I have, in my slightly perkier mo­ments in the wake of my and Jen’s break-up, let my­self believe that chatting women up might be fun; that, with age, I might have got bet­ter at it. For some rea­son, this as­sump­tion gets stronger with ev­ery break-up, de­spite not hav­ing done it for the years I’ve been in a re­la­tion­ship, and de­spite never be­ing very good at it in the first place. And then I’m thrown into the world of flirt­ing and I re­al­ize that sit­ting on the sofa with the same woman watch­ing box sets has not made me more coura­geous and charis­matic. In fact, it has done pos­si­bly the ex­act op­po­site. How could I have let my­self be­lieve, even for a sec­ond, that sin­gle thirty-some­thing life would be an end­less buf­fet of op­por­tu­ni­ties, when I know it is, at best, small plates.

‘This is too hard,’ she says, wav­ing her hands in a way that sug­gests she’s given up. ‘We can’t talk with­out hurt­ing each other. It doesn’t work.’

‘We can agree on that,’ I say. ‘Good­bye, Jen.’ I walk away and, af­ter a few paces, turn back. ‘I can’t even look at the sea any more be­cause it re­minds me of you.’

‘If you can’t look at the sea that’s YOUR FAULT, ANDY,’ she shouts. Passers-by look at her, sur­prised to see some­one so well-put-to­gether bel­low­ing some­thing so de­mented in the mid­dle of the day. ‘Not mine. YOURS. YOU need to go fix your re­la­tion­ship with the sea, NOT ME.’ She turns and walks away.

‘YOU’VE RU­INED THE SEA,’ I shout be­fore I turn and walk the other way.

She al­ways was melo­dra­matic.

I soon re­al­ized that in­evitabil­ity of ev­ery re­la­tion­ship: the things which ini­tially draw you to each other be­come the ex­act things that ir­ri­tate you the most. I’d loved Andy’s non­con­for­mity, which be­came ir­ri­ta­tion at the lack of struc­ture in his life. He’d loved my in­de­pen­dence, which be­came an an­noy­ance at my re­mote­ness. In the early days, he ex­plained away my late­ness with my free-spirit­ed­ness. Af­ter a while he thought it was self­ish­ness. I used to love that he wanted to make ev­ery­one laugh be­cause I thought it was a sign of his gen­eros­ity. At some point I saw it for what it re­ally was – need­i­ness. I re­al­ized he saw ev­ery so­cial in­ter­ac­tion as a minia­ture gig and there­fore an op­por­tu­nity for ac­cep­tance or re­jec­tion. His mood was so de­pen­dent on how he felt these con­ver­sa­tional per­for­mances went and I hated be­ing wise to it.

Andy gave my mum a pair of karaoke mics for her birth­day.

He knows she’s never done karaoke in her life and in fact the most mod­ern song she’s ever sung is Han­del’s ‘Mes­siah’ in the church choir. And as I saw her open the gift, try­ing to think of some­thing po­lite to say, I thought about how Andy al­ways does what­ever Andy wants to do. I thought back on all the presents I’d bought for his mum over the years and how much time I’d put into each of them – how I’d lis­tened ev­ery time she said she liked a piece of jew­ellery I wore or men­tioned a book she wanted to read and men­tally noted it for her birth­day and Christ­mas. Andy kept laugh­ing to me af­ter­wards about how baf­fled my mum had looked when she opened the present. And I re­al­ized he’d cho­sen not to be thought­ful but to be funny in­stead. To no one but him­self.

I chal­lenged a po­lit­i­cal view of Andy’s, which led to an ar­gu­ment, and he said: ‘I would love you no mat­ter what your opin­ions were.’

And I know he was telling the truth. He would have loved me un­ques­tion­ingly and stub­bornly for­ever. And I don’t know if I want to be loved like that.

The next day, as we stood in front of the Venus de Milo in the Lou­vre, I looked over his shoul­der and saw that he was googling him­self.

Specif­i­cally, he was googling ‘Did Ask or Task air in France?’

I know why he was do­ing it: it was be­cause he was feel­ing sore about the con­ver­sa­tion with his agent and he needed re­as­sur­ance that he wasn’t wast­ing his life, that his work had had some im­pact on the world. He wanted to know if there was even the tini­est pos­si­bil­ity that as he walked around the cob­bled streets of Paris, a French per­son might spot him and say, ‘Isn’t that Andy Daw­son? From that un­known sub­ti­tled Eng­lish game show that only ran for eight episodes?’, de­spite the fact he’d never been rec­og­nized in his home coun­try. He needed to have hope that this could hap­pen, more than he needed to take in the beauty and his­tory of the fa­mous an­cient Greek sculp­ture that was right in front of him. More than he needed to hold the hand of the woman he was in love with, who was stand­ing right next to him.

I once heard a the­ory about the first re­la­tion­ship that oc­curs af­ter a big re­la­tion­ship ends. It’s called the 90/10 rule. The the­ory goes: what­ever the cru­cial 10 per cent is that was miss­ing from your part­ner who was oth­er­wise to­tally right for you is the thing you look for in the fol­low­ing per­son. That miss­ing 10 per cent be­comes such a fix­a­tion that, when you do find some­one who has it, you ig­nore the fact they don’t have the other 90 per cent that the pre­vi­ous part­ner had.