Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
How often do you go shopping? Are you an impulse buyer? Do you shop alone?
There are certain questions that are just off-limits; for instance, a wise man once told me, you never ask a woman her age or her original hair color. (Okay, it was a wise woman.) Now I’d add to that list this one: Never ask a woman about her shopping habits.
Though in these days of the Clintonian sentence parsing, ecommerce 24/7 and easy returns, it’s quite easy to get out of those sorts of questions. “Oh, I don’t go shopping everyday” sounds reasonable but really just means “I don’t leave my house and physically go shopping somewhere every single day, but I do obsess over ebay five hours a day.” See where I’m going with that?
If you picked up a Tory tunic on a whim on the 5th floor of Saks and then wandered down to the shoe department where you loitered for a good hour, trying on Jimmy Choo after Jimmy Choo, then go back upstairs and purchase the tunic — phew! — well, does that really qualify as “impulse buying”? I think not. Far too much involvement and consideration (okay, time at least) to be impulsive.
As for shopping alone, well it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to hide anything if you follow this amendment to the rule: Never ask a woman her shopping habits — unless you know you can keep up with her. If you tell someone who also has a problem, you become each other’s accomplice, and thus you each earn a confidante, the one person to tell all your shopping secrets to, with no consequences at all. Confess away! Your conscience is freed and your high is sustained. And so no one can say you have a problem because you don’t shop like an alcoholic drinks– alone, unsupervised. How proud I am to have gotten to this point — until it occurs to me. Isn’t binge drinking accompanied with all your frat buddies way worse??
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May 31st, 2006 08:32
Shooooooooping… so sweet word. BTW, I became more active buyer after I read “Shopoholic”
hmmm, why?