Introduction – Suddenly Single

I woke up one Friday in October and decided I would break up with my boyfriend Cameron. He was a lovely bloke but not for me. I was never sure if he was the one and I reckoned if I didn’t know, then he wasn’t.

I’d had two serious relationships. I went out with my boyfriend David for three years between the ages of 19 and 22. I split up with him because I felt that I was too young to be in a serious relationship. I wanted to spend sometime being single and playing the field. I had fantasies of moving up to London, being a party girl, working hard and playing hard.

I had always envisioned meeting the man of my dreams, the one. I wasn’t entirely sure if there was such a thing as the one. I certainly didn’t believe that there’s only person that’s right for you but I did think that there are only a few people that are right. I thought it was true that you just know. I hadn’t ever felt it myself but that’s what people had told me and I believed them. I guessed it was all about chemistry.

Then again there were others who would say that there’s no such thing as “The One” and you just have to make do with what you’ve got. I reckoned that they were just bitter because they hadn’t ever been in love. Not properly anyway.

I wasn’t prepared to settle for second best. My Mum had drummed that into me. She said that she knew that my Dad wasn’t right for her before they got married but she was too scared to do anything about it.

Actually David and I did get engaged. He wasn’t not the most romantic guy and he was pretty tight with money. I kept hassling him about getting married. I don’t know why. Deep down I knew he wasn’t right for me. Anyway, I started looking around at rings. I wanted a big fuck-off solitaire but knowing David’s finances and that fact that he was tight, I decided to go for a big fuck off cubic zirconia instead.

One Saturday morning on the way to the supermarket we passed H. Samuel and I asked Dave if I could show him the ring I’d seen. It had a white gold band with a large cubic zirconia stone. It was a bargain at £44.95.

So we went in and I tried it on.

“So, do you want it then?” Dave asked.

Shit. I wasn’t expecting that. I gulped.

“Err yeah. Great. Thanks”.

FUCK! What on earth was I doing?

As we walked towards Sainsbury’s Dave suddenly pulled me towards me.

“Charlie,” he said in a hushed tone.

Aah. He’s going to do something romantic, I thought. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

He pulled me towards him and did a massive fart and it all went down hill from there on really.

David knew about my fantasies. He was quite a bit older than me and he was a bit of a father figure. He used to say I was living in a dream world and that I wanted something that wasn’t real.

So I split up with David because I wanted to be single and independent and met Cameron the following week and we started seeing each other almost every day.

It was doomed to failure from the start really because I was still hankering after my dream of being a socialite around town and having a string of casual boyfriends at my beck and call.

***

I told Cameron that I thought we should split up that morning before work and he seemed surprisingly ok about it. It was all very matter of fact.

I had decided that I needed to spend some quality time being single. I wanted to learn to be independent. I thought it would be really cool to be able to sleep with anyone I liked as well. No strings sex, fuck buddies and all that malarkey. It was so exciting. The world was my oyster.

The next day I woke up in a panic. Oh God. What had I done? Cameron was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Why did I let him go? How on earth did I think I would manage on my own? I was a blubbering mess if Cameron just went away for the weekend, let alone forever. How would I cope with being alone?

I told him that I’d made a mistake but he said, “It’s for the best Charlie”. Cheeky sod. He said he’d wanted to end it for a while but he didn’t have the balls. Bastard. I couldn’t believe it. I was devastated. I had thought he was completely in love with me. I lay on my bed crying my eyes out, sobbing into my pillow hoping that Cam couldn’t hear me.

I thought back over the last few months of our relationship. I supposed it wasn’t surprising that Cam had wanted to split up. I used to spend half my time bitching at him and the other half harassing him to marry me, even though I was fairly sure that he wasn’t the one for me.

We had started growing apart when we moved into together. At first it was great, we were at it like bunny rabbits. But as time went on, the distance between us grew. I was always niggling at Cam and he just became more withdrawn. He was always going out with his mates and his work colleagues, most of who were girls. Cam never wanted to have sex with me anymore and the more I tried to seduce him the less interested he became.

Anyway, he said there was no hurry to move out and he would help me to find somewhere to live. How jolly decent of him, I thought bitterly.