Only a few weeks ago I was talking about how awesome it is to date a handful of people at once. I extolled the virtues of flitting from one tangle to another, and now here I am, about to tell you all that, well, I’m not dating anyone. I’m not fucking anyone. I haven’t even got a crush on anyone. That isn’t to say that previous post was a lie, it’s just that I wrote it a month or so ago, forgot to post it, and then while sifting through my drafts found it, and popped it up on the site.

As someone who writes about sex and relationships being utterly dateless is an odd thing to be. I reactivated my OkCupid profile to see if that would throw out any good chances, but the only messages I got said stuff like “R U DTF?” and “You have a surprisingly sexy top lip.” which hardly inspired me to reply. I rifled through my contacts to see if there was anyone who would want to have a tumble, but since having a purge of ‘people I might call while drunk’ it is was horribly bare. There was even a long night where I tried to think if I fancied anyone I followed on Twitter, but even then I came up with a blank.

I guess, if I wanted a one night stand, I could get one of those: I know how that whole rigmarole works. And despite what I said about my contacts book being a little bare there are always a few people I know would be up for a casual bit of sex on the side, but I don’t want it. I’m sure we’ve all had that feeling after coming out of a long term relationship when we suddenly think of all the mouths and genitals out there that are for the taking, and that wild abandon with which we finally re-enter the dating pool, well imagine that in reverse. I’ve been single for long enough to be a little bored of it. I still love the chase, that delicious time between locking eyes with someone attractive across a room, to the moment you’re alone and ripping each other’s clothes off, but after that it all gets a little rote.

Adding to this feeling is the fact that I’ve been rather ill lately, and while friends and family do what they can, I am loathe to call on them when what I really want is someone to feed me cake, rub my sore joints, and spoon with me. Fuck buddies are great, they scratch an itch you can’t reach yourself, but sometimes what you need is a bowl of soup, and they just can’t provide that without things moving to another level. I appreciate everything they do but if I’d wanted to step things up a bit, I would have done that already.

Now I’m faced with a dilemma? Do I want a relationship? Maybe? A relationship is work, effort, time, money; all things I am rather scarce of lately. A relationship is scary, there’s that feeling of putting myself out there in someone else’s hands and saying “Be careful with me!”. There are things I can and can’t do when I’m with someone else, compromises to be made. This is all sounding so mercenary, and of course I believe in the transformative power of love which makes all of this seem bathed in golden light and as fun as playing on the swings, but I don’t think I can hunt out a relationship in the aggressive way that my age and women’s magazines dictate I should when these kinds of feelings arise.

What I want, more than a relationship, is the ability to be ill, get through being ill, and being ill making me miserable, and being miserable making me want a partner to magically make things better, and get through these things alone, so that I can one day appreciate that piece of cake and two hours of spooning, in full.

Photo by Leslie Kirchhoff and screencap from Twin Peaks. 

Title taken from an exchange on Arrested Development:
GOB: My God, what is this feeling?
Michael: Well, you know the-the feeling that you’re… that you’re feeling is-is what many of us call ‘a feeling.’
GOB: But it’s not like envy, or even hungry.
Michael: Could it be love?
GOB: I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it’s the opposite. It’s… it’s like my heart is getting hard.

Some of you may have noticed I am prone to hyperbole. When I said that someone fingerbanged me for seven hours, it may have been only three. Equally I do not really think E. Jean Carroll is a lush. So when I said that I saw someone ‘wearing a checked 3 piece vintage suit, and covered in old school tattoos… listening to Kanye West’ I didn’t actually think we’d be suitable life partners. Sure, he was hot, ludicrously, jaw droppingly, hot, and it seemed there was an overlap in our interests (fine tailoring, good music), but I’d never spoken to him and probably never would.

Those of you who were not well-acquainted with my penchant for ridiculous exaggeration, and falling in love at the drop of a hat, became rather obsessed with the idea that I had a list. That’s right: a list. Because life really does echo Sex and The City, I mean art, and women do indeed carry around lists inside their minds which obsessively detail what their prospective partner should be like. This is why we’re always hounding you guys to get jobs, settle down, cut your hair and nagnagnagnagnagnag. Lol. Lol. Omg. Wtf. Lol. I love the colour pink! Men suck! Women are bitches! Let me file my nails while you talk to me. OMG. BBQ.

Ahem.

As you can guess I did not find it amusing that people assumed I was going out with a strict checklist of things I want in a man. That kind of thinking a) only exists in the one-dimensional characters that chick-lit writers create, b) is utterly pointless. Of course I have preferences but they’re hardly unreasonable. I would like to be attracted to a person I want to be in a committed relationship with. I tend to find that my crushes are either tall thin men with acres of shaggy dark hair or long limbed women with bee stung lips. Preferably I would like my partner and I to share a few common interests: at the moment I am obsessed with ASAP Rocky, Emile Zola, Humphrey Bogart movies, and okonomiyaki. I’d like to think there’s something there for everyone.

Dating someone ignorant, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, or homophobic,would, obviously, be a nightmare. No young Tories for me, thank-you. It would be nice if my partner was good with money, as I am abso-fucking-lutely awful with it, just as it’d be lovely if they liked cats and dogs, but one or the other is a bare minimum. Despising children is almost certainly a deal breaker, even though I am not sure I want any of my own. Lastly: funny. I just cannot go on another date with someone devoid of a sense of humour or, and I think this is worse, who genuinely enjoys watching Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Last of all I would really prefer to date someone who loves food as much as I do, because there are few things I like doing more than eating and making sex noises at the same time.

While these are enviable traits in anyone, I would like to point out that they do not always translate into qualities my squeezes have. My last serious relationship was with someone who liked bee-bop, was almost as bad with money as I am, felt ambivalent around animals, and uncomfortable around children. The one before that was the same height as me and liked cats and Huggy Bear more than he liked me. The thing is this is an ideal: a fantasy world where I look like Elizabeth Taylor, all my jokes are puke inducingly funny, and I rarely if ever have to fart. Even the shonkiest life coach will tell you to dream big because when you do you end up getting either what you want or something that is as good if not better. I’m not delusional, I know that some things are out of reach. And yeah I might not win the Nobel Prize for Literature or own the house from Ferris Bueller, but I can dream can’t I?

Painting by Amos Sewell for The Saturday Evening Post, January 1960 and photo of Paz de la Huerta by Mark Seliger.
Blog post title from this Franz Ferdinand song.  

The last time I got dumped I knew it was coming. My boyfriend and I had been dating for more than a year and we were thinking of moving in together. Life was, I thought, pretty good. In the past we had broken up twice: once for an afternoon and once for a week. Even though I have always told myself that on-off relationships are for people who don’t believe they deserve real affection and are happy with the emotional equivalent of table scraps, somehow I had found myself in one.

And so when my boyfriend told me he needed to come round now I became immediately suspicious. For the ten minutes it took him to cycle to my house I paced. What was he playing at? What was so urgent that it needed happen at 6.45 on a Friday evening? The pacing turned to running in circles and by the time the doorbell rang I was hyperventilating. My boyfriend, we’ll call him JingleJangle, was stood in the porch looking at his feet. “JingleJangle, ever since you told me you needed to come round now, now now, I’ve been worrying that you’re coming over to break up with me. So before you say anything, can you just tell me I’m being silly and then we can talk about whatever you wanted to talk about?” JingleJangle looked up from his feet: “We need to talk.”

We need to talk. Those words. I asked him very calmly what he thought we needed to talk about. “Us.” came the reply. And that was when I totally lost it.

The person being dumped is supposed to listen graciously, counter a few egrarious points possibly, then shake hands and give back the dumper’s personal items before cordially wishing them well in their future life. Crying is almost certainly allowed, but to be kept to a bare minimum. I did not respect any of these rules. For the next two hours I alternated between screaming things like “If you think anyone will put up with your bullshit and love you like I did you’re fucking delusional.” and crying while telling him that I ‘refused’ to love him anymore, as though he were desperately trying to make me. JingleJangle tried to explain to me exactly why he didn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore but I didn’t want to know. All he would tell me was some subjective viewpoint that would have precisely no impact on my future behaviour other than to become a grain of sand around which a pearl of worry would form. “I don’t respect anything you like.” was his first explanation to which I believe I replied something like “Go **** yourself and then take your ***** ****** and ****** ***** with all your ***** ************* while you ******* **** ****** in the ***** ***”.

The crying and screaming was taking it’s toll, so I began to mix it up with some ‘grabbing random things and throwing them at him’. And then he dropped the clanger “You talk too much.” At that point I just began to laugh. It had taken him almost a year of friendship, and another year and a half of dating to realise that? People who sit next to me on the bus know I talk too much! Bartenders know I talk too much! My dentist knows I talk too much! JingleJangle had only just worked that out? I got up, wiped the pools of mascara off my face, opened the door and told him to leave. After the front door had slammed shut, I had trashed my room, and screamed until my vocal chords hurt, I realised that if it took someone that long to realise I talked too much and we had nothing in common then it was probably for the best that we were breaking up, and I logged onto OkCupid to see what my new options would be.

Photos from Suicide Blonde‘s tumblr (by Sam Shaw) and Vanity Fair

What with all the hand-wringing, over-thinking, and typing propped up in bed which is giving me a really sore elbow, sometimes I just need to cut loose. While most of the time I can do that sanely and responsibly there is a two week period of each year where I just can’t. A couple of years ago it reached a peak at a Bathing Ape party where I drank 3 heroin strength cocktails in the stretch of 20 minutes, then tried to go pick up a tent in Brixton at 2am. Last year it coincided with the end of Fashion Week and a bucket of sangria and this year it’s just been all over the shop.

As my Mum pointed out to me when I went to New York for New Year’s “Watch how other people drink, it’s not like English people drink.” and damn was she right. I don’t remember much about the year I started drinking properly, except that all my memories taste of Malibu, and there is a photo of me face down on the ground passed out stuck into someone’s birthday card. From therein things only got better. I learned how to keep track of both the route home, and my shoes, and how to stop drinking before I puked.

One thing I’ve never learned though is how not to drunk dial. Just typing this is making my toes curl and my stomach flip because sweet Jesus I am a drunk dialler extraordinaire. Most of the time it’s my friends (“Where are you fuckface? Come ouuuuuuuuuuut!”) but more often than not it’s people I am or have been dating. My voicemails tend to fall into two categories: 1. me trying to be calm while slurring things like “Oh hey! Issss 9pm and I was wonnnnnndering wha you were doing? No biggie, bai!”; 2. irate nonsense such as “I will tear your head off and spit down down the hole in your neck!”. Either way it’s never good.

Now, with the advent of instant messaging on my Blackberry, things have gotten even trickier. Here is an message I woke  up and found last week:

10.21pm: Ok so I know we’re not talking cos you went all wussy and shit but I need to tell you I’m at The Groucho with [redacted] from Made in Chelsea!
10.30pm: No wait, I got his name wrong! I mean [redacted].
10.33pm: DAMNIT. I mean [redacted]. His head is a lot smaller in real life.
10.47pm: OHMYGOD they are doing DRUGS. They are calling it ‘naughty dust’. So funny.
10.55pm: STOP ACTING LIKE YOU DON’T CARE! I KNOW YOU CARE!
11.25pm: FINE! BE A DICK THEN! DON’T RESPOND.
11.58pm:  I’m not trying to fuck you. Just tell you something I know you’ll find interesting.
12.31am: God, you are such an asshole.

Smooth eh? Honestly that’s the shallow end of the pool. I almost certainly have left 3 voicemails of varying levels of drunkenness over the last few weeks, and can remember little if any about them other than I hope I will fall into a hole and die before someone replays/recounts them to me. The only things I have to comfort me are the fact that I only do this once a year, and that in time people will forget. Though the guy who’s head I threatened to rip off probably hasn’t forgotten. Sorry about that. Next time don’t cheat on me fuckface!

SHAMELESS PLUG KLAXON:
Tomorrow night I am hosting the amazing Letters You Never Sent event in London. Basically it’s a bunch of brilliant, hilarious, and excellent writers reading letters to their teenage selves. There’s loads more info at the link, and you should totally come down.
ANOTHER SHAMLESS PLUG KLAXON:
I got nominated for a Cosmo Blog Award! So if you love me, or at least can stomach me, please do click here and vote for me in the Sex and Relationships category. Thank-you to everyone who nominated me in the first place!

Second photo, of ‘Female narcotics suspects at the police station, 1951′, from The Nifty Fifties tumblr.

Maddalena: I love you Marcello. I want to be your wife. Be faithful. I want it all: to be your wife, and enjoy myself like a whore.
Marcello: Tonight, I don’t know why, I felt like I loved you, like I needed you.
Maddalena: Really?
Marcello: Really. I’m not sure if you’re being serious tonight, or playing games with me. But it doesn’t matter. I love you. I want to be with you always.
Maddalena: After a month you’d hate me.
Marcello: Why should I hate you?
Maddalena: Because no-one can have everything. You can’t have one thing or the other. You have to choose. And I can’t choose, it’s too late. I have never wanted to choose. I’m a whore, there’s no cure. I’ll always be a whore, and I don’t want to be anything else!

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s complicated, subtitled films in black and white. Give me The House Bunny over Les Bonnes Femmes any day. This is partly because I have bad eyesight and mostly because I’m an uncultured cretin. However I speak Italian fluently, so I can just about stomach watching Cinecittá’s 60s output, and last year I discovered La Dolce Vita. Just so you know, in no way am I qualified to even begin explaining the beauty, sadness, and the frustration that watching La Dolce Vita inspires. There are people with whole dissertations based around the dead fish washing up on shore, or Marcello’s stupidly beautiful face. All I want to talk about is the above conversation, because for the last few months it’s been on my mind.

It’s obvious that men love whores, I mean someone’s got to be fucking them or they wouldn’t be whores, but there is the idea that marriage or a long term relationship involves some kind of subduing: that you have to be a ‘good girl’. That is to say that men adore whores, but only when they stop being whores. Even though I tell myself someone who wants to change me is not worth my time, when I am in a relationship I tend to feel the urge to curb my drinking, stop shouting in clubs, or dancing on tables, and to make more nice dinners, because that’s what you do, right?

And even though nice dinners are well, uh, nice, I’ve decided that the next time I somehow fall into some kind of relationship I will not try and be the good girl that society tells me to be, and that I don’t have to make a choice. After all, why did they fall for me in the first place? Because underneath my chatty Cathy exterior lies the quivering heart of a good homemaker? Unlikely. No, they fell for me because I am a gobby tart, and if I’m honest with myself ‘I’ll always be a whore, and I don’t want to be anything else!’

“Did you miss me?” That question. That huge, stupid, stinking question. The one you throw out into the air and watch fall, flat on the ground every bloody time. I asked someone it the other day. And not with an Elizabeth Taylor cocked eyebrow but earnestly, really wanting to know the answer. And what can the answer be? It can’t be ‘no’ because then the whole game’s up. That’s it, go home, the end, the person you are asking didn’t miss you, isn’t thinking about you, doesn’t list you in their top twenty favourite things, what’s the fucking point? And yet if they say ‘yes’ there’s always the idea that they’re just saying it because it’s the right answer no matter what the truth is.

There are half a dozen or so stinking questions: “Do I look prettier with or without my glasses?” “Would you love me if I was horribly disfigured?” “Do you think we’ll always be in love like this?” and so on and so forth. They’re all vile, saccharine, disgusting things. The kind of questions you only ask when you’re knee deep in if not love, then hardcore full on so good it makes you feel sick crush. I am, unfortunately, prone to these kind of questions. Part of me wants the brutal honesty that I look better without my glasses on, but then I want to hear the sugar coated “You look beautiful all the time and in every single thing, even that ratty Garfield t-shirt covered in hot rock burn holes that you cut the neck off and ripped a hole in under the stained armpit.” and I want it to be meant even if it is in the most insipidly earnest way ever.

Can it ever be like that? Is love ever really that wholesome and all encompassing and Disney like? Is there anyone in the world who genuinely thinks that even if their lover lost their face, wore a misaligned dirty wig, and starting voting Tory that their love would remain in that sun dappled golden blossom place that is was in the first few months? Are they sane?

Obviously in an ideal world everyone is missed, horribly, terribly so, and they would look ravishing in and out of make-up, and the person they are with would love them with a devotion so unwavering and intense it would be almost frightening, but not quite, and actually rather charming when you thought about it. But then, ugh what a sugary world! If I’m honest with myself I live for that moment between asking the stinking question and that split second you wait, that hover in the air, heart in your throat when you think they might actually admit, that no, they didn’t miss you, and then the relief, the wash of chemicals through your body when the rote answer comes: “Of course I missed you!”

Images by Jon Whitcomb, and who the hell knows, but it’s from Grottu’s Tumblr. Title, obviously, from the most needy yet romantic song ever 21 Questions.

When I am in crush with someone, when I’m in that delicious getting to know you phase where everything’s sunny and happy and even tramping through the rain with a hangover feels magical and fresh and new, there is always a side of me that is pulling away from the exciting feeling. There’s a bit of me that thinks, hey there, chill out, don’t refresh their facebook page more than twice a day, just be cool. The urge to be easy breezy chilled out, take it or leave it, is overwhelming even in the face of ultimate crushdom. The thing is easy breezy does not come naturally to me. I want to be writing our names in pink Sharpie all over a folder somewhere with hearts and daisies for i’s. I want to be dreaming about lying in a cornfield and holding their hand. But I don’t.

There’s nothing worse than dreaming about starring in your own remake of Field of Dreams, and then being let down. Or as I expressed it so articulartly the other day:”I don’t want to think about something being something if it’s going to be nothing” And so I tend to supress how blissed out I feel about someone in the hopes that my brain will follow suit and that if/when I get let down I’ll be less pissed about it. But then there are times when I meet someone and it’s so Trevi Fountain perfect that it’s hard to turn off the dreamy soundtrack running through my head. It’s horrible! Unbearable! Painful! It’s worse than not being in crush! It’s like wanting to jump off a diving board but not knowing how deep the water is. Because it could be good, it could be fun, you could be about to do something super, mega, better than MDMA awesome, or you could be about to let yourself into a world of wailing and watching Dirty Dancing on repeat because it’s just so so meaningful.

While it seems like it’s probably a good idea to act all cool it can come off like I don’t care. And then if for some mental reason someone sticks around all of a sudden I stop acting cool and it’s like a landslide of emotion and clinging. Or is it? Is it just how normal people act? I used to be super needy. A few years ago a boyfriend who I spoke to multiple times every day didn’t contact me for 15 hours. I went batshit crazy and thought he was dead. I was so close to going all the way to town to stand outside his work waiting for him because I was convinced that he was absolutely positively definitely dead. Instead I just left a dozen or so increasingly bizarre and tearful voicemails and paced around my room thinking of elaborate ways he’d died. Nowadays I can’t imagine demanding that someone contact me multiple times a day or face my anxious wrath, because UGH I AM BUSY DAMNIT. Well, not really, but the illusion of being busy is a potent one that I like to keep up. Point is: don’t bug me all the time. I am over that shit.

Can we just go back to the Facebook stalking for a second? It’s not just me, is it? Even if the person who’s Facebook you’re refreshing isn’t particularly informative (who’s is?) it’s like a scab you just have to pick at and it hurts so fucking good. Oh look! They changed their picture! Oh look! Their friend just asked them out for drinks on Wednesday! Mental note: do not ask them out for drinks on Wednesday. Most of the time it’s just inane shit like that BUT I once figured out that someone was kind of doing the dirty on me by girls posting flirty stuff all over his wall all day and night. Well not ‘figured out’ it didn’t take a lot of figuring, let’s be honest, but it confirmed my worst fears.

Where did we start this blog post? Oh yeah: crushing out on is unbearable torture. Why do I do it to myself? Why put myself through umpteen daydream, don’t daydream, daydream, don’t daydream, weeks? Why do I fucking bother when 90% of this blog is full of DAMN WHY ARE YOU SO SHIT? posts? Because at the end of the shitstorm is a rainbow. That’s why kids. That’s why.

Photos from Vogue/Mikael Jansson (BEST PHOTOSHOOT EVER) and Marie Zucker
Post title is actually the name of a book Nancy Spungeon’s mother wrote about her, and in turn is a line taken from a poem that Sid Vicious wrote. SO DEEP RIGHT?

At the age of 17 I walked into my local Wetherspoons, sat down next to my friends, put my hands down on the table, took a deep breath, and said “I need to tell you all something.” They went silent. I took another deep breath, “I’m bi.” There was a pause. Then another pause. Then my friend Susan looked at her boyfriend who looked at back at me. “Is that news?” and then everyone laughed. I was so crestfallen it hurt. This was my big reveal! My lightbulb moment! And they’d ruined it by guessing my secret months before.

While at that time I had done no more than dream about kissing girls in a semi-innocent fashion, I made up for lost time fairly quickly. There was an incident during my first week at uni that could have been straight out of a Russ Meyer film: me and most of the hockey team in a ladies bathroom. It was just as fun as I thought it’d be because how couldn’t it be? Tits! Snogging! Nudity! Hands in places! It is a situation I have returned to mentally over and over again, with some slight stylistic improvements. It is also a situation a boyfriend of mine made me relive ove and over again until it became a Caligula style orgy situated in a bath house with roses and only swimwear models for company. Tsk. Men. This is why I don’t talk about it much, it becomes this whole raised eyebrow thing where everyone says “Oh really?” and you sound like Katy fucking Perry trying to get some attention from a douchebag propped up on a bar, and it’s not about who you are and what you like it’s about some dickface’s purile fantasies and I really need to end this sentence because it’s run on too long and I’m getting kind of angry.

So for a few years it was girls and boys and fun and hands and places. And then, I somehow got back into men only mode. That isn’t to say I stopped finding women attractive more that I just moved into a mode where I stopped finding moments where I was with a woman who wanted to make out with me and maybe even spend some time with me afterwards. To be honest I stopped finding those moments with anyone for a while, but anyway, that’s a whole nother kettle of fish.

These days I don’t know where I fall on the Kinsey scale. Could I imagine myself spending the rest of my life with a woman? Sure. With a guy? Sure. It’s like Patrick Wolf said, ‘In the same way I don’t know if my sixth album is going to be a death-metal record or children’s pop, I don’t know whether I’m destined to live my life with a horse, a woman or a man. It makes life easier.’ That said I’ve always hoped, personally, that I wouldn’t end up with the horse. It seems like it could get kind of awkward. Not to get all Ming the Merciless judgemental on you, but I cannot imagine looking at another attractive person of any sex and not thinking about how much I’d like to just rip their clothes off and fuck now, on this busstop bench.

It’s like the way I feel about food: I love food so much I cannot imagine excluding a single food group. Why would I deny myself the pure, beautiful pleasure of cheese? Or pie? Or crayfish dipped in breadcrumbs and slathered in sauce and eaten from my fingertips which are covered in grease? So why would I deny myself the pleasure of any kind of person? Boobs are so fucking good! I want to lie in a big disembodied pool of boobs and just feel my way out. The same applies with men’s bums. Clean bums only please. Maybe this just brands me as some kind of sex obsessed nympho but it’s not just about sex, it’s about that cheesy bullshit of connecting on a deeper level, and much as I claim to hate people, the ones I love I love so fucking hard that it’d be impossible for me to pick just one gender, much like I could never decide between Gruyere and Asiago.

Photos by Ryan McGinley and Playboy (Miss July 1958 Linné Nanette Ahlstrand)

In the summer of 2005 I moved to Mexico and taught a bunch of bratty rich kids English in a school run by a rich hippie. In the absence of a social life I got super into Livejournal and in particular a community called j__rn_l which showed scans of people’s diaries. In awe of their mad collaging skills and also bored as fuck I really went to town on my diary. It barely shuts and is full of magazine pictures with song lyrics written on, nonsensical fragments of ideas, and moaning about how soalone I am. It is also a testament to my crush on someone called Chris.

Chris isn’t alone in that diary, but he’s notable because this year we dated. Normally I’m nice on here, well, nice compared to how I talk about people in real life. However for once I just can’t be arsed. This whole stupid fucking situation is partly my fault, because I should have known better, but mostly, it’s his fault.

My 2006 diary starts off talking about how he’s sent me a sappy email or some shit, and how I’m on cloud nine. Even though I’m thousands of miles away I’m impressed someone cares enough to bother thinking about me. He refers to me as ‘the bestest’. The diary entry is written in January: the last time I had sex was April, so you can see why this shit seemed so real to me. As the diary goes on I develop a crush on him that is truly phenomenal. There is even a page where I’ve dotted all the i’s with hearts. Cringe. Trawling through old emails we are as revolting as two puppies who’ve learned to work a keyboard. He tells me cutesy shit, I lap it up, repeat ad infinitum.

And then, and I don’t know what this is apropos of, because I’m still in Mexico at this point, I write the following entry:

I didn’t hold out on him. I called him up when I got back a few months later and we arranged to go on a date. I went to the allotted meeting place, and he didn’t show up. He didn’t answer his phone, he just disappeared. This farce was repeated at least twice. Then this year, I sent him another email. I guess I was blinded by the memory of his good looking-ness. After pinging emails back and forth I call him in the middle of the night and turn up at his house drunk, in an enormous prom dress and we sleep together. I’m nothing if not classy.

For a brief moment I think “Wow, this is awesome!”. We spend a day wandering around Hampstead and eating cake. It is all so nice and so fun I feel bad for ever doubting him. I tell all my friends that he’s kind of awesome and super cute. One of those things is true. And then after 3 weeks he just disappears. My therapist told me to tell him I was pissed off, so I did. I sent him an email and he replied. He promised me the moon on a stick and I fell for it.

Of course he didn’t make things up to me. He disappeared again, and stopped answering my calls, and my emails. At first I was pissed off, then I was annoyed at myself, and now, finding my old diary I’m just amused I have such a short memory. I know I’ve quoted Don Draper before but he is so right ‘People tell you who they are, but we ignore it – because we want them to be who we want them to be’.

What could I have done with those 3 weeks? Well I would have not gone to see Green Lantern for one, or watched Made in Chelsea, I’d probably have got pissed more, and danced around more, and maybe even bothered to get some curtains made for my room. I’ve been trying to think of some witty way of saying he was crap at sex, but I can’t so I’ll just put it out there like it is.

Ugh all those hours I just can’t get back. All that time on the bus to Finny P. It’s ironic that at the same time I was writing about Chris in my 2006 diary, I was also obsessed with a phrase, the mooted title for Bret Easton Ellis’ abortive autobiography: ‘Where I Have Been I Would Not Go Back’. If only I’d followed that advice…

Photo by Anja Mulder

Apparently somewhere in the world there are men who like their women to be virgins. Though I’ve never met any of these men myself, I can in a way see their reasoning. When you date someone they bring their whole world with them, a cavalcade of one night stands, drunken fumbles, and obsessive crushes, not to mention the dreaded ex. Maybe you don’t mind and you’re better at living in the moment than I, but I often lie alone at night next to the poor buggers I go out with, thinking about all the people who’ve come before me and everyone who will probably come after me.

Is it better to have been proceeded by ugly or plain people? Bores with lank hair and vacant gazes? Or should you be at the end of a line of sculptural beauties? Are either of these things good? Never has the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’ been more appropriate. Surely with the former it means that you too are a dullard, and with the latter that you’re doomed to spend the rest of your life trying to compete? Much like no-one could ever live up to the glory of Elizabeth Taylor for Richard Burton, how can I ever live up to the memory of his part-time acrobat, full time model slash philanthropist girlfriend? HOW?

The utter delicious irony of this obsession with everyone else’s dating history is that I despise mine being raked over. Sure I’m happy to talk about it, even with people I’m seeing, but if they start to compare and judge I go batshit crazy. Recently a man said to me “What’s the matter? Did your ex have a small cock?” Words can’t even begin to explain how badly that went down. However even when people are less freaking shitty (seriously mate: go fuck yourself next time yeah?) I can’t handle my dating past being subject to scrutiny. It pains me to admit this but I frequently give my partners a fairly edited picture of my past. One night stands turn into flings, flings turn into relationships, and somehow relationships get downgraded into ‘this guy I was seeing for a bit, you know’. Lovebites and nail marks get explained away with tales of falling from bikes and mishaps with the cat.

Having been burned before I just don’t want to lay it all out on the line because there is a strong chance that once someone finds out about my gung-ho attitude to dating they will freak out and promptly dump me, or worse just stop returning my calls. Then again, I feel shitty about lying. Of course I should just be totally honest. That’s a given. And yeah, yeah, I know that anyone who’s stupid enough to judge me by some outdated moral code isn’t worth my time but it seems that 90% of people operate on dating rules that were out of fashion in the fucking 50s. Then again this just backs up my theory that most people aren’t worth my fucking time.

The double standard I ask people to accept is ludicrous: you must feel comfortable with the roving band of people in my past, and I must never ever hear about anyone you did anything more than hold hands with. Strangely I don’t think of myself as jealous. I could never be the girl who stops her boyfriend from speaking to someone, or stands possessively close in bars shooting lasers out of her eyes at any woman in a 2m radius. Thinking of myself as ‘not the jealous type’ I now realise is freaking ludicrous.

I think, in an ideal world, I would like to go out with someone who had had a varied, chequered, and filthy, dating history, and in a strange twist of fate, all the people they’d tangled with had mysteriously died. That would be bloody perfect.