If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know I love a meet-cute.
Take the cancelled Sunday morning train at Cardiff station which started the four-hour train love affair. Or the night of too many beers for a Thursday which led to meeting a very, very French man in a pub garden and ending up on several dates with him.
So imagine what happens when a six-foot something guy with deep brown eyes, a cheeky smile, and a voice with a slight New Zealand twang to it started chatting to me in an après bar on a ski trip earlier this year.
You’re right, I lost my mind.
Well, not quite straight away. But probably definitely a few weeks in. And though this story has now come to an end, you bet that you’re going to hear about the chapters.
What do ya wanna talk to me for?
First up, I’ll be honest – I was convinced he wanted to chat up my friend. But she was otherwise busy talking with some people she already knew, so the guy was left with me to talk to.
My memories of what we spoke about are vague – in part, the day’s beers had caught up with me, but I also wasn’t too bothered about chatting. I was not-so subtly playing the cynic, still convinced he’d rather be sitting opposite my mate. We tipsily flipped and flopped through some small talk, like who we were in France with, where we’d skied that day, who was the better skier, what we did for work. So when he said he was from the Isle of Wight, worked on a sailing boat, and was based in America, the cynic in me knew it was her time to shine…
…until he leant close, put my face in his hands, and asked if he could kiss me. And though my memory of that week of skiing is hazy to say the least, I remember that kiss. Without it, the rest of the week would have been very different.
And so would the weeks after.
All the cynicism
Until the night before I flew home, I was resolute that it was just a ski fling and nothing more would come of it. God, it took my friends to talk me into agreeing to meet him a couple of nights later for a drink (and then another night and another), let alone agree to ski with him.
The final night of the trip, I met him for a beer and a rather shocking game of pool. (It was humbling to know there was something this charismatic, travelled, intelligent, annoyingly-good-at-skiing excuse of a man was average at.) Even with my lack of ball and cue skills on full display, he told me he’d like to see me again when we were both back in the UK. I don’t know if I scoffed out loud, but I know I did on the inside.
For starters, we were on holiday and had been drunk 95% of the time we’d hung out.
Second, the Isle of Wight is nearly 300 miles from Leeds.
Third, he works halfway around the world for half of the year.
Fourth, he seemed real nice. Like, reeaaaaal nice. Too nice for moi.
Fifth, I was still kinda convinced it was just circumstance. And that if my friend hadn’t been caught up chatting to someone else, we wouldn’t have even got to this point.
Why would I do it to myself?
Give it to me I’m worth it
The honest answer is because in the weeks that followed, he made me feel worthy of it. Worth the drive, the sober risk, the general punt. And the moment I allowed the teeniest bit of hope through that he wasn’t joking and he actually meant it when he said he wanted to hang out, well, that’s the moment I began to crumble.
Since that ski trip in April, I’ve had a lot of time to think. Actually, that’s not quite right. I don’t have a lot of time to think, which is why the nights are horribly long as my mind hop, skips, and jumps its way through a million scenarios about my new job, friends I need to check in on, if my grandparents are OK, the drain unblocker I need to add to my shopping list, the service light on my dash that’s been shouting at me for months, the slow and devastating realisation of why I’m such a cynic when it comes to men.
And for the first time in forever (genuinely forever), I trusted myself to think about it hard – which meant rewinding to my early twenties.
Alexa, what’s a bad relationship?
Back then, I was in a long-term relationship with the wrong person. When it started to get bad, it got real bad. It wasn’t loving, it was nasty.
He’d berate anything and everything about me, from what I was wearing and how it made me look to the way I behaved with him or in front of other people. He’d tell me off and shout at me, then sit in silence so loud I’d want to scream. He’d dismiss me when I’d arrive at his house, opening the door and then stepping away from it – and me – as though he couldn’t bear the sight of me, let alone the thought of me spending the night there. He was repulsed by me. Or at least that’s how he made me feel.
And that’s a feeling you don’t forget.
It was only a year or so after we broke up that I began to realise how much it ruined me. And for all the time that’s passed since, it’s why my cynical instinct is still so strong, why I can’t trust that someone can really mean the lovely things they’re saying when it can change so fast.
I hate to think about it, so I rarely do – and I did such a good job at blocking it that there’s blank spaces scattered across two years of my memory. But the feelings are still there, especially when I’m muddling my way through getting to know someone new.
The reality of the holiday fling
The ski guy didn’t know this, of course – it’s not really the sort of stuff you talk about in the early days, not least appropriate for small talk in an après bar. So it’s no wonder I struggled to let myself believe him when he told me he liked me enough that he’d drive six hours to spend a weekend with me a few weeks later.
And that’s all real sad, right? Because a holiday romance that spills into real life should be magic – you should feel like you’re flying, chewing off all your friends’ ears about this real life meet-cute that’s finally happening. (Of course, I did talk everyone I know into the ground about him and whether he’d actually come to stay, what we’d do, if anything would happen next. And of course, I didn’t let him know aaaaany of this – I was the easy, breezy girl he’d met in a bar in the mountains, slinging back the pints without a care in the world. I obviously wanted to stay that way.)
So he drove from the south to the north to spend the weekend with me, and then he did it all over again. It was lush, and I did feel like I was flying. But I was always flying with one hand ready to call a Mayday, because it was never going to last – how would it? Logistically, it was screwed. But emotionally, I was invested – and for a moment too long, I let myself imagine it would turn out differently.
He was always going back to the boat for the summer, so we left it that we’d carry on getting to know each other and catch up in person when he was back in the UK. It was here my imagination went into overdrive, getting far too carried away with how it thought getting to know someone in another time zone would go. Because as the weeks passed, the conversations grew shorter and the chat felt more distant, and I realised how little we really knew about each other. Yet I still hoped it would pan out differently.
It’s not me, it’s you
Why we allow our minds the freedom to fantasise over something other than reality is something I’ll never understand. Because in the end, it’s always the hope that hurts that most. As much as he was the guy who lived the life and seemingly had the world at his feet, it was how he made me feel that had me hooked – and that’s despite not really knowing him at all. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had enough willpower to wave the unworthiness, rejection, and abandonment from all those years ago ‘goodbye’, and lean into how someone said they felt about me.
Someone who thought I was funny, intelligent, cute. Someone who chose to spend time with me, not because they should but because they wanted to. Someone who told me they didn’t care which bar we went to next, as long as they could kiss me in the street before we got there. Someone who twirled me around and dipped me low in a queue for a beer, oblivious to the looks we were getting of the people standing sensibly. (Read boring.) Someone who let me be myself, and seemed so at ease with themself.
I loved how I felt when I was with him, and that’s what so rubbish about all this. Because you can’t date someone you don’t see or someone who you can’t get to know. And the thing is, we didn’t know each other. Not as well as you’d get to know someone you were dating when you could give them an actual hug, rather than wait for the occasional WhatsApp message a couple of times a week. We knew a little, but we didn’t know a lot. I just kidded myself that we did.
Take me home, country roads
And all this is how I came to spend the other weekend on a random campsite in the Cotswolds for one last après with the guy from skiing. A weekend we’d pre-agreed would be the end – in part, because it couldn’t work like this. But also in part because of the truths I’d spilled to him on the phone a few months ago. I took a solo trip to Bodrum, accidentally sat on a hornet in my swimsuit, and went on to drink away the pain – making a few questionable phone calls, about ten to him included.
The weekend camping was lovely, just as I thought it’d be. And the days after didn’t ache as much as I thought they would, though I guess I’d already gone through the motions in the months he was away and the bubble burst.
I’d joked with my friends about how the weekend would end. Would it literally be along the lines of a quick hug and ‘see ya never, thanks for the memories’? Would it be the kiss of all kisses, one almost as good as the one Ross gave Rachel when she got off the plane? Would there be a suggestion that actually, it wasn’t going to be goodbye forever?
Well, true to form, the words ‘see you then, have a nice life’ were out my mouth quicker than I knew it – I couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t help the coy smile that followed. Because the truth of the situation is that’s all it needed to be and all that needed to be said. We’d written these final lines of the story as we spoke on the phone the week before and agreed camping would be the last time we’d see each other.
And we’ve been true to the words since.
How I’m feeling now
Am I sad? Yes.
Or at least I was.
Because I’m also happy. I’m happy because I met a man who gave me a hint of a heart of gold. I’m happy because it’s made me confront thoughts and feelings that have been making me unhappy for a reeaaaally long time, and I’m getting some way to shifting them somewhere else. I’m happy because it’s restored hope – and what it is to hope wholeheartedly. I was having a year off from bothering to date, and though I feel I’ll see out the rest of the year in the same way, it’s made me realise the best really and truly is always yet to come.
If this is the first guy I meet without trying, it’s a wonder the kind of man I’ll meet if I don’t try for a little longer.
(And I’m also sleeping soundly at night knowing there’s a guy out there, driving across Europe in his big white truck with a not-so-discreet burgundy line down one side. Did we drink red wine on the roof? Yes. Did I drink too much? Obviously. So was it me who knocked the cup of rouge down the side of the truck? I’ll leave you to decide. But if that’s not what they call ‘leaving your mark’, I don’t know what is.)
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