Recently I realised that this year marks ten years since the last time I fell ‘in lurve’. It started in February, and was finished at the end of July, when the other party’s (supposedly) estranged wife decided she wanted him back, and he went.
A friend had tried to warn me quite early on (towards the end of April, when I was beginning to believe I’d finally met a man who genuinely cared about me) not to ‘…get involved in someone else’s train wreck…’, but of course, I was the fool who went rushing in. I’d been on my own for two years, I was tired of chatting to men online, meeting them once and convincing myself that they were really nice, interesting guys who were worth getting to know, only to find that they disappeared without a word or made it obvious that all they wanted from me was sex. Yes, I knew that he was jumping straight into a new relationship, and that that was dangerous, but I’d had my time in the wilderness, and I was sure that if I just gave him time and space to see how well we fitted together…
Well, if I ever meet that woman, I will thank her from the bottom of my heart, because if we’d stayed together, I wouldn’t have caught the Eurostar nine years ago today and gone travelling, never have lived in Prague, never have moved to Southsea… Of course, at that time, I wasn’t expecting it to be the last romantic relationship of my life. I thought maybe I’d been trying too hard, I should stop looking for love, I should just give up and wait for it to happen naturally – I was a free spirit, I would take my pleasure wherever it came my way, I would live the Bohemian life I’d always dreamt of, and some day, I’d fall in love again.
I won’t say I can count the number of times men have ‘come on’ to me in those years on the fingers of one hand – I can count them on my thumbs. The first was the old boy on the bus in Rome (‘Single to Sirkeci’, p165). The other was in my first summer in Southsea, one Friday afternoon in a pub overlooking the harbour, as I was settling myself with a pint of cider, and waiting for my fish and chips, when a creepy middle-aged man plonked himself down at my table with the words: ‘I don’t mind sharing if you don’t!’. (In case you’re wondering, there were plenty of empty tables, and I removed myself to one straight away).
For a few years, I still hankered after the fantasy of finding love – or at least, occasional male company. I used to wonder: what’s so awful about me that no one wants me? Is it my looks, personality, intellect, expectations too high, or too low? Is it just bad luck – or maybe good luck – that I’m the way I am?