How many of us out there are having great sex with people we're ashamed to introduce to our friends?
Season 1, Episode 6
It’s a familiar story. Kind, brilliant, uncomplaining woman. Shit boyfriend.
I’ve read many versions of this story. And written some too. Stories about the boyfriend who referred to me as the bird with eczema in a blog post after I declined a threesome with him and his friend. Or the boyfriend who strategically dotted girls underwear around his bedroom before I came over. I even wrote an entire article comparing ex-boyfriends to a catastrophic weed that destroys peoples lives and homes.
I’m quite good at writing about useless men whilst painting myself in a very lovely, very blameless light. But on the odd occasion, I’ve been the shit one too.
Before we get into that, let me introduce Mike Singer. A friend of Carrie’s who’s close enough with her to replace Miranda’s absence at the anticlimactic bus stop party in episode six—but whom we never see or speak of again after the credits run.
Mike’s seeing this woman but doesn’t want to introduce her to any of his friends. Carrie tells us that this secret girlfriend of Mike’s is the only woman he’d ever met who he felt he could just be with.
“So what's the problem?” Carrie asks him.
“She's not beautiful,” he replies.
Oh Mike. I so want to discuss your shortfalls but I promised I wouldn’t write about useless men today. Carrie goes on monologuing, I couldn’t decide whether Mike was being shallow or honest, but the question nagged me for days. How many of us out there are having great sex with people we're ashamed to introduce to our friends?
I was dating this guy once. He was OK. Really good at DIY. He had a complicated relationship with his family and mine had just moved to another country, so we quite quickly enmeshed. He told me he loved me two weeks into dating—and I forced myself to say it back. I had to laugh years later, in another relationship with a bloke who struggled to say it over the course of two years. “Has he told you yet?” My mum would ask. I’d financed a BMW and had a membership to a yoga studio in Chelsea and although I disliked driving in London and the yoga studio was full of pretentious thirty-something housewives who pushed passed me in the changing rooms, life was pretty sweet. Except for the fact that the answer to my Mum’s question was no, he hasn’t told me yet.
But DIY guy couldn’t stop. Those three words would reverberate out of him at every opportunity. I love you he’d say as I opened the front door to let him in, I love you he’d say when I went to the bathroom half way through a film, I love you he’d say just before I turned the hairdryer on, in fear of us being without communication for the next three to four minutes.
Like I said, he was OK. But we had nothing in common. He also refused to get a job and was partial to a pub brawl on the weekends. For those reasons, I was ashamed to tell my friends about him. And even though I saw no future together, I still struggled to cut ties. He was a companion. A companion who was also really good at helping with jobs around the house—filling cracks, fixing draws, cleaning the oven! There seemed to be an endless list of tasks that I, a tiny little woman, could not manage.
I’ll end it tomorrow, I thought. But then the plumbing in the bathroom exploded. Water was gushing out of the pipes, flooding the bathroom floor just like it does in films. The only way I could stop the ongoing surge of water was to wrap a towel around the broken pipe under the sink and put pressure on it. I called him with my spare hand and he was there within seven minutes. He twisted a few whatsits and tweaked a couple of dingys—and voilà. It was fixed.
I could just imagine Carrie looking down the camera lens before saying something like, Breaking news: Local woman stays with secret boyfriend who fixes things.
There was no denying it. I was using him. And no matter how desperately I needed to repaint the kitchen cabinets, I had to let him go.
It wasn’t just shallowness I had in common with Mike Singer though—there was something else that united us too. After a messy, unexpected, definitely not mutual breakup, the soft centre of my heart had hardened, leaving me with a miserable case of heartbreak. And just like Mike, I didn’t want to be alone.
Us humans aren’t very good at being alone. We never have been. Three hundred thousand years ago we used to live in commune, because being alone, banished or exiled meant serious danger, possibly death. And even though we now live unrecognisable lives to our ancestors—and have replaced words like banished with dumped—that fear of being alone lives on. If you’re anything like Mike and me, experiencing this fear multiply after a bad breakup, might push you head first into the rebound waters.
It’s an unfortunate, cruel world for the rebound. I’ve both had one and been one—and both sides of that coin are unpleasant. In my desperation to feel loved and worthy again, I began a rebound relationship that had next to no chance of survival, with someone I didn’t even want to tell my friends about.
On my hands and knees mopping up the aftermath of the exploding bathroom pipes, I decided I needed some time to figure things out—whether that was who I am without a man wrapped around my arm, or what type of primer to use on those cabinets. And so I plucked up the courage to tell him I needed to find my independence and be on my own for a while. Or (and I didn’t say this out loud) at least until I found the type of love that Madeline Miller writes about in The Song of Achilles:
I would recognise you in total darkness, were you mute and I deaf. I would recognise you in another lifetime entirely, in different bodies, different times. And I would love you in all of this until the very last star in the sky burnt out into oblivion.
That’s someone I would introduce my friends to.
And off I went to B&Q.