The term “friendship break-up” has gained popularity in recent years. I often read articles and think what an ordeal to have somebody you cherished and shared so much with slowly morph into a stranger. How gruesome it must be to walk past a former friend on the street and not know how to greet them. I often count myself lucky at having a spectacular teaming mass of friends in my life and at never having to experience the rotting corpse of a dead friendship. Continue reading
Sometimes it starts inconspicuously enough; a sudden interest in a new band or a brief case of Mentionitis. You’ll wonder why they’ve stopped the weekly pub outings and yet, are suddenly, suspiciously more broke than usual. Then a friend will drop off the radar for weeks at a time with a hasty “yeah, things are great”, only surfacing for air for once a month. They can spare just a few distracted minutes after your show, leaving after the first round of drinks, back to spending every night at their beau’s pad. Continue reading
Settle for somebody who will bring you flowers: not just for birthdays and anniversaries, but also, just because. Somebody who will move all your spiders. Somebody who lends you books with the page corners folded down and scribbled notes in the dust jacket like a portal to their thoughts. Settle for a person who will hold a constant umbrella over your parade.
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Those who have been single for a long time will know that you gather up exes. The significant others who actually, in the grand scheme of things, turned out not to be so significant. Things didn’t get serious for long enough to cause a full-on heartbroken split from when things end, and most of the time you don’t meet the prerequisites to be banished from each others lives.
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You don’t hear about the hours they spend memorising freckles. You don’t hear about the time they bought a pair of socks from Joy The Store at the train station – full price! £8 on a pair of socks! – so that you wouldn’t have to re-wear a pair. You don’t hear about the picturesque night they practised slow dancing when they got in from the club, an endeavour that ended with their first perfect kiss timed miraculously with a Bright Eyes chorus at sunrise, a moment so utterly cheesy it could have been a scene in a John Green novel. Continue reading
I sometimes feel as though my life is like a parade of people I used to know. Most of my friend pool has been in my life for quite some time, and at this point I have a fair number of exes to run into; friends of friends; other peoples housemates; ex-colleagues; a pal from “back home”, somebody’s cousin who was in town for the weekend. The list goes on. Continue reading
Waking up with a full day off ahead of you and the endless possibilities contained therein. Nothing is too ridiculous or too indulgent to be a viable way to spend the day. Going to an exhibition. Changing your hair ribbon three times. Watching 5 episodes of Bojack. Re-reading your old diaries for half an hour and then finishing a box of Easter eggs in bed. Talking to your housemates about Domhnall Gleeson vs James Franco for 2 hours in the garden.
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about why I love being single. It was a weird one to write, because like so many of my blogs, I am completely oblivious to the fact that not everybody feels the same way. I assumed that everybody reaches the same conclusions after a while and it was only last year I realised actually, no, a lot of friends of mine are not single through choice and really struggle with being single. They analyse obsessively over how dates have gone, if they’ll ever find somebody, when they’ll get a message back or when they’ll find “the one”.
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