“A strong woman will automatically stop trying if she feels unwanted. She won’t fix it or beg, she’ll just walk away.”

Okay, so you know I said I was enjoying the Guppy’s company and bad sex was better than no sex? Well, that didn’t last long.

He was so boring.

As you know, he works in a bar so we barely got to hang out outside of the bar. I’d often wait for him to finish and in the little hours we’d go back to his and usually just sleep or watch a movie, and occasionally we’d have bad sex.

There was no adventure.

On his days off, he’d sleep in so I’d be at work, or going to work by the time he woke. Even when he was awake at the same time as me, all we’d do was lay in bed watching a shit movie. When we weren’t doing that, he’d have his laptop out doing ‘work’. Now, I’m all for the trivial hangs and existing alongside each other doing our own thing together, there can be a lot of beauty in those simplistic moments, but all this was not that, and we’d known each other less than a month, we shouldn’t be in a dead married routine this early.

There was no excitement.

There was no passion.

I don’t know how I stuck it out for as long as I did, and I don’t know how he was the one who ended up ending it with me, boredom really does make you settle. Anyway, long story short, he finally had an evening free, so we’d planned to go for a nice meal as I wanted to get all dressed up and actually do something for a change. The plan was for him to wear his going out clothes to work so I could meet him from there and we could head straight to the restaurant. Bulletproof plan right?

Wrong.

I’d had a rough day at work and had to skip lunch, so I’d messaged him to say I was starving and joked about us having to run straight to the restaurant. At 8pm I waited outside his work for him, my stomach rumbling, then he appeared wearing a Hawaiian shirt and joggers. I didn’t say anything, not that I had a chance anyway, without so much as a hello or a hug to make me feel better about my rubbish day, he flew past me and started walking as if I wasn’t even there, like it was just a given that I’d follow him. This was new, normally I got a hug, or a hello, some kind of acknowledgement that I was seen, that he wanted me there, that I mattered. Even though he just made me feel like nothing in a way that’s hard to articulate now, I pushed my annoyance to the back of my mind, I was just happy to be with him after the day I’d had. It turned out he was leading me back to his place, he said he needed to get changed (strike 2- he was supposed to already be ready.) After 20 minutes of him sat in the lounge catching up with his housemate, he finally went to shower, leaving me watching ‘Open All Hours’ with this stranger. After the longest shower ever, he returned with glasses and whiskey and said, ‘who wants a drink?’ My insides were eating themselves, I said that I thought we were going out, and he replied, ‘well where do you want to go?’ as if we hadn’t already made plans, I reminded him of those plans and he said, ‘I know, I’ve just got to wait for my clothes to finish in the dryer.’ 

SERIOUSLY?

Strike 3. You’ve had days to get some clothes ready and you should have already been wearing them when I met you from work, and seriously, you must own more than one outfit, you aren’t a Simpsons character. I bit my tongue, quietly sipped on my whiskey and patiently waited for his clothes to dry, all the while my stomach was screaming, along with the voice inside my head. Nearly 2 hours later, I was sitting across a table from Guppy who was wearing a different Hawaiian shirt and a different pair of joggers, cut to the voice in my head screaming: SERIOUSLY, what was the point of the last 2 hours.

I was obviously quieter than normal, all my energy was focused on biting my tongue instead of biting his head off while we waited for the food. The food arrived and I was starting to feel better, until he had the audacity to ask me what was wrong. After I’d explained nonchalantly the things that had frustrated me, and explained they didn’t matter because we were here now, he implied that I was being over dramatic and I was ‘just moody because I’d had a bad day and now I was taking that out on him.’ 

SERIOUSLY?

I let go of my tongue. I explained that I had had the kind of day that would put even the strongest person in a bad mood, but as soon as I left work and thought about seeing him, I’d forgotten all about it, and it was actually his greeting, or lack of, that was the catalyst for this mood I now could not shake. I even said to him that I was 2 seconds from walking out of his flat after he pratted around for so long knowing I hadn’t eaten all day and that we’d made plans, and that I was now 1 second away from walking out of the restaurant because of his ignorance. He was very shocked by this, and I suppose if you weren’t going through the motions with me that night, maybe you wouldn’t understand why I was so angry and fed up, and maybe I was being over dramatic, I don’t know. All I know is he was showing his immaturity and inexperience in the way he was handling this situation, and he was showing me the kind of man he’d be during a storm, and it wasn’t the kind of man that could understand or handle me.

Despite my doubts about moving forward with him, and because he had eventually (sort of) apologised for upsetting me, I told him we should just forget about it, blame it on my day and have a nice time, so I faked my way through dinner, through the walk home, and then through an orgasm. After all I was trying to be a less rash and impulsive version of myself, that version would have walked at strike 2.

There’s more to this story, even though the dormant rash and impulsive me would have, and every version should have walked by now.

Catch ya later,

Ren.