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[...] Sex, I miss, but I’m aware some of the things I might want from a romantic partner are infantile. Someone to be able to be a brat to without consequences, someone to baby me with soft words and the tucking in of a blanket when I feel vulnerable and unwilling to be accountable for myself. I wa…

Instead, I have wanted to be changed. To become or resemble an ideal of someone’s romantic partner, always looking within myself to identify what it was that got in the way of love, the tiny adjustments I could make to fulfil another’s vision. My eyes were so trained on my own imperfect state that …

When I was seeing a therapist a couple of years back, she asked me to write a list of what I would like in a potential partner and to bring it to our next session. I was round my friend Ella’s house for dinner, and she offered to help me with it. Even coming up with a list of things that were impor…

Before he and I kissed for the first time, the boy said ‘you are a very nice girl.’ He said it slowly, a ialking-in-his-sleep mumble but his eyes in touch with mine. The kissing and sex part of our encounter was clumsy and unremarkable, but the whole evening is drenched in romantic feeling for me. …

[...] Looking back on my diary from that time was revealing. I wrote often about feeling suffocated by him, being repelled by his declarations of love, loving him but not feeling passionate about him, finding him pathetic. I was shocked by my cruelty. I’d written, ‘God, men must have felt this way …