Dumped, Actually(21)
I was pretty much a hopeless romantic myself by the time I reached adulthood. While a lot of my mates were off watching action and horror movies, I preferred to sit down in front of something by Richard Curtis.
I kept quiet about my love of romantic movies, as you would expect. The epic taking of the piss by all of my male friends would have been long, sustained and probably quite unpleasant.
In fact, the first time I ever really expressed my love for films like Four Weddings and Love Actually was when I wrote the speculative article that got me the job here at Actual Life. The fact it became a pretty popular read on the website meant that I wasn’t the only bloke out there who didn’t mind a bit of romance in his life.
Once I’ve provided the brief background about my upbringing, I start detailing my first break-up, and the words begin to spill out of me in a torrent. If you’re going to clean out a wound, it’s best to do it as quickly as possible.
Gretchen Palmer gets about seven hundred words dedicated to her. She was my first love, and my first heartbreak. We were together for six months when I was seventeen. Gretchen loved dancing. So I loved dancing too. Ballroom dancing, to be precise. If I didn’t tell my mates about liking romantic comedies, I sure as hell didn’t tell them about doing a bit of tango with my girlfriend in the church hall every Sunday afternoon. Can you imagine the response?
But Gretchen loved it, and I was more than happy to keep her happy by being her willing partner on the dance floor, whenever she wanted me to be.
I lost my virginity to Gretchen.
I then lost Gretchen to a twenty-one-year-old Asda assistant manager called Simon Pickings, who drove a restored 1978 Ford Cortina. I have never shopped in an Asda since.
Next came Yukio Sagawa. She was a student, studying cookery at my university, and I met her in the halls of residence. She spoke flawless English and dressed like a bohemian princess. My provincial little brain could barely cope. She opened my eyes to the world and showed me what was outside my comfort zone.
Yukio was an excellent cook, as you’d imagine. And she loved to cook and eat oriental food from every country in the Far East – with increasingly exotic ingredients as she got better at it.
Therefore, I also cooked and ate oriental food. Even though I don’t like chilli. Or garlic. Or noodles. Or rice.
In fact, truth be told, I hate oriental food, but I wanted to keep Yukio happy, so I ended up eating a lot of stuff with a barely concealed grimace on my face. Do you know how hard it is to look happy about chomping down on a salty, wiggly octopus leg? Extremely hard, as it turns out. I must have got very good at it, though, because Yukio never seemed to notice that I’d go a slight shade of green every time she produced a new delicacy for me to try.
Watching me eat something that I’d probably be bringing back up again once she was out of the room always put a big, happy smile on her face, though, so the gastro-intestinal discomfort was worth it.
Yukio was unbearably exciting to be around . . . right up until the point where she wasn’t around any more. At the end of our university courses, she announced that she was moving back to Tokyo. I, of course, offered to go with her. I would have gone anywhere with her, to be honest. But she said she wanted to be alone again. To be able to explore her own identity – or some such other bullshit.
Yukio gets over fifteen hundred words in my rapidly expanding article.
Lisa DeVoe was a sweet, sensible girl, who seemed to adore me. We met online, after a period of singularity for me that had lasted two years.
Lisa was an archaeologist, and loved her some dinosaurs. So I loved me some dinosaurs as well. To this day I can tell you all about the flora and fauna of the Jurassic and Triassic periods with no hesitation whatsoever, thanks to Lisa DeVoe.
This was all a lot easier to get along with than the ballroom dancing or the awful food, as it mainly involved looking at books and drinking coffee. It did also occasionally mean that I had to stand in a wet ditch with a trowel in my hand, but that was a small price to pay to see the happy look on Lisa’s face when I dug up a Roman coin.
It was never a whirlwind romance with Lisa, but over time I became very fond of her, and I thought she felt the same way about me.
Right up until she dumped me in the middle of sex.
Yep. That’s right. One minute I’m pumping away happily, the next I’m looking down into the crying eyes of a woman who it turns out doesn’t want to be with me any more.
Her reasons? She said she wasn’t excited by our relationship – which is just the kind of thing you want to hear while you’re still inside someone. My unexciting penis withdrew extremely quickly at that point and became even less excited as I sat there while she explained how she felt.
It just didn’t ‘feel right’ to her any more, apparently.
In much the same way as that knocking noise from the rear axle doesn’t feel right, so you take it into the garage for a once-over.
No garage for me, though. I was sent straight to the scrapyard.
Lisa gets six hundred words in ‘Dumped Actually’.
Which brings us back to the most recent disaster, of course – that of Samantha Ealing.
As has been established, Samantha was ‘the one’. Funny, intelligent, beautiful, witty. I couldn’t have created a better girlfriend for myself if you’d given me a test tube and access to expensive DNA sampling equipment.
It was love at first sight with Samantha. I’d only gone into the garden centre to buy some lavender for my balcony, and I ended up falling in love. It was the bees, you see. I wanted the lavender because I’d read in an article on Actual Life by one of my fellow writers that the bee population of the UK was plummeting, and one of the ways to help them out was by planting lavender. Also, I knew it would please my parents if I took more of an interest in plants.