Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

I’m not her family any more, we are no longer playing for the same team. I am just a man from the Midlands who she would probably never be friends with, being rude about her sister.

I had to work hard to keep up and match her confidence. I cringed as I watched drunken thoughts tumble out of my mouth like Scrabble tiles and I tried to piece them together into clever observations.

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Men never make the first move any more. What’s happened to them?”

Sobbing is a sedative. I wake up after a ten-hour dreamless sleep and it takes me a few seconds less than yesterday morning to adjust to my new reality. I’m in my mum’s house, it’s not Christmas, Jen’s broken up with me, conveniently in the exact month of the break-clause in our rental contract.

It’s strange to think that everything we know about romantic love and sex we first learnt from each other, and yet now we don’t speak.

“Because people don’t break up with people who they’ve had absolutely no prior problems with just so they can be single. No one likes being single that much.” “I’d like to be single,” Jane replies. “I think most women would. It’s men who don’t know how to do it.”

“And the truth is, I was only ever going out to find someone to stay in with.”

I want to lash out with my pain to force them into acknowledging what I’m going through. I want to take my mangled break-up in my mouth and drop it in front of them like a cat bringing in a bloodied mouse from the garden.

I miss going to bed knowing other people are also asleep in the house.

As I eat a cold hard-boiled egg wrapped in smoked salmon on the top deck of the bus I realize that, since the day we broke up, I have been counting down to Jen’s birthday. Hidden somewhere inside me, there was the belief that Jen’s birthday would mark the beginning of our relationship again. That it was going to open up our channels of communication and that she would be so overwhelmed by the memories of past birthdays spent together, there would be no other option but to reunite.

“I’m not entirely sure, I think it’s just like a generalized surrealism that is a part of her online persona.”

“If you ever want to find a woman her age who’s desperate for a boyfriend, find the girl on Twitter saying things like ‘kill all straight men.’ ”

She was the one with all the power. Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.

“I don’t know how to get over it, Mum,” I say. “At this point I’m so tired of myself. I don’t know how to let go of her.” “You don’t let go once. That’s your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you’ll hear a song or you’ll walk past somewhere you once went together—something will come to the surface that you’d totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.”

I say goodbye. And it feels okay. I say all my goodbyes, ready to no doubt meet her again tomorrow to say goodbye all over again.

“Life is a bit more difficult for women. More difficult than it is for us, I mean. And you don’t need to ask them to explain why or understand it all. You just need to be nice to them.” He looks up at me nervously. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I’m sorry that I loved you so much more than I liked myself, that must have been a lot to carry.

Not only would he never go to therapy, he looks down on it and sees it as self-indulgent, so he never appreciated the work I try to do on myself or our relationship.

I used to love that he wanted to make everyone laugh because I thought it was a sign of his generosity. At some point I saw it for what it really was—neediness. I realized he saw every social interaction as a miniature gig and therefore an opportunity for acceptance or rejection. His mood was so dependent on how he felt these conversational performances went and I hated being wise to it.

Being unsatisfied was a part of the relationship experience, and the relationship experience was exactly what I wanted.

I didn’t feel like we were teammates any more.

“As much as I loved and cared for Graham, I just thought, I’m gonna end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges, you know what I mean? It’s like, I better not. And it broke my heart.”

And I realized he’d chosen not to be thoughtful but to be funny instead. To no one but himself.

if I feel single, wouldn’t it be easier to be single? And then I wouldn’t have to worry about disappointing someone or someone disappointing me? When I’m single, I know where I am. I am alone when I’m ill, but I’m not abandoned. I get a promotion and I celebrate with friends, rather than worrying that my good news might make my partner feel insecure.

Hadn’t I just turned twenty-one? Hadn’t I just left university? Hadn’t my life only just begun? I couldn’t fathom how I had got here so quickly and how I could be expected to make such enormous decisions while I still felt so young. How had this happened?

How his emotions were always more important than mine—that when we had arguments, his feelings were discussed as facts and mine were interrogated as fabrications. “Jen,” she said matter-of-factly, “do you even want a boyfriend?”

By the time I broke up with Andy, I’d been planning it for months without even realizing it. My subconscious had put him on a probation period, collecting reasons to end his contract without my knowledge. Incidents that were insignificant to him were weighty to me.

I’d reached the same dead end.