Obsession.

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It’s spring of 1989 and I am six years old, sitting in my friend Laura’s bedroom, listening to the latest New Kids on the Block album on my Walkman, wearing my cut-off denim dungarees that my mother had make-shifted for me. I had saved up all my pocket money from my birthday to buy NKOTB’s latest album. (Even the most unseasoned psychotherapist would be able to offer an interpretation about the fact that I always see the word KNOB in this acronym.) I spent hours listening to their songs on repeat, manually rewinding and fast-forwarding in oscillatory anticipation, searching intuitively for just the right spot…much like how I later learned to navigate men.

We didn’t have much money growing up so, like many of my things, my Walkman was a hand-me-down. Despite resembling an ugly giant stapler, it was a treasured item that had to be shared between myself and my older brother.

Today was my turn.

Of course, I had no idea what the right stuff meant, but I knew that I must have it, because Donnie told me I did. And at six years old, that’s all I needed—an invitation from a man to believe that something was special about me. I closed my eyes, and imagined what it would be like for Jordan Knight—my ultimate NKOTB crush—to fall in love with me.

To be chosen.

I attempted to emphatically emanate the classic eighties shoulder flicks and pendulum leg swaying of the music video that I had memorised, whilst Laura poured tea for her cabbage patch dolls. Their chubby heads, covered with ill-suited wigs and the rather startled yet joyous expression on their faces, caused them to resemble a rather unusual looking group of baby ravers, high on MDMA, whose father (singular) looks like a bloke called Dave from down the pub.

Dropping Junior Dave, Laura reached for her bubblegum-pink Polly Pocket case, opening its small heart-shaped lock, revealing a Church, painted purple and yellow as if it was the unfortunate victim of an unsuccessful episode of Changing Rooms. You know the ones - where you secretly revel in the disaster that was once someone’s bedroom but that now had echoes of a brothel in Disneyland. The watchful parishioners stood to attention in the background, with their socially approving faces, staring at the dutiful bride and groom who were standing in the bright pink aisle, with no idea of what they were about to get into. I closed my eyes and my little uncoordinated body bopped around to the music, trying to avoid standing on Laura’s collection of My Little Ponies, which lay strewn across the floor as if a group of bloodthirsty Chippendales had rode in and massacred them at the Battle of Little Bigshlong.

To my youthful and inexperienced eyes, Jordan Knight looked like a gorgeous Italian man had eaten James Dean and then birthed a beautiful hybrid Adonis. (Jordan’s Canadian, as it turns out, but this was my fantasy after all.) Now, nearly forty years later, as I search for him on Google, Jordan Knight just looks like just another bloke called Dave…and I wonder if I might finally have a chance.

Back then, I obsessively imagined what it would be like for us to fall in love and live happily ever after — a dream that, despite the antagonist periodically changing, I became completely and utterly addicted to for a significant part of my life. A yearning for a romantic saviour, dressed in ripped jeans, a dirty leather jacket, and an even dirtier set of wheels (yes, Grease II was - and remains - my favourite film).

I was completely age-appropriately deluded back in 1989, lost in my naive innocence, a victim to the capitalist music industry’s marketing juggernaut. I used to watch their music videos and fantasise about being one of the lucky girls whom Jordan was flirtatiously chasing around. Now, I question if I think a group of women being chased through a graveyard by a group of older men is indeed sexy, and I wonder if I have been hit by the woke parade, or whether I’m still being controlled by the patriarchy.

When I think back, I see myself through that naive lens, lost in a fantasy of romance, not realising that life isn’t quite as easy as it appears in music videos, or that men aren’t always going to chase after me just because I believe I’m worth it.

I hadn’t yet learned the unfairness of life and love and still naively thought that anything was possible if you just guarded and nurtured it enough.

But back then?

I was six, and in my world, anything was possible...if you just believed.

So, what do you do when you’re now nine years old, and you desperately want a real-life NKOTB for your very own?

Well, I asked every boy in my class to be my boyfriend.

I started at the bottom of the boy-pyramid and decided to work my way up. Ease myself into it, if you will.

The high quantity of potential suitors wasn’t just a reflection of an abundance of rejections and a pre-pubescent girl with questionable standards but rather because the boy inevitably realised that being ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ actually meant nothing, therefore calling it off and putting me back on the market, creating a rather high turnover as a result.

I was not deterred, however. I simply adapted my dating strategy to one of shameless outright bribery...by offering packets of Rollos in exchange for commitment.

Eventually, after many hushed conversations nestled in the corner of the class cloakroom, eyes darting around to check for adult onlookers, the exchanging of goods between hands indicated a promise made…if only for a time. I’m not sure if this is the Year 4 equivalent of drug dealing and prostitution. This was certainly one of the first times I learned to exploit whatever resources I had for things of inequivalent value, and certainly my first lesson in learning that boys will take what they can get, and break their promises as they go.

It turns out that you can’t buy love, no matter the stakes, or how many Rollos you have.

One rainy Wednesday, I was in my usual cloakroom spot when Wayne Baker, the boy whose glasses were held together by plasters and who still had the remnants of his jam sandwich stuck to the side of his face, told me that he didn’t want to be my boyfriend anymore. I fleetingly wondered if it was because I wouldn’t hold his equally sticky little hand at lunchtime.

He conciliatorily offered me the half-eaten packet of Rollos that I had given to him that morning, which I declined with a slight shake of the head and a look of disgust at the green-stained bit of tissue stuck to the toffee oozing out of the wrapper’s side.

My boy-pyramid ascension was almost at its peak. Wayne had been a left-field choice because I was too scared to face the summit - there was only one boy left to ask...Steven Jones: the Jordan Knight of my tiny little world.

So far, Steven only had eyes for another girl - let’s call her Amy, as most pretty and popular girls were in the nineties.

Amy was the only girl on his radar. Not gangly, socially awkward, or gap-toothed like me. She was the one who all the boys ran towards during our break-time game of Kiss Chase. I was always the one who the boys ran away from.

However, not having perfected my defeatist-I’m-not-good-enough-persona just yet, I told myself that no summit was too difficult to climb and subjected Steven to such convincing declarations of love that Atticus Finch would have been proud.

I would cycle past Steven’s house after school on my hand-me-down bike and helmet that made me look like a giant bowling ball, hoping to catch a glimpse of him so he could see what a cool-bike-riding girl I was. A love-addicted stalking habit that I repeated in other desperate contexts in later life. I can still picture Steven’s golden gravelled driveway and dark brown wooden gable roof, making the 1950s bungalow look more like a French chalet than the home of some poor boy living like he was in a school-girl-turned-stalker witness protection programme.

In reality, I just wanted to be his friend. I certainly wasn’t hitting these prepubescent boys up for Dick Peeks (as they were in the nineties, before the camera phone came along and evolved the traditional ‘flash’ into an unwelcomed phone-pinging right of passage). If I had been an adult though, I would most certainly have been arrested for harassment and had a restraining order slapped on me.

Or not, as is the current state of our Criminal Justice System.

However, no matter what I said, or how much confectionary I tried to bribe him with, Steven would not agree to be my boyfriend.

Then, one day at school, the unimaginable happened.

As I was hanging up my winter coat, which looked like I was off to a skiing party hosted by Timmy Mallet, Steven walked up to me and said, "I’ve been thinking. I will be your boyfriend."

That was it.

No further explanation was given, obviously no cementing of the deal with a kiss or even the need for confectionery. He just walked away, and left me walking around on cloud nine...until gym class the following afternoon.

I was staring at him lovingly (obsessively) across the hall when he arose and walked towards me. As he got closer, I gazed up at him expectantly. He towered over me, looking down at me with those big brown eyes, staring straight into mine, before saying, "You’re dumped. I’m going out with Amy now." On that note, he turned away, and I realised that I had just been a pawn in his game of making Amy jealous enough to agree to be his girlfriend, which, I think in all fairness, was karma biting my greedy little boy-hungry arse right in the same spot that I’d fallen in stinging nettles only the day before when I was trying to avoid Steven's Mum seeing me loitering at the end of their driveway.

Romance, it turns out, is dog-eat-dog.

My heartbreak was exacerbated the next morning when I arrived at school to find not only Steven and Amy holding hands at the gate but also Matthew, Steven’s cousin, standing there with them, waiting to tell me that no one was 'allowed' to be friends with me anymore. He reinforced this designated social ostracization by smashing a handful of horse-shit in my face.

I walked off without saying a word, trying to hold my head high until I made it to the girls’ toilets before bursting into tears.

Needless to say, Matthew was never my boyfriend, although tragically, if he had asked me, I would have said yes.