Category Archives: Life

#100HappyDays

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You might have heard of the #100HappyDays project. As soon as I started doing it, today, friends started popping out of the woodwork saying ‘Ooh, I read about that somewhere. It sounds cool.’ The basic premise is that, for 100 consecutive days you post a picture on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter of something that made you happy that day. If you manage to post all 100 pictures they send you a little book of them at the end, but that’s not really the point. The point is watching out for the little things that make you smile.

God knows I need it at the moment. I’ve blogged enough about depression recently, and what I intend to do to get better. When I first heard about #100HappyDays, I couldn’t really be bothered. But the bright yellow webpage made me happy (yes, seriously) and i realised that actually, I’ve always been pretty good at making sure I have those little moments of happiness in my life – I’ve just lost the ability to focus on them, that’s all.

So yeah, from now on, when I wear bright, lacy matching underwear I’ll be taking pictures (probably not that kind, though). I’ll be buying myself flowers, painting my nails, buying more books and wearing red lipstick. There’ll be photos of it all, but don’t worry if you find the whole thing a little bit too twee – they’ll be confined to my Instagram account.

If you do like the idea though, I’m curious: what are the little things that make you happy?

Going AWOL

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I’ve been thinking, since the post I wrote about depression, about long- and short-term happiness, both of which I’ve blogged about before, and which you should prioritise at any given moment. The depression thing has taken off since I last wrote – I’m now weepy all of the time, and the thought of using this blog to write about sex, love, boys, or anything that’s fun seems completely out of reach.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with a friend. I cried; she fed me milky tea and tried to make me feel better. Actually, she was full of great advice: find a new GP, one who understands mental illness, make sure they’re near work, so you can go often, and make sure you always see that doctor, not whoever happens to be available. With their help, try different anti-depressants, until you find the ones that work, both in terms of maximum mental health benefits and minimal side effects. Be kind to yourself. (I keep saying that, right?’)

Those are the things that I know will help me: but I also think it would help to step aside from the long-term goals for a bit and focus on creating a life which is happy and healthy, and where I make the most of the people around me and what they can offer.

It seems that inadvertently in my blog posts I’ve been putting across the message that what I definitely want from life is children with a long-term partner. In reality, I think that yes, that’s possibly what I want, but not definitely – right now I value my space and solitude way too much to want a long-term partner in my life. Plus, even if I do decide that’s what I want, it doesn’t have to happen by 30 – that’s just society’s fucked-up view of the timeline to which women should live their lives.

One of the things I do want to do this year is take back control of my life – one of my worst habits is looking at a diary that contains free weekends and either booking something in for all of them, or hyperventilating. As a result, last year I missed a shitload of stuff I would have loved to have done because I’d put stuff in place just to stop the weekends being empty – but an empty weekend isn’t going to kill me.

The other thing I desperately need to stop doing is sabotaging my relationships – questioning things; starting arguments; being negative – just because, as a therapist once told me, when those things do inevitably lead to the relationship breaking down, yes I get the satisfaction of proving to myself that my deeply-held belief – that I’m completely unlovable – is correct, but that satisfaction is pretty hollow compared to what I’ve given up in the process.

So, starting from now I’m going to stop sabotaging my life – I actually can’t remember the last time I went out and got drunk with a big group of people, but I’m going to stop feeling guilty for not doing it. I’ll see friends when I want to, and give myself peace and quiet when I need it. I’ll spend more time doing the things I love, like reading and writing, WI meetings and craft workshops, even if those activities are predominantly female and aren’t going to help me meet a man (thanks mum!). I’d like to keep having fun with the boy and not destroy the time we do have together by over-thinking the future – that one though is slightly less in my control at the moment.

So, what does that mean for the blog? Honestly, I’m not sure. Right now, I’m so low that I feel like every post is at risk of being a rehash of this one – and that’s the kind of writing that’s best kept out of the public domain, due to the fact it’ll end up boring everybody stupid.

Alison Tyler has kindly agreed to let me review her new novel, The Delicious Torment, on February 2nd, as part of her blog tour, so I’ll be back for that. Until then, I think posts might be somewhat more infrequent than they’ve been thus far. We’ll see, I guess.

Thanks for reading up till now x

It’s ok to be happy with a calm life

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Writing about depression consistently loses me Twitter followers. I don’t care – the ‘of sorts’ part of my blog name was always designed to allow me to write about other things that are important to me, and that’s exactly what I plan to do in this post. I wrote a shorter post on this earlier, but I’ve since deleted it, because I have so much more I want to say on the subject. If you don’t like it, go right ahead and unfollow.

I hate New Year, and this year was no different. I find the pressure of statements like ‘2014 is going to be so much better than last year’ almost unbearable, especially because depression always seems to catch up with me in the weeks after Christmas. This year, I should have known it was on its way. A few days after Christmas I was in a restaurant with my parents. They made a slightly critical comment and I burst into tears. The weepiness lasted the rest of the evening.

My parents are not great in this respect: they tell me repeatedly that I’m not actually depressed because my depression is always triggered by specific, upsetting events. There’s some truth in this – it often is – but part of the reason they think that is because often when I’m low I avoid telling them, partly because I know they don’t really get it. 

What really upsets me though, is knowing that depressive episodes are almost always triggered by people I care about. Sometimes it’s my friends, more often it’s the boys in my life. A couple of years back, I was pretty involved in a complicated situation with a depressed male friend and ironically, as he recovered, I succumbed to it more and more. He ended up offering to pay for me to have therapy, thinking I was resisting it because I couldn’t afford it. Nothing could have been further from the truth: I was resisting it because I couldn’t handle the stigma that came with being depressed. He was lucky I refused his offer though: to date it would have cost him more than £2k in therapy sessions.

I’m slightly more comfortable with the stigma surrounding mental illness now (good therapy will do that), but less comfortable with the way it’s treated. Therapy is risky – I did have a great therapist, but when I moved halfway across the country I had to find a new one, and I’m pretty sure that in the six sessions I saw her for she did way more harm than good. 

Anti-depressants make me even more antsy. I take them, on and off, but as soon as I start to feel better, I stop. This is a pretty irresponsible thing to do: they’re known to have side-effects, including mood swings, as part of the come down, which is why you’re supposed to reduce the dosage slowly and under a doctor’s supervision. Sheer bloody-mindedness means I never do: as soon as the depression subsides I get resentful about reliance on drugs to control my emotions, bitter about the fact that my emotional range is so curtailed and really, really fucked-off about the weight I inevitably gain when I’m taking them. And so I stop, just like that. And just as day follows night, several weeks later I’ll have a day just like today, where I get up, shower, start to cry, and have to go back to bed because everything else feels like too much of a struggle. Today, I thought I might make gingerbread. Then I thought of the mess it will inevitably make and couldn’t face it. The same goes for cooking meals. Drying my hair is too much effort. Watching TV gives me too much time to think. Basically, I just want to be asleep, but I’m not tired enough to get there. It’s on days like this that I wish anti-depressants could be given intravenously, just so their effect would be more immediate.

None of this stops me laying in to other people though: I’ll do anything, anything, to turn the self-hatred outwards for a bit, so god forbid that anyone should say or do anything that hurts or upsets me – I can rant and rave for hours because that’s what’s going on inside my head anyway. 

But as much as that’s me saying It’s not you, it’s me, I can’t help but wonder if the solution is to return to the kind of single girl independence I last had around 2007, when I was doing my finals and boys were the last thing on my mind.

I’ve mentioned in a few posts that I had more to say about this post. The way Juniper describes sitting on the harbour, wiling away the hours made me wistful as hell. I used to be that girl, the girl who could sit in a bar with a glass of wine and a book, watching the world go by and not fretting about the present, or worrying about the future. In recent years, I’ve lost the ability to do that – now I always seem to be checking my phone for messages from an AWOL boy, or worrying about the fact that I’m not doing super-exciting stuff with other people.

Depression has taken away my ability to enjoy my own company, and that’s the shittest thing of all. 

Will you please look at my face (or my tits) when you’re talking to me?

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I walked around all day yesterday in scorching heat, and by six o’ clock I was knackered. I was browsing through dresses in Jigsaw and as I moved from one rack to the next, the shop assistant looked at my feet and said ‘I can tell you’ve had a tiring day.’

Ah, well yes, but that’s not why I’m limping. I look like I’ve had a tiring day just as much first thing in the morning as I do last thing at night.

People’s comments are well-meant, mostly – I know this. Women comment more often than men, middle-aged women comment more often than younger ones. I get it. It’s a motherly concern for me, probably – thinking I’ve twisted my ankle or that I’ve been wearing silly shoes again and I just need a plaster. Except this is my life all the time, and those silly shoes you think I’ve been wearing? I haven’t. I never get to wear flip flops, or stilettos or pretty court shoes, and I would kill to.

You’d think, after knowing me for 29 years, my parents would get me better than the average stranger, but that’s not always the case. Last week I went out with my mum wearing wedge sandals I haven’t worn since the summer and I tripped. This is common with the disability I have and while I hate falling, I can deal with it much better if people ignore it (if you’re worried I’ve hurt myself, ‘You ok?’ is fine, but if I say yes, drop it.)

My mum can never drop it. My mum says ‘Right, they’re clearly not supporting your ankle, let me buy you some new shoes.’ It might sound like a dream; it’s not. I hate shoe shopping, a) because I can never buy the shoes I really want and b) because it takes me ages to wear new shoes in until they’re comfy. Often, when I fall, one or other of my parents will keep on and on about it until I end up crying. All I want is for them to understand and accept that tripping and falling frequently is just part of who I am – it’s not a bit I want to focus on, that’s all.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Guys my age don’t often comment on the way I walk (apart from one guy who hit on me, realised I was limping and then asked if I’d be this way for life – he nearly got punched), but I notice them looking at my feet all the time. Nothing to see there boys – all my limbs are intact and I don’t have some huge, gaping wound that’s causing me to walk this way. Why not look at the good bits instead – my tits are amazing and I did nice eyeliner today. Plus, you not looking at my feet will make me feel so much better about myself.

This would be an easy post to write if it was as simple as ‘Let’s all pretend there’s nothing wrong with my body,’ but sadly, it’s not. People give me evil looks for sitting on the very front row of seats on the bus, the one that’s meant for old and disabled people, all the time. Why do I do it? Because my balance is shit and when was the last time you saw a bus driver wait until someone sat down before he pulled away? This might make you think that you should give me your seat on public transport, but don’t. If the front seats are free, I’ll sit there because it makes my life easier, but I can stand, as long as I’m holding on to something. Offering me your seat just confuses me – you might have spotted my disability or you might just think that my rounded tummy is a sign that I’m pregnant. Either way it doesn’t make me feel good about myself.

So boys, here are my guidelines – if you like me, try to turn a blind eye to my disability (that includes surreptitious glances at my feet) except in the following two situations. If a) I’m standing at the top of something steep and uneven, looking at it with terror or b) we’re walking along a road that’s icy as fuck – in either of those cases then please feel free to offer to hold my hand.

Self-preservation: 2 ways

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So … you remember friend with the ex-fling who ‘joked’ about her being a size 14? Well, he’s been cementing his reputation as a total cunt this week by getting drunk and making more great jokes – this time about how, the morning after he slept with a girl, he drew a map to the nearest bus stop, gave it to her, rolled over and went back to sleep. That girl is my friend and they work together. It’s not like he was never going to see her again. But the deal breaker for me is that he regaled all her other friends and colleagues with this story on a night out – ok, he didn’t say it was her, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t something she wanted to relive. She was, understandably, pretty upset. But she didn’t let him know this, because this is her version of self-preservation:

Self-preservation #01

When someone, whether it’s a guy, a friend, a family member or whoever, does or says something that hurts you, you *never* let them know that it bothered you because that would just add to how humiliated and stupid you feel. You might, after a time, rant to other friends about it, about how he made you cry, or why you wish your mum would just shut up for once, but on no occasion do you mention it to the person concerned. If it’s particularly bad, you might give them the silent treatment for a while, but the key feature of this approach, to me at least, is ‘Quick! Brush it under the carpet!’

Self-preservation #02

Personally, I prefer approach No. 2. The only thing this has in common with approach No. 1 is that it sometimes involves the silent treatment, but rarely. More often it involves ranting and raving at the person who hurt you until both of you have lost the thread of the argument and are absolutely exhausted. Why do I handle things this way? Because just as my friend says it’s embarrassing to let someone know that they’ve got to you, I cannot internalize how much I hate myself if I think someone’s treated me badly and I’ve just gone along with it.

That’s the logical thinking behind it, anyway. The reality is more instinctive. If, for instance, I get a text or see something online that I don’t like, I immediately get pins and needles in my hands and feel like I can’t breathe. For a long time, I thought this was just me being melodramatic – I’ve since realised that it’s actually a mild panic attack, and as someone who suffers with anxiety and depression, I’m not sure why that surprises me. I’ll immediately fire back a text or an email with my gut ‘How dare you!’ response, because it feels like the only way to exercise some control over the physical reactions.

I should probably learn some relaxation techniques, but I’m far from ashamed of approach No. 2. Yes, it often backfires, but hopefully it sometimes also forces difficult conversations that wouldn’t otherwise be had (sometimes being the key word). I wouldn’t switch to approach No. 1 for the world.

How about you? Which of these approaches do you think works better? Or do you have a third way? Are you , *gasp*, capable of talking things through calmly?!

On imminent big birthdays

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One of my best friends turned 30 today – the first in my uni friendship group to do so. I’m in the slightly strange position of being young for my school year, but old for my uni year because I took a gap year, which means that roughly half of my friends will be turning 30 before I do, while the others still have a year to go.

Let’s get one thing clear: I’m far from having a breakdown at the idea of turning 30. Casual sex aside, I’m really not a massive fan of a lot of things you’re supposed to spend your late teens and twenties doing – clubbing, getting blind drunk, travelling the world – so I’m quite happy to, shhh, whisper it, ‘settle down.’

Quite happy, that is, apart from one thing – I want to be a mum, and I’m worried that the things that need to fall into place for that to happen won’t fall into place until it’s too late. And when I say ‘want to be a mum,’ I don’t say it lightly – I’m the girl at dinner parties cuddling the babies of mere acquaintances, the one who inevitably doesn’t get to eat dessert because my hands are taken up cradling someone else’s kid who’s fallen asleep on my shoulder. I’ve wanted it for as long as I can remember and I don’t see that feeling going away any time soon. 

Society’s views on women like me aren’t often very helpful either – I know I shouldn’t let the Mail rile me, but god I was fucked off when Liz Jones wrote this piece. You might steal men’s sperm as payment for microwaving the odd ready-meal, love, but don’t you dare imply that it’s something the rest of us would do. I think a woman in her early 30s should be able to be open with a man about wanting to have a child without the man automatically assuming that that means that she wants to have one with him, and feeling accordingly threatened because that’s not something he’s interested in.

That, plus the fact that I can’t quite get my head around how I will meet, fall in love with and build a sufficiently strong relationship with a guy before the mental cut-off point that I’ve established by which I need to make this a reality (35, if you must know), means that my usual, defensive position is: ‘I don’t need a man in my life to have a baby, I’ll have one by myself.’ That line though, I’m increasingly realising, is just self-preservation – it’s my way of persuading myself, and other people, that I’m in control and have a game plan, even though the reality is, yeah, not so much.

More and more I’m realising that, while I would still have a baby on my own, I’d rather have one with a guy who I love and who I’m in a relationship with. The question is: if I know that that’s something I want from my life, should I give up the relationships happening in my life now that clearly aren’t leading to that in order to dedicate myself more fully to what I want in the long term, or should I stick with what’s working in the short term and assume that the bigger picture will sort itself given time?

 

Fat is an issue that I’ve not had in my relationships … thank god

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Earlier this week, my neighbour came round with my Christmas gift, a bottle of marsala wine and a legendary M&S stollen – a vision of icing sugar and flaked almonds. He handed it over and wished me a 2014 that was ‘lucky in love.’ My neighbour is amazing, and if he wasn’t over 60 and married, I’d probably be making a move.

Anyway, that’s by the by. I took the stollen to work, commenting to a colleague that if I ate the whole thing by myself, it was unlikely that I’d be lucky in love next year, because, y’know, I’d be huge.

‘Do you consider your chances in love to be linked to your weight?’ she said, sounding vaguely horrified, as well she might.

I nodded and she shook her head. ‘That’s not good,’ she said. ‘Not good at all.’

She’s right – it’s not. You shouldn’t keep an eye on your weight because you’re worried about what a man might think about it, you should do so (if you want to) for your own health, sense of wellbeing, desire to reach a goal etc. etc.

A friend came round last night, after her work Christmas dinner. She mentioned that one of her colleagues, who she had a bit of fling with back in the Spring, had joked, after she’d finished both her risotto and sticky toffee pudding. ‘Wow, seeing you eat like that, it’s no wonder you’re a size 14.’

Now, this friend is petite, height-wise, and she’s a size 10-12. She said she’d laughed off his comments, told him to fuck off and felt smug that that particular day she was wearing a size 10 dress. Because that makes his comment fine, obviously.

I said this, and pointed out that that was hardly the point – how is it funny to accuse someone of being a dress size that’s smaller than the UK average? Because her attitude didn’t thrill me either, rather than calling him a cunt, which is what I’d have done, she was just pleased that he was two sizes out.

I am a size 14, bordering on a 16, and I pointed this out to her. She backtracked sharply, ‘Oh, but it’s different, isn’t it, because you’re taller, and curvier, and you have bigger tits.’ Well, yes, all of this is true, but it’s also a massively flawed argument. If we were the same weight we’d be very different sizes, but if we were the same dress size we’d be just that, the same dress size.

Her attitude isn’t quite as bad as his, but it’s still not great, and in my life I’ve found most of the pressure around my weight has come from other women (namely my mum), not from men.

The boy, for instance, has never made me feel remotely fat or uncomfortable about what I eat or drink. The only thing he has a go at me for consuming is wine which is clearly in his glass, not mine. Last week I mentioned, in passing, that the night before I’d eaten two bowls of cereal, a croissant, and then my dinner, all because nothing seemed to sate my hunger – and then I’d felt massively sick.

‘Well, obviously,’ was his only comment. ‘I’d expect a seven-year-old to know  that.’ He wasn’t at all bothered by how much I’d eaten, just by the fact that I seemed surprised that it had made me nauseous – and that was worth teasing me about. It’s that attitude which makes me happy to fuck him on top of the covers, sober, in daylight, and to wander around naked after sex without worrying about the size of my tummy, and fuck, it’s liberating.

So please, ladies, don’t fuck anyone this Christmas who makes you feel fat. There’ll always be men, but there won’t always be lebkuchen (this statement may be  slightly flawed). But seriously, if he wants to sleep with someone skinnier than you, then that’s what he should do. You don’t need to be a certain weight to make him happy.

The things that make us who we are …

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I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what it is that’s stopping me from going after what I really want when it comes to love. Sure, I’ve dabbled with internet dating, but I hate it. And recently, I’ve realised that, unlike many people who hate it because it can be depressing and it takes up precious time, I hate it because it means confronting my biggest fear: that no one will want me.

As ever, no melodrama intended – that’s just my honest world view. One of the things that has surprised me most since setting up this blog is the followers I feel I have most in common with are not the sex bloggers, but the relationship bloggers. That’s not to say that there aren’t some fab and supportive sex and erotica bloggers out there (if you haven’t read Kristina Lloyd or Alison Tyler you really, really should), but the girls who write about their search for Mr Right have been kinder and more interested in what I’m doing here than I could ever have hoped for.

Because relationships are my greatest hang up. Technically, I’ve never had one. How did that happen? Well, it’s a pretty long story….

Why do you walk like that?

I’ve touched on some of the issues in this post before. My very first post was about my slight disability and the way complete strangers react to it, but it’s not always complete strangers. The first person I ever felt wasn’t able to accept that my body wasn’t normal was my mum.

This isn’t some kind of attempt to pass the blame for all my insecurities back to my parents – they’re fantastic, and I adore them. In fact, when I first went to therapy, the first thing I said was that I had no interest in trying to pass the buck back to them for how I got so fucked up. But my mum hasn’t always got it right. She walks at 100mph, for example, and I’ve always been expected to keep up. My dad is generally better at recognising that this is tricky for me but when I was a kid, we got taken into his office every Christmas Eve and every year I fell over on the walk from the station and ended up in awful emergency Sock Shop tartan tights.

Not only do I have to keep up though: I have to walk properly. I’ve got much better at this – until very recently I was becoming more agile, not less. She’d say things like ‘You’re walking badly today – are you tired/not concentrating/wearing uncomfortable shoes?’ Often, yes, one of the above – but who isn’t one of those things much of the time. When I paid close attention to every step, I walked better but at the expense of becoming massively self-conscious. It’s never gone away.

No one wants to kiss me

All through primary school, no one noticed that I wasn’t as co-ordinated as every else. Then, when I started secondary school, all that changed. Not only was there a fair amount of teasing, there was also the hell of school discos and under-18s club nights. All the other girls would spend most of the evening with some boy’s tongue down their throat while I hovered on the edge of the group, desperate for the evening to end. Did my disability mean that I was a terrible dancer? Actually, I have no idea – I’m a pretty cautious dancer, but I don’t know if that’s because my body won’t let me be otherwise, or just because I’ve never had the guts to properly throw some shapes. In the end, I was 17 before I had my first kiss and then, irony of all ironies, 17 and a half when I lost my virginity. In a nightclub.

Older men

When the boys your age aren’t interested, you’ll turn elsewhere for male attention in the end. I have a lot more to say about crushes on teachers, so I’ll write about it in more detail later, but let’s just say that most of the years from 15-18 I wasn’t interested in anyone who didn’t take a register. Wanting to impress helped me to get into one of the best universities in the country, but the opportunities for sex there were far and few between too. Plus ca change …

Just good friends

My first grad job was in the middle of nowhere, and my first good friend in that job was senior to me, but behaved at least five years younger than I was. He was a terrible flirt, and he had a Geordie accent that left me weak at the knees. We spent increasing amounts of time together until he decided to tackle the fact that I clearly fancied him head on. He wasn’t ‘in a good place for a relationship,’ which turned out to mean that he’d been in love with his girlfriend’s twin sister for nearly seven years and the idea of moving on was completely alien to him.

That rang true with me. I started seeing a therapist about a year later and one of the first things she asked me was why I thought I continued to be drawn to him despite the fact that we didn’t want the same things. My answer: he doesn’t want to sleep with me.

Now, looking back, that seems odd, even to me. I’m unapologetic about how much I love sex – chasing it, talking about it, having it. But I didn’t want to have sex with anyone I really cared about – I couldn’t face the fact that the morning after they’d inevitably wake up knowing that I’m bad in bed and liking me less because of it. But I stuck with it nonetheless, increasingly unhappy. For two whole years.

What ended it? He met someone, obviously. Someone younger, stick thin, and with no tits to speak of. It’s rare that I don’t love my cleavage, but we had a rough few weeks around that time.

Friends with benefits

Of course, looking back I can see that he didn’t end up with someone else purely because my body was a disappointment to him. It probably wasn’t a disappointment at all – it was probably just that he didn’t fancy me. Or that he wanted someone who was less emotional, less of a drama queen. And that’s ok. Well, ok to an extent – we’ve never salvaged the friendship, but he collects stuffed meerkats now, so I consider myself to have had a lucky escape.

Hopefully all of the above makes it clearer why I consider the current boy  (wow, nearly wrote relationship there!) to be something of a break through. The first time I slept with him I honestly expected that I would never see him again – I certainly never imagined that two years on, despite huge ups and downs, we’d still be fucking, or that I’d be comfortable enough with him to not need to pull my clothes back on straight after sex or to always need a few drinks beforehand.

Of course, the things that don’t work in this arrangement have been well-documented over the last few days – I’m reluctant to lose what we do have, but I know that if I stay, I’ll be giving up a massive chunk of my dreams. I can argue until I’m blue in the face that I’d rather have a baby by myself, but honestly? It’s self-defensive bullshit. I would have one by myself, absolutely, if I don’t find anyone to have one with. But would I rather find someone to raise my children with, someone to slob in front of the telly with, someone who loves my body and who wants to be my friend? Well, obviously. Who wouldn’t?

On other people’s relationships

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I’m currently watching a couple on a pretty awkward date (I think). Of course, that’s not guaranteed. They could be friends with benefits, colleagues having an affair, or, possibly, they think they’re on the best first date in the world…

Watching other couples doesn’t usually fascinate me. Other people’s PDAs, intimacy, affection for one another is a massive trigger for me. It reminds me of how lonely I often feel. Today is unusual, because until a few minutes ago I was having lunch with my own friend with benefits, and yes, I’ll admit it, we were watching this date as a source of entertainment.

I’m not generally smug when I’m out and about with the boy. Our own dynamic often leaves a lot to be desired and I spend a lot of time wishing we had more moments just like these – having lunch, feeling like we’re on the same wavelength, relishing the fact that, after 2 years, we know each other well enough that it’s no longer that awkward and yet the sex is still damn hot.

But of course, it might not appear like that to other people. They might watch us and think we don’t like each other at all. We don’t hold hands when we’re out and about, for instance. Are other people watching us and thinking, ‘Thank fuck we’re not scared of showing we care.’ And when we bicker, (there’s a lot of one upmanship) – are they thinking. ‘So glad we never argue.’

My point, I guess, is that, much as it’s fun to watch other couples and to draw your own conclusions, you shouldn’t use them as a barometer to judge your own relationship. Use them as a funny story to tell your partner, your friends, your colleagues, but, good or bad, don’t try to be more like them. You have to find your own happiness.