What happens when you purge your long-term boyfriend part three: die harder

Why am I having relationships whatsoever? I see no point. I see nothing. I have spent the last six years of my life ceaselessly and habitually attached, monogamous, deranged, deluded, dealing with pointless, unremitting bullshit, and what, exactly, have I achieved? What do I have? A house? A child? A solid gold telephone? No. I have vague and spasmodic depression — a condition I could have acquired by running into walls or trapping myself in a mine.

I don’t recall being a child wishing I could grow up and date a string of controlling jerks, any more than I recall being a child wishing I could grow up and shit my pants, yet here we are — I want to bury another boyfriend alive, another boyfriend wants to drive a pitchfork through my arse, and look, I’m back where I started, confused, fucked, lost, spent, desperate to simply understand — Holy Christ — why I am doing this. Remember: I once dated a man who sweated in his sleep like a champagne ham. I woke up every day for three years smelling like a glazed pig. Somewhere in there lies an answer.

All relationships begin as a concept, or more specifically, an ideal. Reduce any ideal to flesh, blood and crusted underpants, and you are ultimately rewarded with the same, sick prize — disappointment. Note: I dated a man who lived in a shed. He kept rats, crates of porn and a dog with eczema of the nuts. Do you think I built any of those disgusting facts into the “concept” of our relationship? Do you think he introduced himself by firing rats into my face, or waving around his dog’s chronically infected balls? No. The concept of our relationship was based on his poetry and hilarious intellectual banter, one. Two, I didn’t expect our relationship to end up in his repulsive shed and terminate due to his clinical alcoholism; I expected it to end like the three billion romantic comedies I’ve seen in my lifetime — he wins the election and we get married, we graduate high school and drive off in a flying car, he collects me from a psychiatric ward and convinces me I’m the mother of his four rambunctious sons — WHATEVER. Everyone, on some level, thinks of their life as a movie, but life is not a movie, relationships are not movies, relationships do not run for ninety-three minutes, relationships don’t solve problems, relationships create problems — so why am I having relationships?

Two years ago I underwent a major operation to save my life. The operation itself was potentially fatal — a fact unknown to me until moments prior to surgery. An anesthetist happened to mention the odds of survival versus death to me, I explained I was unaware death was on the menu, at which point he looked confused and left the room, where I remained, lying on a metal cart, crying, alone. I spent the following three weeks in hospital throwing up. I was unable to walk, as walking also made me throw up. My then boyfriend (the boyfriend that inspired this series of articles) spent every day insisting I try and mobilise. This process mostly involved carrying me around the room; unaided, I was only able to curl to the edge of the bed. When I finally stood, it would be clutching his arm, as he held my throw up bag. Extremely slowly, he would lead me out of the room and into the hospital’s corridor. As I walked, I gripped his hand, to try and quell the tears stinging my eyes. “I love you,” I said. He glanced up at my face, and seeing my tear-tracked cheeks, he hugged me.

Whatever, we’re broken up, one day you’re in love, the next you want to BBQ his face. I have now withstood five long-term relationships, each of them broken, and they collectively have broken me. I consider these relationships retrospectively and all I can see is a pointless trail of destruction. Logically, I see no point. Logically, there is no reason why I am having relationships. They do not meet the ideal I create in my mind, they bear no resemblance to movies in which we are driven to believe, and they leave me — without exception — depressed, destroyed and fucked up. But, you know, life is fucked up. And, you know, those relationships were also pretty fucking amazing. And regardless of whether I’m in love, depressed, crying, at least I know I’m fucking alive. Am I going to have more relationships? Yes. Will they also self-destruct? Probably. But fuck it. Die harder.

home