I was raised in an all-female household. When we were done re-watching Disney films, we would sit with our mother and watch the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice over and again: the melodramatic tale of two protagonists who have a long-lasting desire to get it on, and finally declare their love and get married.
I have recently come to realise that this film has influenced the amount of time and drama I will allow to unfold when it comes to being with the person I love.
I met my current boyfriend when I was 17. With his long hair, band t-shirts and seemingly unflappable attitude, I was instantly smitten. But lacking the maturity level necessary to not act like a 10-year-old, I proceeded to let him know I liked him by being rude and calling him names. Unfortunately, most people have outgrown this, and so my dreams of him entering my room at night to declare he thought my t-shirt was awesome, resulting in a pash-fest, seemed unlikely.
I finally got together with him on a night where he was singing a crude song about me, to me, and I had to kiss him to get him to stop. But then the university year ended and we decided to break-up and see where we were the following year. We didn’t get back together.
For the next four years, I remained ‘in like’ with him and he couldn’t care less.
Other than occasionally making out when we were both drunk enough, he thought my crazy bitch drunk-texting a bit much to handle. However, we talked nearly every day, which lead me to fall deeply and desperately in love – whereas he probably thought of me as that girl he talks to every day. It probably meant he was never allowed to stop caring about me and being my support person who things got shit.
After finishing my degree, I began seriously thinking about moving overseas, and I talked to him about it. We talked of adventure and Jack Kerouac. On the night before I left, I got outrageously drunk and told him I “didn’t want him to be with anyone else”.
He nervously laughed and told me I tasted like vomit.
On that night, as I lay in bed at the sublet I was set to move out of the next day, with the girl who was meant to move in the next day, I read that he loved me through tear-soaked eyes. It was my waking up at dawn to find Darcy in the paddock, and we had both overcame our pride and our prejudices. My Carrie in Paris when Big comes to tell her he’ll not be a dick anymore.
I spent the rest of my time away talking to him and being in a long-distance relationship with someone I had been in love with for five years, regardless of distance – kissing over webcam, talking drunk about getting served at a bar by the bassist from Pavement, and lusting over doing it.
Later, I learned he had wanted to be with me for a while, but didn’t know how to tell me directly. Now when we’re in bed I know he’s looking at me ‘cause he thinks I’m a babe, not because he wants to walk my embarrassing ass home so he can sleep.
It took me five years and, it would seem, I had to put an 18-hour time difference between us, but now I’m living out the ideas I have of love – not day-dreaming about them.
When we talk about moving overseas together, or I think about what he said to me the night before, I get like my friend does when she watches romantic films: I clasp my hands and sigh, filled so with love I get love glow.
* * *
I was in love once. It was fine. Until it all turned to shit.
I met this guy through my co-writer, Eliza. Slash that’s a lie—he was in my politics class in second year and I thought he was totes a babe and then my esteemed colleague took a class with him and then I was like “woo wanna tap that shit” and so I did and then after a while he was my boyfriend.
Fast forward 2.5 years. We shared an apartment, and what a sweet apartment it was. It had all the mod cons, like carpet and electricity and windows that looked out onto a concrete wall. I was IN LOVE with this apartment—more so than with my missus. But we were in love, because we said I love you. Sometimes we had sex but not that often because I was just. Not. That. Into. Him.
Then one day he came home and dropped a bomb (like, fi guratively—not a crap that destroyed the toilet). He said a girl had given him a handjob in the university library but it wasn’t cheating because they didn’t kiss. Seriously you couldn’t make this shit up. So I dumped his ass. Best choice I made in 2.5 years.
A week later I scored a guy with a massive cock and a week after THAT I scored this dude who is now my missus. And they are babes. And I was like woo!!
The moral is: I fell out of love. It happens. I didn’t care about the breakup. I was kinda pissed about the cheating for a bit. Like a day and a half. But I was sooo over that hairy douche anyway.
Looking back, I have wondered: was I actually in love? It was a different love to my previous boyfriend, who was my first love. And it’s a different type of love with my current missus. Those loves are also different to how I love gin and Sesame Street and whipping my hair back and forth—mostly at the same time. But as an expert on every topic (including boatology and ghostology* which I have studied extensively), I henceforth decree that love is generally a load of crap that ends badly, except when Sesame Street is involved coz Big Bird is the mannnn.
Really the only good thing about love is the more relationships you have that end badly, the better you know you’ll soon get over the dropkick you once loved. And the other best part is when you’re on the rebound and you score babes but not when it results in rippage (shame).
Fast forward a year and, if you’re like me, you’ll facepalm slash spew in your mouth or maybe on the bus** when you think about someone you used to love.
* if anyone’s able to put up capital for mine and Eliza’s next project, deep-sea diving to haunted shipwrecks, holla atcha gurl candy.b.badger@gmail.com
** don’t eat curry before travelling on a bus