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“It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out,” she read. “Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.”
“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.” “Yes, you did,” she said with the slight smile she reserved for when she was pleased I had gotten there before she did. “It’s putting other people down so you could feel big.” “Yes, I suppose it is.” “Do you know who else does that?” There was a pause. “Donald Trump.” I burst out laughing.
Extinguished in a copy-and-pasted message in an email and a few calls. The day, that future, their story was finished.
It was at this time that I was reminded of the chain of support that keeps a sufferer afloat—the person at the core of a crisis needs the support of their family and best friends, while those people need support from their friends, partners, and family. Then even those people twice removed might need to talk to someone about it too. It takes a village to mend a broken heart.
“You know, that life isn’t happening elsewhere,” I said. “It doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.” “I know.” “Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.”
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 would give anything for a lifetime of those first three months on repeat and a guarantee that I would never have to go to an Ikea, a National Express coach station, or a relative’s home outside of the M25 with a sexual partner.
The lyrics of the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” are the most neatly worded explanation of the reality of life and summarize the initial optimism then crashing bathos that is the first five years of one’s twenties with elegant concision.
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 professional—can be incredibly useful and freeing.
Things will change more radically than you could ever imagine. Things will end up 300 miles north of your wildest predictions. Healthy people drop dead in supermarket queues. The future love of your life could be the man sitting next to you on the bus. Your secondary school math teacher and rugby coach might now go by the name of Susan. Everything will change. And it could happen any morning.
First and foremost, I don’t know what a relationship feels like for longer than a couple of years. Sometimes I hear married people refer to a “phase” of their relationship as being a period that lasted longer than my longest-ever relationship. Apparently, this is common.
In fact, I don’t know what it is to be a proper team with a partner; I’ve never really leaned on a romantic relationship for support or relaxed into its pace. But I’ve been in love and I’ve lost love, known what it’s like to leave and be left. I hope all the rest will follow one day.
I know that love happens under the splendor of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in the emergency room or in the queue for a passport or in a traffic jam. Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.
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.
Breakups get harder with every year you get older. When you’re young, you lose a boyfriend. As you get older, you lose a life together.
Unless someone dies, if a relationship goes wrong, you somehow had a part to play in it. How simultaneously freeing and overwhelming it is to know this. Men aren’t bad,
When you date from thirty onward, get ready to meet someone with 550 pounds of rucksacks absolutely brimming with history, complications, and demands.
The older you get, the more baggage you carry, the more honest, open, and vulnerable everyone allows themselves to be.
You can acknowledge your bad patterns of behavior in relationships. You can analyze how they developed. You can do the work to make sure you never behave like that again. But that’s all you will ever be able to control. 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
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People meet with pain they are not even aware they harbor. There is a reason why those with shared demons or who had similar childhoods or overlapping ancestry often end up together. I think everyone’s deepest emotional fingerprints reach out and touch each other on an unconscious level.
When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.
