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I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years.
But I found the reality of boys to be slightly disappointing. Not as funny as the girls I had met there, not nearly as interesting or kind. And, for some reason, I could never quite relax around any of them.
Perhaps it was because this was the only way I had learned to get to know someone, with a distance in between us, with enough space for me to curate and filter the best version of myself possible—all the good jokes, all the best sentences, all the songs I knew he’d be impressed by, normally sent to me by Lauren.
scan the room for boys with working limbs and a detectable pulse. I am, at this point, eighteen, six months into my sexually active life and at a uniquely heightened stage of sexuality; an ephemeral period where sex was my biggest adventure and discovery;
“We were just trying to collect stories for each other,” she tells me now, whenever I question how we could all have had such an infantile appetite for recklessness and such little self-awareness. “That’s what we traded in. It wasn’t to show off to anyone else but each other.”
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
woke up at three p.m. with a terrible headache and a terrible sense that the punchline to the joke wasn’t as funny as I thought it had been the night before.
My mum often told me this was a misguided act of feminism; that emulating the most loutish behavior of men was not a mark of equality
It was the first time I had experienced heartbreak and I’d never thought the overwhelming feeling would be such acute confusion; as if I had no reason to trust anyone ever again. I didn’t have an exact idea of what had happened or why. All I knew was that I hadn’t been good enough.
People told me how great I looked, over and over and over again. Every compliment fed me like lunch.
I carried on because, at every turn, society was rewarding me for my self-inflicted torture. I received compliments, I received propositions, I felt more accepted by people I didn’t know, nearly all clothes looked great on me.
felt like I had finally earned the right to be taken seriously as a woman; that everything before that had been redundant. That I had been foolish to think I had ever been worthy of affection. I had equated love with thinness and, to my horror, reinforcement of this belief was everywhere.
You can restore your physical being to health; you can develop a rational, balanced, caring attitude to weight as well as good daily habits. But you can’t forget how many calories are in a boiled egg or how many steps burn how many calories. You can’t forget what exact weight you were every week of every month that made up that time. You can try as hard as you can to block it out, but sometimes, on very difficult days, it feels like you’ll never be as euphoric as that ten-year-old licking lurid jam off her fingertips, not ever again.
I only make sense with her there to act as my foil and vice versa. Without the love of Farly, I am just a heap of frayed and half-finished thoughts; of blood and muscle and skin and bone and unachievable dreams and a stack of shit teenage poetry under my bed. My mess only takes a proper shape with that familiar and favorite piece of my life standing next to me.
Another thing that no one tells you about drinking as you get older is that it isn’t the hangovers that become crippling, but rather the acute paranoia and dread in the sober hours of the following day that became a common feature of my midtwenties.
Growing up engenders self-awareness. And self-awareness kills a self-titled party girl stone-cold dead.
All those hours spent lying in sweat and panic in your bed at five a.m., your heart beating as you stare at the ceiling, desperately willing yourself to sleep. All the hours lost in the cul-de-sac of your head torturing yourself with all the stupid things you said and did, hating yourself for the following few days.
“Nothing will change.” It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.
I promised. But little did I know how much work it takes to sustain that kind of intimacy with a friend as you get older—it doesn’t just stick around coincidentally.
You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy “when I grow up” and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.
found it impossible to articulate how I was feeling to anyone; I spent huge swaths of time on my own. There was a hum in my body of disinterest, ennui, and anxiety, as low and simultaneously disruptive as a washing machine on a spin that won’t turn off.
I sat on the outside, looking in. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to find a sense of security in the person you went to bed with—a notion that was so foreign to me.
I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.
I told him about the one time I had been in love; the intimacy that I couldn’t bear, the dependence I feared. I told him how my friends, one by one, had fallen in love and left me behind. I told him how my anxiety had crept up on me in catatonic flare-ups since I was a child;
I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it.
I told her that I gave almost all of my energy away to other people when no one had asked it of me. I described the control I thought this gave me over what other people thought of me, and yet it left me feeling more and more like a fraud.
“I don’t know. To feel close to people? To make conversation? Maybe to feel powerful,” I said. “That’s the only reason people gossip. I obviously did it to feel powerful.”
“What are you trying to control?” “Everything,” I said, realizing it as I said it out loud. “I’m trying to have a hand in everyone’s opinion of me. How everyone behaves toward me. I’m trying to stop bad things happening. Death, disaster, disappointment. I’m trying to control it all.”
“The danger of a person like you doing therapy is that you seem clever,” he said. “You will get the theory of it all very easily. You’ll be able to be academic about yourself in conversation. But, you know, all the talky-talky stuff will only take you so far. You need to really feel it in your core, that change. It can’t just be stuff you discuss with a therapist. You need to feel it in your body—” his voice slowed—“you need to feel it in the backs of your knees, in your womb, in your toes, in your fingertips.”
He told me that sometimes a breakup can be nothing but a relief for both parties; like an air-conditioning unit has finally been turned off, the low, relentless hum of which you hadn’t realized was there until everything is silent.
I was filled with a sour feeling of violent rejection. I felt it from my stomach to my throat: self-disgust, self-loathing, self-pity, squared.
Boys fascinated me and frightened me in equal measure; I didn’t understand them and neither did I want to. Their function was for gratification, whereas female friends provided everything else that mattered. It was a way of keeping boys at arm’s length.
“Projecting”: this is one of those therapy words you learn along the way. It means you accuse someone else of doing or being exactly what you fear you are as a way of deflecting responsibility; it’s “watch-the-birdie” blaming. I did it a lot when it came to Farly’s relationship choices. I had always thought of my perpetual resistance to commitment as an act of liberation; I hadn’t ever realized it was the thing that made me feel trapped.
learned how to enjoy the conversation of a man next to me at dinner regardless of his marital status; to resist fighting for the attention of the only single man at the table by saying something inappropriate in a vaguely threatening tone of Sid James bawdiness.
Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers.
You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down. How your parents hugged you, that thing your first boyfriend once said about your thighs—these are all bricks that have been laid from the soles of your feet up. Your eccentricities, foibles, and fuckups are a butterfly effect of things you saw on telly, things teachers said to you, and the way people have looked at you since the first moment you opened your eyes. Being a detective for your past—tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a
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If you feel exhausted by people, it’s because you’re willingly playing the martyr to make them like you. It’s your problem, not theirs.
If you’re feeling wildly overwhelmed with everything, try this: clean your room, answer all your unanswered emails, listen to a podcast, have a bath, go to bed before eleven.
Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I have lived with at one point or another.
frayed old navy sweater she calls Nigh Nigh that she likes to sleep with.
Any decent man would take a woman at peace with herself over a woman who performs tricks to impress him. You should never have to work to hold a man’s attention. If a man needs to be “kept interested” in you, he’s got problems that are not your business to manage.
More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself. If you can’t treat yourself with kindness, care, and patience, chances are someone else won’t either.
However thin or fat you are is no indicator of the love you deserve or will receive.
There is no feeling as awful as breaking up with someone. Being dumped is a violently intense pain that can, at some point, be converted into a new energy. The guilt and sadness of breaking up with someone goes nowhere but inside you and, if you let it, will do circuits of your mind for eternity. I’m with Auden on this one: “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.”
There was no specific requirement for being a twenty-something—it’s what I found so disorientating about the experience. I never knew where I was meant to be or what I was meant to be doing—it was just as normal to be a twenty-seven-year-old with a husband and a labradoodle called Brie as it was to be one who lived with strangers from Gumtree in a basement flat with no living room.
Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above
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You cannot predict how another person is going to behave in a relationship. You can risk-assess, you can be cautious, you can make sensible decisions about who you choose to trust and invite into your life and heart. But you can’t manage the unruly variables of another living, breathing human. To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling—no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love.
Be aware that abstinence could feel so peaceful, the thought of returning to the land of the loving may start to feel impossible. It could leave you terrified of ruining that by inviting someone into it.
