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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 …

In my twenties, air travel became illogically affordable. It was easy to buy return flights to Spain or Poland or Italy for the cost of a new pair of jeans. I took one or two trips a year – short holidays in European cities like Turin, Bratislava and Paris with friends. But the glamour I thought wo…

I’ve just returned from a week in Tenerife, my first out-of-the-country trip since LA. It made me smile when one of the waitstaff at the hotel said to me, ‘hey I love your style – eating alone, with your bottle of wine and your book and your nice blue shoes.’ I had ordered a bottle of wine from her…