As we enter a new year, Laura Reynolds looks at how the dating game differs from previous generations.
Laura Reynolds looks at the freedoms of festive singledom
Join Jason Rose for a peek behind today's door.
Lauren Tabbron writes about the difficulties of spending Christmas away from a loved one.
My friend Sophie had had some horrendous incident, being woken from a spooning slumber by the big spoon's girlfriend opening the door to the cosy scene. Apparently the cuckoldess had shouted the house down, ripped the duvet off from over them, and hurled it across the room in her humiliated rage. This dramatic gesture had been executed very inelegantly; duvets not being the easiest things to throw, it had landed with an underwhelming plod just inches from the poor girl, who then lowered her voice and seethed "I was just coming to tell you that you've given me f'ing Chlamydia you bastard", and then, with a withering look at the naked Sophie added, "Did she give it to you?!"
Actually, he gave it to her.
Suddenly my month of being the emotionally tortured young romantic seemed never to have happened, and the bra saga (no doubt the British press would call it Bra-gate) became less the start of all my troubles, and more an all-trumping "most embarrassing drunken night EVVVVER" story.
I went back to uni calmed. And then January the 31st happened. It was a Ziggy's night. Naturally. Some sports team were on a superheroes social, and the girls from my block and I sat in the "Champagne Lounge" - vodka pit - and admired their mountainously muscular rugby-player thighs and arms through their oddly sexy all-in-one spandex jumpsuits. Until that night I had always thought that the aspect of Speedos that draws one's attention to the 'crown jewels' is that fact that they are skimpy. I learnt, however, that actually, it's the tightness. Spandex jumpsuits have the same effect. All eyes were looking south.
On the dance floor I saw Tom with some girl. Residual loathing caused me to dislike her and find her skirt - that was probably no shorter than my own - to be the most horrifically slutty garment known to man. I thought of my grandma complaining about the youth of today - "The things these young girls go out in! It makes me feel cold just thinking of them!" Crap. What a fuddy-duddy I was becoming. Loosen the hell up!
I danced with my back to them. At some point (as ever with Ziggy's it's hard to pinpoint exactly when this happened) between 10 and 2 no doubt, I found myself dancing with him.
"It's been a while" he said, after we kissed. As he spoke, all I could think was ‘YES’. It had been a friggin’ long while that this Dirtbag had been on my mind last term. And here I was, going full circle. What's more, I was doing it willingly. Not only did I know - or thought I knew - about his two-a-night antics, but I had literally just seen him kissing some other girl.
"Did you miss me?" he asked, after my silence. And there it was - slap! - a red hand print on his cheek where my hand had landed. What an arse. After all this time, after not speaking to him for two months, after his madly unattractive behaviour the previous term, and he asks "Did you miss me?" How dare that cocky bastard presume that I'd entertained so much as a subconscious half-thought about him since that night! More to the point, how dare he be right! It was all very well for me to obsess about him for hours on end, but for him to think my obsession so predictable! Were his capabilities for making me feel like crap endless? I'd been through a sequence of confusion, anger, humiliation, paranoid obsession, and now all these feelings at once.
You must log in to submit a comment.
