【英语生活】姑娘，学会说不

Cost Centre #1 will be 17 in October, if he is still alive by then. One of the potential causes of his premature demise may be the publication of his GCSE results in late August. If these don’t give me sufficient cause to wring his neck, he will enter the sixth form in September, a sixth form in which there will be - he can’t wait – girls.

Sixth-form girls (16 to 18 years old) are a breed apart. I was recently cajoled into giving a talk to the sixth form of a girls school near Guildford, and had no idea what I was going to say. I finally alighted on the idea of giving them a list of 10 things I wish I had known when I was 17. I drew up the list, and circulated it among some of my staff in the office for their comment. They immediately banned at least seven of the 10 items. I am not going to reproduce them here either, but they concerned, among other things, intimate depilation and sexually transmitted diseases. (疑为“私处脱毛”)

I did eventually come up with 10 things I wished I had known at 17 and which my staff were prepared to allow me to discuss in public. Point four on this list was “saying no is difficult”. At 17 saying “no” (or even “yes”) was something I associated with drink, drugs and sex, or going out when I should have been doing my prep. But saying “no” is an important life skill, and I pointed out to my youthful audience that if they didn’t learn it at 17, they would spend years doing things they didn’t really want to do and wasting a lot of time (and indeed money) as a result.

I, of course, wasn’t very good at saying “no” early in life and am only managing to get a bit better at the advanced age of 44. As a direct consequence of failing to master this important life skill early, I spent my early 20s becoming a serial fiancee, agreeing to marry no fewer than four different people. This was in series rather than in parallel, and I didn’t actually make it to the altar until I got engaged for the fourth time, to Mr M. People ask me why (and indeed how) I got myself into this predicament. The truth is that when someone pays you the enormous compliment of asking you to become his life partner, it seems to me churlish to refuse. So then I found myself having to unwind the position, to use a capital markets analogy, and just as in the real capital markets it wasn’t always easy or quick to do so, neither was it always possible to come out without absorbing some losses.

When I did get married I changed my surname to Moneypenny, which was Mr M’s name. When I wrote about names the other week I had a deluge of e-mails from female readers, particularly in Asia or the US, asking why I had done this. The simple truth is that I rather liked his name. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have changed mine! But names can cause great anguish. My Single Girlfriend is a good example. She is technically no longer single, having set up home with an Eligible Banker and given birth to a son. In England and Wales it is compulsory to register a child’s name within 42 days. With hours to go, they were arguing about the surname. SG wanted to hyphenate the name, so that he would be known as Child SG-EB. EB, on the other hand, wanted the two surnames to be registered unhyphenated, as Child SG EB, so that later on in life the child could, if he wish, pretend that SG was just another middle name. I’m with EB, myself, but SG is having none of it.

Several readers wrote and suggested that all women should keep their surname throughout their life, which would avoid all complications when marrying, divorcing and so on. This is what happens in Asia in particular and seems very sensible to me. All that changing of names can be a complete pain. My Most Glamorous Girlfriend changed her name when she married her first husband. At the time, MGG worked for a leading advertising agency, which was of such size that processing routine administrative requests took ages. As a result, her new name didn’t appear in the internal telephone directory for five months - just about the time the marriage collapsed and she reverted to her maiden name.

It sounds like she is not alone in finding that some relationships last longer than others. I confess to being a bit concerned about some of my female readers, especially those living a sybaritic life as expatriates in some of the newer financial centres of the world, who write and tell me that the length of their relationships is measured by the number of condoms used rather than weeks or months. Sounds like they have an equally big problem learning to say no.

到今年10月，成本中心1号就17岁了，如果那时他还活着的话。倘若他早亡，一个可能的原因也许是8月底英国普通中等教育证书(GCSE)考试成绩的公布。如果他的成绩还不足以让我拧断他脖子，那么，他将在9月份进入中学六年级，那里将会有(他已等不及了的)女生。

六年级女生（16至18岁）是特立独行的一类人。最近，我受人哄骗，要去给吉尔福德镇附近一所女校的六年级学生讲话，但我不知道该说些什么。最后，我决定给她们列一份我希望自己在17岁就能了解的10件事。我起草了一份清单，在办公室的一些员工中传看，让他们发表看法。他们立即枪毙了10项中的至少7项。我也不打算在这里再提了，不过里面包括偷偷脱毛和性传播疾病等。



我终于列出了10件希望自己在17岁时就知道的事，我的员工们也准备同意我公开讨论这些问题。清单中的第四点是“说‘不’很难”。17岁时，我总会把说“不”（甚至是说“行”），和饮酒、吸毒、性或是和在本应做功课时外出等联系起来。然而，说“不”是一项重要的生活技能。我向年轻的听众们指出，如果她们在17岁时不能学会这一技能，她们将会花很多年的时间去做哪些自己实际上不想做的事情，并因此浪费大量时间（当然还有金钱）。



当然，我年轻时也不太擅长说“不”，直到44岁的高龄才勉强做得好了一些。未能及早掌握这一重要生活技能导致的一个直接后果是，在我20岁出头时，曾多次当过别人的未婚妻，接受了多达4位不同男士的求婚。这些都是先后发生，而不是同时发生的，我实际上也一直没有走进教堂，直到第四次，也就是和钱眼先生订婚为止。人们问我为什么（以及究竟如何）让自己陷入了这种困境。事实是，当某人请求你成为他的生活伴侣时，这是一种巨大的恭维，对我来说，拒绝似乎有些无礼。因此，然后我发现自己不得不，用资本市场的话来说，解除头寸，而且就像在真实的资本市场中一样，往往不会很容易，动作不会很快，永远也不可能全身而退。



当我终于结婚后，我随了先生的姓，改姓钱眼。有一周，我写了一篇关于姓名的专栏，结果收到了大量女性读者的电子邮件，尤其是亚洲和美国的读者，问我为什么这样做。事实很简单，我非常喜欢丈夫的姓。如果不是这样，我就不会改掉自己的姓了！但姓名可能带来极大的苦恼。我的单身女友(Single Girlfriend，简称SG)就是一个很好的例子。从技术上来说，她已不再单身，而是与一位合格的银行家(Eligible Banker，简称EB)组建了家庭，生了一个儿子。在英格兰和威尔士，孩子的名字必须在出生后42天内登记。只剩下几个小时了，他们还在为孩子的姓争吵。SG希望将两人的姓用连字符连接，因此孩子的名字就是Child SG-EB。而EB则希望在登记孩子的名字时，去掉两个姓中间的连字符，即Child SG EB，这样在孩子长大后，如果他愿意，可以假装SG只是一个中间名字。我个人同意EB的意见，但SG却不肯接受。



几位读者曾来信建议，所有女性一生都应保留自己的姓，这样，在结婚、离婚等事情上，就可以避免把问题复杂化。这正是在亚洲发生的事，我也认为这样做非常明智。改名可能会非常痛苦。我的最迷人女友(Most Glamorous Girlfriend，简称MMG)在嫁给第一任丈夫时，改掉了自己的姓。当时MMG在一家一流的广告公司工作，公司规模非常庞大，处理日常的行政请求就要花上很长一段时间。因此，5个月过去了，她的新名字还没有出现在公司内部的电话簿上，就在此时，婚姻破裂了，她又改回了婚前姓名。



她似乎并不是唯一一个发现某些关系延续的时间比另外一些关系更为长久的人。我承认，自己对一些女性读者感到有些担心，特别是那些在全球新兴金融中心以外籍人士身份过着奢靡生活的人，她们来信告诉我，她们浪漫关系的长度是以用过的避孕套数量来衡量的，而不是按周或月计算。听上去，她们在学说“不”这个问题上，似乎也同样遇到了大麻烦。



译者/梁艳梅