The first time my heart was broken – and I say this with a fairly solid definition of what heartbreak feels like for me, and how it’s different to a simple, everyday hurt – it felt like the world was going to end. There was too much emotion to hold inside my fragile body, and it stayed for so long that I couldn’t conceive of the possibility that one day it wouldn’t be there any more. This heartbreak – puny and pathetic now I come to think about it – was caused by the wandering, horny eye of an eighteen-year-old boy.

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There are tonnes of things to mourn at the end of a relationship. Not least, in my case, a really awesome holiday I had planned for April this year. Lockdown put paid to that, but the ferry tickets still exist, and the rescheduled dates sit in my diary taunting me: a cycling trip with fondue and fucking and fun which will now likely never come to pass. There are infinite possible worlds in which we didn’t break up, or in which we broke up in far less painful ways, where some of this stuff might have occurred. But in this world, the one that exists for me, here are a few fucks that will never happen.

Note: the third story in this trilogy involves sex-while-asleep. It’s pre-negotiated and fully consensual, but I know some people aren’t into that, so this is just here to let you skip over it if you’d like to. 

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The problem with suddenly becoming single is that it throws up a bunch of dating problems that I very much hoped I would never have to deal with. I appreciate that absolutely none of these are serious – they are all things I’ll happily overcome, about which my whining is intended to be no more than a brief and amusing distraction as you trip down whichever path your Wednesday happens to be taking. My current mantra, as life gets harder, is ‘I like doing difficult things.’ Doing difficult things is incredibly empowering, and having the freedom to do those things excites me. Nevertheless, as I start to explore the ways I will throw myself into the exciting hard stuff, I can’t help but bump up against dating problems that I genuinely do not want to tackle. Here is a brief (and likely non-exhaustive list) of things I can’t be arsed with.

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This one’s fiction, which will hopefully become obvious when we start talking about wormholes. I’ve had it in drafts for absolutely ages, and I am still not entirely sure it’s right, but I’m running a bit short on stuff at the moment, so please enjoy this dimension-jumping, universe-splitting love(?) story. 

She’s been staring at him for weeks over sticky pub tables and board games and jokes. Each time she catches his eye there’s this absurd teenage chest-blush feeling – the warmth of nurturing a crush and holding it close to your heart. The debate – if you can even call it a ‘debate’ – that she’s having with herself  about asking him out, is all part and parcel of the fun of it. Will they? Won’t they?

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I’m having a lot of nightmares at the moment. Don’t feel sorry for me, if I were to write posts purely to gain sympathy I’d find far more interesting things to pin them on. I think the nightmares – like clockwork, at 4am, unless I take a sleeping tablet – are a way of processing a lot of break-up sadness so that during the day I can get on with being my proactive, practical self. They are horrible, but they’re also good in a way because when I wake up I realise that the world holds far more promise and possibility than my dreaming brain would have me believe. I also reckon I’m not the only one who has struggled with some of this after a break up so I thought I’d get some decent content out of ranking them from best to worst. Here are my top 4 break-up nightmares.

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