He does this thing when he’s about to make a joke where his top lip tenses up, and it makes me want to laugh before he’s even said anything. Like on a walk one day when he was telling me about the time he got into a steel bin and rolled down a hill, which obviously wasn’t a good idea because he broke his arm. Or when he was telling me about his dad’s hobby of sending handwritten letters of complaint. He’s a bit of a show pony, a class clown, the sort of person who sucks up all the attention in a room and becomes bigger and bigger with it. I could imagine us together, not now but in the future, friends rolling their eyes at us as if to say, What are they like? I saw this girl on TikTok talking about this beautiful walk you can do by the coast, only a 25-minute train ride from London, the cliffs chalk white and the sea below smashing against seaweed matted rocks. I saw us doing it together, the skin on our noses pink from the wind, and then us at the pub afterwards, picking up pints with our fleeces folded up over the ends of our fingers to keep them from stinging with the cold.
But then we went to a mutual friend’s birthday party, and I realised I had to stop thinking about him. Nothing bad happened or anything. I’d just come to rely on the fact that he would be around, like a comfort blanket, but when the night finished, I wasn’t sure when I would see him next, or if one of us would text the other – and that reminded me that he’s said he doesn’t want anything serious. The next day, my flatmates and I pulled out the sofa bed to watch horror films together, and I kept hitting the space bar to talk about him. I wanted to ask him, “Do you want to hang out again soon?” Except I couldn’t do that because I knew that I was phrasing it ambiguously so that it wouldn’t be clear it was a date. I was trying to trick him into spending time with me, tip-toeing around what I wanted, because I knew he had the capacity to freak out. And once I realised that, I couldn’t send the text anymore, because I deserve someone who actually wants to go on a date with me.
I messaged the group chat, and they told me that it’s probably not even him that I’m upset about; it’s connection and romance that I want, and he’s just the nearest outlet for those feelings. “You don’t know him well enough to feel like this,” a friend counselled. “It’s so easy to project in these situations.” I told her that she’s probably right, that I do catch feelings very easily. But then someone said, “I don’t think you catch feelings, I think you see flashes of an exciting person and generously expand them all the time… I think it’s useful to think, ‘Why do I actually like this person?’ and if it’s all to do with how you feel, then it usually isn’t much to do with them at all.” And then: “You see the potential in him, which is so lovely, but he is not his potential.”
I don’t want to accept it, but a lot of this is true. I meet men and I take who they are and twist and pull them into something more in my mind. One’s quiet, and I say that he’s meditative and introspective, imagining myself looking out of the kitchen window of our shared cottage and seeing him picking herbs to use in a salad he’s making for dinner. One goes down the stairs of my house on a chopping board, chipping every step on the way down, and the money comes out of my deposit, but I just think he’s wild and crazy and anarchistic. It reminds me of that Virginia Woolf quote: “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” It’s not something any of these guys asked me to do, though. They don’t want me to put them on a pedestal. They probably just want to be themselves.
A couple of days later, I saw another TikTok that reminded me of what my friends had said. “One time I was obsessed with this guy,” the girl begins, “and I was telling my therapist I won’t find anyone like him, I just had so much fun with him… She said, ‘What do you like about him?’ And I said he’s really smart and he’s really funny and we have really great conversations, and she told me to write down every instance I could remember where it was an interesting or funny moment and then figure out who started that conversation or that joke, and they were all entirely me and I do that with everyone now. I think, that was really funny that moment that I started.”
Her point is, when women end up falling for every guy they meet, it’s usually because they’re great, not the guys. The comments under the video are filled with people having the same realisation.
“This is so real! I always wondered why I had chemistry with almost every guy I talked to. Turned out I’m the chemistry.”
“My therapist made me realise this too. She said I don’t fall in love with these guys, I fall in love with who I am when they’re around.”
“My little brother told me this one time. It never left me. ‘You can bring out the good in anyone because you’re so, so good.’ Never left me. I’m 43 now.”
It helps in some ways but not in others, because a lot of the jokes are ones he started. But a lot of them were actually me. The story about rolling down a hill in a metal bin came after I told him about this one time when I was drinking in Hyde Park in Leeds as a teenager. My mum had made me promise that I would be back in time for dinner because the family was coming over, so when I saw my bus (which came every hour) nearing the stop, I threw my bottle of cider down and got up and ran for it. I was so drunk and so determined that I didn’t see the rope between two of the trees that people had been tightrope walking across and flipped right over it, a whole 360, and then the entire park erupted into cheers, and I had this long blue bruise across my stomach for weeks afterwards.
So much of what made it special when I saw that guy was me and my stories and my sparkle. But that doesn’t mean I no longer want a connection with him; he still brought that out of me as much as I brought it out of him. Taking credit for how much of it I initiated isn’t going to make me say something annoying and untrue about having everything I need right here. But I can take solace in the fact that he isn’t as big as I made him out to be in my head, he’s probably big in so many ways, but ones I don’t know yet and one’s I might not even work well with. He’s not the person to walk with me along a cliffside, even if my imagination tells me he should be. He’s not his potential; he is who he is right now. And even though I might have to lose something, I won’t be losing what it feels like I’ve lost.