by
Amy Key
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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 to eat with my meal, asking to take it back to my room afterwards. I’d wanted to get into my pyjamas, have a glass of wine and watch TV in bed. I’d taken my habits with me. I inch towards my holiday persona, who doesn’t have movie star glamour, who isn’t concerned with artifice, but is in communion with her own wants, needs and pleasures. Even if I know a timidity might set in, as though all my powers of aloneness have been spent by the heroic act of arriving elsewhere, on every trip I relearn how to be alone. I’m still travelling, travelling, travelling.
this passage is closer to what i want from her. just do what you want lady who cares
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 would break out of me, like a fascinating fossil concealed within a drab stone, didn’t seem to arrive. I still felt timid in the places I was in. Insecure and unsophisticated. I’d always be travelling on the cheap, eating emphatically beige meals in my hostel bedroom, drinking so much I’d come home feeling poisoned. I did get things from these experiences though – I became enamoured with the details of places. A spectacularly huge light fitting in the foyer of a run-down communist-era hotel in Bratislava, which looked like a retro schooling aid that would be used to illustrate atomic particles. A meal in Turin, at the point where hunger turns to derangement, of mashed potato and a slice of margarita pizza. The only things my friend and I could decipher on the menu. But I itched for the kind of travel I thought went hand in hand with romantic love. I wanted the staged photos at sunset, every cliché – hot tubs, candlelit dinners, a personal infinity pool, to suddenly look chic in a wide-brimmed straw hat. I thought this type of holiday was my natural next step. I thought that sort of romance was my natural next step. A progression beyond one-night stands, beyond the constraints of my earliest relationship, where I at first lived at home, then later had a student’s budget where even a romantic meal out was unlikely. I ached for the status of relationship that a luxurious holiday would make obvious. In my imaginings I was going to have epic day sex in a white-washed hotel room with the breeze billowing the curtains, sleep with a book over my face next to a pool, carefully adjust the straps of my swimwear to even out a tan. A man who loved me close by with sunscreen or a fresh cocktail. In these holidays, worries, self-consciousness, would fly away, easy as shaking a tablecloth free of crumbs. But this has never happened; in fact, the entirety of my sexual encounters have been in England, something that feels humiliating, as though my sex life has been hopelessly provincial.
this feels honest at least
[...] 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 about me a million times and it’s awful.’ Suddenly empathising.
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. I never saw him again. I want another night like that. That look in a person’s eyes just before they kiss you, I want to see that again. A kind of thickening of the atmosphere, as though you’ve entered personal mutual weather conditions. I remember one time, out with friends in Brighton, a friend of a friend turning slowly on their heel, wondering whether to kiss me. I didn’t notice in time. You never imagine you’ve used up all your life’s eyes-before-a-kiss moments. Very occasionally I feel a theatrical stab in my heart, I don’t want to live if they’re all gone.
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 important for me felt hard. Some of it was the defeated part of me that assumed I would never get what I wanted – being madly desired was something I felt was important, but I also knew it had to be less important than it had been in the past – but some of it was simply not knowing. Ella wrote things down as I thought out loud. I remember saying ‘someone who goes outdoors’ and ‘someone who is enthusiastic about something’ – my bar set very low. But a lot of the other things I said were borrowed ideas from positive representations of romance, or just too generic. It made me think of a list Roddy once wrote when I asked him why he liked me and how it didn’t have a specificity that made me feel seen, it was all ‘blonde, curvy, likes music, Geordie’ etc.
lmao
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 I failed to consider the imperfection of the romantic partners I sought. If I think back to the man I had the affair with, the desire for him to like me like me – to see me as valuable to him beyond sexual pleasure – was so strong I didn’t even ask myself if I liked him. Once the spell was broken, I realised I didn’t. He would text me now and then over the years since we were involved, telling me he missed me, talking like friends. There was no friendship there for me. He was boring, arrogant, talked down to me. And who would blame him when I so clearly placed myself in service to him, failed to stand up for things that I desperately wanted, became oddly characterless in the face of his personality.
i mean maybe you should do both
[...] 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 wail that if I don’t get a romantic partner, I’ll never spot that lump that needs to be checked out and then die. Then other things I want are more than equalled by my closest friendships – emotional intimacy, making plans for the weekend, for short trips, for things we want to celebrate, and the foundational support of curiosity, feedback and encouragement that helps the people we love go after things they want.
this sounds like wanting a mother ngl
I need to cross a threshold – from the place I am in now, where I can still feel confused, ashamed, embarrassed, angry even, that romantic love is not part of my life, to a place where I care less about what other people might think about me and don’t punish myself when I do care, judge myself less for always wanting more. I have to own that romantic love is a present desire, not consigned to some fantasy me.
agreed about the first sentence, not sure of the second
[...] That’s the risk of abundance. It can be easy to find it lacking. A birthday party where you’re sore someone didn’t come rather than delighting in all who did. A canyon of want that is impossible to fill.
somewhat nice turn of phrase
It wasn’t until recently that I paid attention to a line in Blue ’s first song that goes, ‘I love you when I forget about me.’ In the last few years, I’ve come to realise that in the romantic loving I’ve done, I’ve often obliterated my sense of self: I’ve not located my needs, let alone asked for them to be met. I’ve just doggedly pursued a kind of abstract reciprocation – have I been noticed or have I not? – and because I’ve not paid enough attention to what I want, the vast contrast between what I want and what I’ve received hasn’t been as visible to me. Romantic love transformed me but not in the way I’d dreamed it would. It made me forget myself, not to my self’s flourishing advantage – connected, inspired, courageous – but to my detriment. My resilience, self-image and facility for care scrawny with neglect.