Something light-hearted....

A close friend recently revealed to me a new terminology used by her group of friends. She introduced to me the use of the word ‘shoes’ which actually refers to ‘boyfriend’. Ah.. Ah… New to you? Well, it definitely was to me.

So, amongst her group of friends, if someone starts dating someone new, they often discussed it using this terminology. A typical conversation might sound something like this, “Hey, have you heard? So-and-so has new shoes.” Which actually goes to mean, “Hey, have you heard? So-and-so has a new boyfriend”

I, honestly found it to be rather peculiar… New shoes means new boyfriend? It was a little hard for me to get used to that term, especially since I’m a big fans of shoes (in the literal term). It is my weakness.

So, let’s see how you would want to interpret this. You can read between the lines or you can take them as they are. It was just too tempting not to write about.

So, here goes.

I am a big fan of shoes. I love shoes. When I am at the mall, I am constantly looking at shoes, hoping to find a pair that would once again sweep me off my feet and give me the fantasy of beauty, even if it was temporary.

I am such a big fan of shoes, that when I started working, I started getting a new pair of shoes every month. So, I had a June pair, a July pair, an August pair and so on. I made sure I got a new pair every month, just because I could.

To come to think of it, all my shoes were pretty different. There were some funky ones, some cool ones, some hot ones, and some ‘fierce’ ones, and yes, some sexy ones too. Those were the good pairs I bought I guess. What makes a good pair of shoes? They make us feel good, we feel comfortable in them, we can wear them for long hours and they still wouldn’t hurt us and we LOOK really good in them.

But there were also pairs that we may completely regret buying. You know what they say? You’ll never know how the shoe really fits until you’ve worn it for quite a while. There were shoes that looked pretty good at first glance but when we start wearing them, they caused us much pain, in the different parts of our feet. After which, we gather the courage to not wear them, regardless of how beautiful they might look. But we would still keep them in the closet. Probably secretly hoping (or being in denial) they might not hurt us anymore someday and we may be able to wear them then. It takes even more courage to finally come to the realization that we need to get rid of that pair because we’ll never use them as they hurt us.

Even if we had 4 pair of shoes that were comfortable and that looked good, we would still have that one pair, we preferred above the rest. One that we would chose to wear a lot more than the rest. One that fits the whole package. One that meets more than one of our needs. One that is not just comfortable, it also looks good on us and makes us feel confident and beautiful. The truth is, it is for precisely this kind of shoes that we go on our 4 hour hunt in the malls. That doesn’t mean, we don’t like our other shoes. We do like them and we would still have them because we’d like to use them when the need arises or when the occasion permits.

At the end of the day, the shoe that stays with us is the one that can last all our walking around, our sweat, our imperfect feet shape. And we can’t live without our shoes. Especially the good ones.

p.s I think shoes are more like guy friends than boyfriends (as in guys who are our friends, I suppose)

Thank you for reading.

Now that was fun. Let’s try something else… next time…