“the girl next door” is a quintessential romantic imagining for the ordinary boy. but where does it derive from? sure, from literature, from American culture and then forwards into pop culture over the decades. time has warped it, giving it a more sexualised role these days. it’s embedded into our culture now, but how did it start? the answer: fences. or lack thereof.

in my written piece for ABC Pool, the culture tourist, i spoke of my simultaneous experiences of alienation and integration within an entirely new ‘tribe’ – America. one of the little things that i would never have thought of until i spent time living in the States was the layout of it’s suburbia.

this is elmwood avenue, an artsy street in buffalo, new york. i don’t know why i didn’t expect the houses to be so different to the ones i’m used to in australia considering our completely different climate and urban development, but i was surprised. brightly painted, wood panelling, sharply pointed roofs for snow to slide off easily – and no fences between houses.

the idea of ‘the girl next door’ that never quite sat right with me – i don’t know who lives next door to me, and i’ve lived in the same house all my life. suddenly, it made a lot more sense, when i witnessed firsthand the country from which the fairytale emerged. how much easier would it have been to converse with your neighbours, run over and borrow a cup of sugar, when there are no fences to impede your path? no physical lines drawn between houses, no unspoken “this is mine and that’s yours” beaten subliminally into you every time you glance at your neighbour’s property?

fences are not afterthoughts, they are not council regulations and they’re not just another part of your property. we box ourselves into our individual worlds, our own tribes, unaware that they are social dividers, raising what-ifs and influencing the formation of our relationships and the very course of our lives.

following on from this idea, it’s interesting how the concept of the white picket fence and the perfect suburban life it represents came to be then – considering it’s enveloped in the wholesome ideal that the ‘girl next door’ originates from also. but it makes a strange kind of sense too; where the fences would line the front of houses but not separate them, creating a cocoon of bliss where a young boy and a young girl could meet and influence society and tradition.

in America, anyway.