Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

“Like, did I ever fantasize about being single? Sure I did! But the point is, relationships are challenging and boring and annoying, and that’s unavoidable. You have to work through it, you can’t just opt out of the whole thing.”

There are so many hidden miniature break-ups within a big break-up. There are so many ahead of me that I haven’t even thought of yet.

“And it’s easy to look back and think that those sorts of experiences were what being single was. But for every night like that, there were thirty nights where you and I wandered around bars trying to find people who might like the look of us, and found no one, and ended up on a two-hour night bus home being moody with each other.”

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

“You are locked in a prison of your own nostalgia. You need to let go of the past.”

Here’s what I’m getting at: I don’t know if I really want to move on, because the further away I get from the pain, the further away I get from her.

The fact of our respective attraction to other people is separate to the fact of our attraction to each other.

Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.

I can’t remember what we used to talk about before we started the complaining portion of life.

“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.”

Generally the experience of being single at thirty-five will feel different to any other time you’ve been single and that’s no bad thing.

I once heard a theory about the first relationship that occurs after a big relationship ends. It’s called the 90/10 rule. The theory goes: whatever the crucial 10 per cent is that was missing from your partner who was otherwise totally right for you is the thing you look for in the following person. That missing 10 per cent becomes such a fixation that, when you do find someone who has it, you ignore the fact they don’t have the other 90 per cent that the previous partner had.