which we struggle to conceal is not shock – but boredom.
