Mortifying oddity + time = riveting eccentricity.

Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating? I resented it.

“I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” he said within the first two minutes of me asking him about his job. I wouldn’t be surprised if right-leaning thirty-somethings received a script in the post to prepare them for social situations. “I’m not sure if I believe that really exists,” I replied. “I know what you’re trying to say. But ‘I

I was reminded that the behaviour around dating had its own set of rules and standards, which all the participants had to seem overly relaxed about at all times. It was completely different to having a drink with a friend.

Each of them would give these men something—a story, a weekend away, their attention, their advice, their time, a sexual adventure, an actual adventure—then they’d be forced to pass him along to the next relationship. These men would emerge at some point, full of all the love and care and confidence that had been bestowed upon them over the years,

The sexiest, most exciting, romantic, explosive feeling in the world is a matter of a few centimetres of skin being stroked for the first time in a public place. The first confirmation of desire. The first indication of intimacy. You only get that feeling with a person once.

then haunted me with a sinister sense that there were important things I couldn’t remember and never would. Hundreds of black holes in who I was, as bottomless as a night spent drinking tequila.

We talked—openly and intensely—we laughed, we listened, we got drunk, we were spontaneous and filthy and domestic and peaceful.

She was so desperate to love someone. It seemed like such a simple, singular thing to ask from this life.