Pretending: The brilliant new adult novel from Holly Bourne. Why be yourself when you can be perfect?(16)

That’s the sort of thought Gretel would have, I realise.





That night, I lie in bed and, for the first time, I let myself really feel all the pain that men have put me through. I’ve tried so hard not to think about it for so very long but it’s all catching up with me. I can feel my heart closing as I stare up into the darkness that’s never that dark. After all this time, it’s finally giving up. I’ve determinedly clamped it open, every morning of every day since I first decided to try and love a man. Despite all the knock-backs and reasons not to and shattering disappointments, I’ve always picked it up off the floor where it’s been discarded, blown off the dust, admired the new scar, put it gently back into my ribcage, and prised it open again. I know that the opposite of love is fear. That it only works if you believe.

I don’t think I believe any more. In fact, I think I’m beyond not believing. I think I’m finally, finally, allowing myself to feel pissed off.

So I’m lying here, in my 33-year-old body that isn’t getting any younger, and I’m thinking of all the horrible things men have done to me and this wide open heart of mine.

There was Tommy, in sixth form, who told everyone I just ‘lay there like a brick’ the day after he took my virginity. Then there was Tommy again, who cheated on me with Jenny Cartwright and everyone in the whole school knew it but me. There was his laugh when I confronted him. ‘I thought you knew?’ he’d said, like it was all my fault.

Then there was my overcorrection boyfriend at university, who couldn’t be more sweetness and anti-toxic-masculinity and wrote me poems and pushed them under my halls door, but also needed to be loved in a way that no one could ever offer, bled into me, making my life his life and my friends his friends and always said ‘I don’t mind’ whenever I asked anything. When I left him after graduation, he couldn’t handle his ‘investment not maturing’ and swapped the love letters for long emails about what a total prick I was as a person.

There was the date that went for a piss at the pub and never came back.

There was the guy who told me he wouldn’t go down on me because I tasted like chow mein.

Then there was Ryan … whom I met aged 25, when I was insecure and scared by how long I’d been alone for and who was the most perfect boyfriend for six months, and made me believe I was going to save his life – but then couldn’t handle it, or me, when I couldn’t. Then two years of arguments, always concluding that it was all my fault, of anxiety pulsing through my stomach, wondering what Ryan I would get that day – the rare, amazing Ryan, or the man who told me I spoke too much and laughed too high-pitched and cooked all my food wrong and who never wanted to touch me. Until those two times where he raped me coldly and clinically – and it took me years to call it that because I was so confused and filled with self-disgust that I felt I’d just let it happen.

Then there was the fallout of Ryan after he moved on to some poor 24-year-old, whom, I know from the low moments when I spy on him, he still calls Hashtag Soulmate on his insta. How I tried to have a one-night stand, like you’re supposed to do when you’re 27 and heartbroken, but how I couldn’t have sex and screamed in piercing agony, pushing him off me.

Then there was the hospital appointment, my legs in stirrups, and the year of using numbing gel and vaginal trainers to try and fix what he’d done to my body and being too scared to leave the house, let alone consider dating.

Then there was John, two years afterwards, whom I told about Ryan and who then used it against me. Telling me it was clearly ‘too soon’ for me to have a relationship if I ever dared behave imperfectly, before dumping me.

Then there’s been all the micro-aggressions of dating hell since. The ghosting, the guy who is happy to date you for two months, and, then, only when pressed, admits he ‘sort of has a girlfriend’. The slight winces new dates make when you say something that doesn’t match their idea of what a woman should be. The last-minute cancellations, the hours of my life waiting for a man who is late, checking my phone, and pretending I don’t mind when he finally turns up. So much rejection, gaslighting, entitlement, pushiness, scorn, manipulation, power play, compulsive lying, on and on it has gone. And, every time, no matter what men do to me, I have taken some time out to recover and then hurtled back into the ring, determined to try again. You can’t lose the faith otherwise you lose the opportunity to spend your life with someone. You’ve got to keep trying, I told myself. This time will be different, I told myself. You can’t love without fear, I told myself. There must be someone, I told myself. They can’t all be broken, I told myself. Other people have managed it, I told myself.

I can’t tell myself lies any more.

I’m lying in bed. I stare at the ceiling. I can’t see the cracks but I know they are there. And I’m finally hardening. Not because of Simon. (I admit that, yes, maybe I am overreacting to Simon. Simon is just a man. Yet another not-good-enough man.) I’m hardening because I’ve realised something.

I actually, physically, mentally, spiritually, can’t do this to myself any more. I can’t put myself through it. It’s not worth it. Because what is the prize? A man? A man who will never quite give you what you need, and never quite do enough around the house, and never quite comfort you in the way you need comforting, or fuck you in the way you need to be fucked, who will never quite deserve you but yet believes he deserves the medal for staying with you, a man who will always prioritise sport, who will smell and shit and burp and fart and lie and cheat and be lazy and get complacent, even if he wasn’t to begin with, who will inwardly roll his eyes over time, who will let you take the strain if you’re stupid enough to have children with him.