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What is that thing they say? Poetry is the most reviled and redundant art form, everyone rolls their eyes at it and takes the piss out of it. But the second that something shit happens in our lives, it’s the first recourse we have.
“I’d like to be single,” Jane replies. “I think most women would. It’s men who don’t know how to do it.”
“Reverse break-up schedules,” he explains. “When men and women break up, men hate everything about their ex-girlfriend for three months, and then they miss her, and then they think they love her, and that’s when they text her. Meanwhile, she has spent three months loving him and then she hates his guts forever,” he says, leaning in for emphasis, his breath hot and tangy with gin. “We were never meant to be with each other. Men and women are not compatible.”
Could it be that the boat and Tash came into my life at the exact same time and I got my feelings all muddled? Did I confuse my enthusiasm for a potential new girlfriend with my enthusiasm for living on a canal boat? Did I conflate the two? Did I think that my new life on a boat went hand-in-hand with a new relationship with an outrageously attractive woman who thought I was hilarious?
I wish I’d known this Inception hack for heartbreak before now. You’ve just got to eat some really mouldy cheese really late at night and you get to have your dream reunion with your
“If you can’t look at the sea that’s YOUR FAULT, ANDY,” she shouts. Passers-by look at her, surprised to see someone so well-put-together bellowing something so demented in the middle of the day. “Not mine. YOURS. YOU need to go fix your relationship with the sea, NOT ME.” She turns and walks away. “YOU’VE RUINED THE SEA,” I shout before I turn and walk the other way.
I wander off in search of a department that interests me and resort to going up and down the escalators. I don’t like feeling like this—a heel-dragging ogre who doesn’t understand the intricacies of femininity; the sort of guy who makes the women in his life look at sales assistants for camaraderie, and roll their eyes and say “Men!” A bloke who could never understand why his girlfriend needed to get her eyelashes tinted or own eight pairs of identical jeans or sleep on a silk pillowcase. Why was she always so hellbent on acquiring more volume at the roots of her hair via video tutorials, when
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But I’m not a member of that club any more. No one is. It’s been disbanded, dissolved, the domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all its stuff? Where do I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now I’m no longer in a tribe of two? And if I start a new sub-genre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I loved from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find this so hard?
“Do you want to have children?” “Yeah, I’d love to. I can’t wait to have kids.” “Well, with all due respect, I think that is not a wise decision,” he says with a knowing laugh. “What with the world going the way it is.” “What exactly do you mean?” I ask. “I’ll leave that with you,” he says, holding his palm up to signify that he has reached the end of this conversation.
As I chug a black coffee, orange juice and Diet Coke in succession
that's crazy
But that’s not the inciting incident. Oh no. That happens when we pull apart and a man walks towards us with two coffees. He hands one to Jen and calls her “sweetie” and says sorry for the wait, the queue was crazy. I stare at Jen and say nothing and she says, “This is Seb,” like that. Nothing else. “This is Seb.”
AH
His dad died of prostate cancer, which is sad and I’m sorry that it happened to him, but it doesn’t redeem him in my mind in any
“Jackson’s struggling with this idea of being replaced, I think,” he says in a hushed tone. “No shit,” I reply. I have never felt a stronger affinity with my godson.
You think that because you have a New York Times subscription and occasionally remember to drink kombucha that you’re above mammalian impulses? You’re not above mammalian impulses. It’s DISGUSTING. But it’s who we are. Why do you think ‘Mr. Brightside’ is the anthem of our generation for men?” “The guitar riff.” “
“It’s true. I wish I was thirty-five.” “Well, I wish I was twenty-three,” I say.
“That’s how I feel, I think. Like, I’d like to be more progressive and detach monogamy from love. But I can’t. I find mutual possession hot. I want someone to be mine and I hope they’d want me to be theirs.”
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.
“One of the lesser-reported tragedies of the London property crisis is that it is now possible for two people dating to live twenty miles apart from each other.”
I am not sure what this feeling is. It’s so different to any other feeling I’ve had when I first start seeing someone. I feel close to her, but distant from her. I feel excited but unsatisfied, caring but detached, invested and indifferent. It’s like we’ve taken all the activities of coupledom and put them in a framework of two strangers who owe each other nothing; who have no past or future. It’s confusing. Not confusing enough to stop, obviously, but it is confusing.
Gen Z saw how we used social media, as the first young people who used it, which was way too earnestly and with too much personal sharing, and they found it extremely cringe—” “Well, I find THEM cringe,” Avi bellows. “But of course they still want attention because they’re young and stupid like we were, but they do it in this style where they give less of themselves. They’re showing off and trying to be funny and asking everyone to fancy them, but in this sort of enigmatic way.”
“How does she feel about you?” Jane persists. “She’s not interested in anything other than casual sex. She doesn’t want anything from me,” I say. “That’s something twenty-three-year-old girls say to older men so they don’t get hurt,” she says.
Hey mate, saw what’s happening online. Hope you’re ok. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but there is no scenario in which this text is not one of the worst texts you can wake up to other than being informed of a death.
Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.
“I guess I’m saying that I just need to be in something casual. I can’t be in a relationship right now, I’m still all messed up from my break-up.”
I'm getting war flashbacks
“Girl?” she says, tracing her finger around the rim of the wine glass. “Why do you say ‘girl’? How old was she?” “Twenty-three,” I answer. She scoffs and knocks back the last of her sangria. “Men are so predictable,” she says. “Even the good ones.”
Never has a woman been so interested in topless photos of me, and not only is she a lesbian, I’m paying her.
“Getting dumped is never really about getting dumped.” “What is it about, then?” I ask. “It’s about every rejection you’ve ever experienced in your entire life. It’s about the kids at school who called you names. And the parent who never came back. And the girls who wouldn’t dance with you at the disco. And the school girlfriend who wanted to be single when she went to uni. And any criticism at work. When someone says they don’t want to be with you, you feel the pain of every single one of those times in life where you felt like you weren’t good enough. You live through all of it 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.”
Soon enough, some girl is going to be crazy about you for some undefinable reason and you’re not going to be interested in her for some undefinable reason. It’s all so random and unfair—the people we want to be with don’t want to be with us and the people who want to be with us are not the people we want to be with.
I love how quickly you read books and how absorbed you get in a good story. I love watching you lie on the sofa reading one from cover-to-cover. It’s like I’m in the room with you but you’re in a whole other galaxy.
He thinks being ambitious means wanting to get accolades and praise for something, rather than wanting to get better at something.
Talks about women’s issues in a chin-strokey, armchair-academic way which he thinks makes him a feminist ally but actually is quite tone deaf.
It was like my career was my bad boyfriend—it sensed every time I was going to leave it and, at that exact moment, would promise me all sorts of things to make me stay.
People didn’t really notice that I was always single because I had so many other things going on and they always wanted to hear about them.
“I just don’t understand it,” my mum would say, every time she said goodbye to me. “You’re such a fabulous girl—so clever, so attractive. I don’t understand why they’re not lining up.”
“I’m not ready for something serious and I don’t think I will be for a while,” said a long-time single, never-married and childless man, aged forty-one, without a hint of doubt.
My godchildren multiplied. My social life was scheduled by the nap times and feeding schedules of babies. I held newborns on L-shaped sofas and pushed prams in the park and entertained toddlers in the pub while trying to have a conversation with their exhausted parents about anything other than babies and children. I waited for the moment when I would realize this was something I wanted and it never arrived. Andy kept telling me that no one is ever ready to have a baby and that it will always feel terrifying. The more he said this, the more resentful I became. The risk felt so much higher for
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“You have a home that is yours,” she said. “And your own money. Don’t you?” “I have a bit of money, yes.” “And you have your education. And you have your career.” I nodded. “Then you have everything,” she said.
She suggested he devise a brand-new show, one with a theme and a story rather than just jokes, and that he take it to Edinburgh and tour it.
And it was there, in front of the Venus de Milo, that I realized: I don’t think I’m cut out to support a male artist. And I’m certainly not cut out to have a family with one. That, irrespective of where Andy’s career might go, I would spend my life with a man who was so in need of affirmation from strangers that he stood on stage every night, even when he wasn’t being paid, even when he was needed at home, because he wanted them to find him funny. Because he wanted them to love him. There was nothing wrong with Andy and there was nothing wrong with the choices he’d made. He could make a woman
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It was torture because he was my best friend and I told him everything. But I couldn’t tell him this, because the minute I said it out loud I knew we couldn’t come back from it. I don’t know if we’re right for each other, I don’t want your children, I don’t want anyone’s children, I don’t know if I want to be someone’s girlfriend. That would be it. The End.
“And I don’t say this as his mum, I say it as a woman who’s got twenty-six years on you. Everything you want to do in your life, you can do without a man, Jen.”
“But do I ever think about what my life would have been like had I been brave enough to not become a mother? Had I been brave enough to even imagine what that life could have been like?” “Do you?” I asked, checking she was still on the line. “I think about it all the time,” she said.
At the end of the reading, she said that perhaps the best way to get in touch with my ex was not via the spirits of his grandparents but by picking up the phone. When a psychic is giving you this advice, you know you’ve really lost
“Jen,” she said, taking my hand in both of hers. “You’ve always been alone, my darling. That’s one of the things that makes you so unique. You were alone when I met you, you’re alone in a crowd of people, you were alone when you were with Andy.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, don’t have a kid or get married because you’re worried about being alone,” she said, rubbing my back. I sat upright in my chair and she held me by my shoulders. “Be alone, Jen. You know how to be alone without being lonely. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how much I wish I could do that? It’s a wonderful thing you’ve got going on there.”
“And if it’s not, apparently the world’s going to end before anyone gets to see it anyway,” she says, pointing at the front page of her copy of the Evening Standard that says, with the comic certainty of a disaster movie: Killer Virus Now “Spreading Fast.” We laugh and she squeezes my hand.
I’ve been scattering the bones of us and who we were together. Reading all our old messages, throwing bottles of discounted Armani She into a canal, trying to re-create our memories, standing on stage and talking to you. It’s a weird kind of mourning and a weird kind of celebration, to examine the skeleton of something that was once so magnificent, before you scatter all the fragments of it out into the world to say goodbye.”
“Why waste good material?” he says.
