Chapter 19 #3
‘But… what?’ Lizzie takes a big slurp of her wine and waves her hand in the direction of mine like she’s telling me that I need to drink too.
I pick up my wine glass, take a long, slow sip and say nothing. I’m not sure what else there is to say.
‘So.’ Lizzie stands up and turns her oven on. ‘We’re having lasagne and salad. I made them earlier. Could you clarify what you mean by your relationships do finish?’
‘Erm. Just that. All my relationships finish. They just do. It’s something about me.
So I don’t want to start one with someone I’d be sad to split up with.
And I don’t want to start one with someone I already know I wouldn’t be sad to split up with because obviously why then would I want to have a relationship with them? ’
‘So that’s why you only ever go on the occasional date? Because if you really like someone you don’t want to date them seriously and if you don’t really like them you don’t want to either?’ Lizzie takes a big oblong dish out of the oven and removes foil from the top of it.
‘Basically yes?’
‘I’m mind-blown. We’ve been best friends for so many years and you’ve been carrying all this around inside you. Why have we never talked about this before?’ She puts the foil in the bin and sits back down.
‘I’ve always felt that you know this. Like it’s so obvious? And I don’t like talking about it, plus there’s nothing much to say.’
‘So that’s why you’ve always been so vague whenever I’ve tried to talk about the end of your relationships? And I suppose also I did have a lot of dating disasters of my own and maybe I’ve only started to think more clearly about dating in general since I met Dan.’
Lizzie shakes her head and then sits for a long moment, clearly thinking. (She has this actual thinking-woman pose: elbows resting on table, hands propping chin, eyes kind of swivelling around the room.)
I just carry on taking little sips of my wine and watching her and waiting for her to finish thinking.
‘Driving tests,’ she pronounces finally.
I look at her, confused. Why has she so thoroughly changed the subject?
‘Remember how I took my driving test seven times.’
I nod. You couldn’t have known Lizzie during her learning-to-drive era and not remember that. She became like a woman possessed. She had to pass. I don’t think she’s driven since.
‘And how you took yours twice,’ she continues.
I nod again.
She looks over at the oven, where the still-heating-up light has just clicked off, and stands up.
As she puts the lasagne in, she says, ‘Until we passed our driving tests, we’d only ever failed them.
’ She sets a timer and sits back down. ‘Similarly, until you’ve had a successful relationship, you’ve only ever had failed ones.
Failed exams don’t mean you’re never going to pass.
Failed relationships don’t mean you’re never going to have a successful one. ’
I frown, confused again, this time because on the one hand what she just said sounds as though it makes perfect sense, but on the other I know it doesn’t.
‘Not similar,’ I state.
‘Why, though?’
‘One is an exam and the other is a human relationship?’
‘So what, though?’ She tops up both our glasses.
I just sit and stare at her, while I try to work out how to articulate this.
‘Erm,’ I say after a bit, as a space filler.
She stands up and gets oil, vinegar and mustard and makes salad dressing.
‘Going back to your driving test analogy,’ I say eventually, ‘everyone’s got something they’re never going to manage.
And most people realise that at some point.
Like you might try and try and try to run a four-minute mile but eventually you realise that it’s never going to happen and you give up, be it by choice, or by de facto continued failure.
For most people, I think there would be a number of driving tests after which they’d say: do you know what?
This is not for me and I’m giving up. Remember you nearly didn’t take your seventh one? ’
‘But I did take it,’ she says triumphantly. ‘And I passed it.’
‘But if you’d failed it, and then you’d failed say another ten, do you not think at some point you’d have said to yourself that driving wasn’t for you and given up?’
‘Well, yes, maybe.’
‘Exactly.’ I feel extremely relieved to have made my extremely sensible and valid point, and now hopefully we can have a nice evening talking about anything but this.
But no. ‘Continuing with the driving test thing,’ Lizzie says, ‘there would come a point where you’d taken a certain number of tests and you’d decide that you were never going to succeed.
But there would be a catalyst for that. After investing all that time and effort you wouldn’t want to just walk away.
Maybe the catalyst would just be that you’d failed one test too many.
Or maybe something would make you think there was a particular thing about you that meant you personally were never going to be a good driver.
What was your catalyst for coming to this realisation about relationships? ’
Lizzie is a very, very good friend of mine and that is why I’m humouring her and continuing with this annoying conversation because I really don’t like analysing myself.
‘Well,’ I begin. And then I repeat what I told Jake, about my parents and my past relationships.
The timer for the lasagne goes off just as I finish and Lizzie stands up to take it out of the oven and the salad out of the fridge, before sitting back down.
‘You know I love you and respect your wisdom and life choices,’ she says. ‘But this is silly. It isn’t you, it’s them.’
She stands up again and begins to get plates and cutlery out, waving away my offer of help.
‘Your parents,’ she says as she places the lasagne dish in the middle of the table and hands me a large spoon. ‘You know how both my parents are pretty much tone deaf but I can sing?’
I nod. That’s an understatement. Her parents really are not at all musical, and she has the voice of an actual angel.
She was a professional opera singer for a couple of years but then decided it involved too little money and too much travel for a happy adult life and became an accountant who sings in a very high-level amateur choir and occasionally does recordings for money.
‘So.’ She pushes the salad towards me. ‘I did not inherit my musical tendencies from my parents. Obviously my grandmother was a great singer—’ her father’s mother was a fairly famous professional opera singer ‘—and I probably inherited it from her. Things can skip generations. And you are the product of your parents but genes are complicated and you are a completely different person from both your parents, as we all are.’
I nod and pile salad onto my plate before saying, ‘I totally agree that people are not carbon copies of their parents, and everyone is unique. But in this instance it’s clear from my life experience that I have inherited my parents’ relationship flaws.
Just like it’s clear from your life experience that you might not have inherited your voice from your parents but you did inherit your hair from your mother. ’
Lizzie and her mum both have the most amazing thick, very curly, auburn hair.
Lizzie says, ‘Okay,’ and takes a large mouthful. When she’s swallowed, she says, ‘Soooo. Talk me through your first ever relationship.’
‘But you know about it already?’
‘Yes, but humour me.’
‘Fine but only because you’re a very good friend and you’re feeding me very delicious lasagne and salad with very nice wine.’
And then I tell her again about how I met my first boyfriend in sixth form and he dumped me two days before I was supposed to be going on holiday with his family and took another girl.
Who had been until that moment a friend of mine.
I was still a bit of a mess when I arrived at uni a month later, and my new uni friends very much helped pick up the pieces.
‘And is he happily married?’ Lizzie does know the answer to her question.
‘Nope, serial cheater who cheated on the girl he cheated on me with and is already on his third wife.’
‘Exactly.’ Lizzie raises her hands like Hallelujah. ‘He is the problem, not you. You are just one of many women he has cheated on over the years. I bet most if not all of the others have not subsequently sworn off romance.’
‘Yes but the rest of his romance victims probably haven’t had a billion other relationship fails.’
‘Fine. Talk me through your next relationship.’
We spend an uncomfortably long time going through every relationship – short and longer – that I’ve ever had, in order.
I really wouldn’t be doing this if Lizzie weren’t such a good friend and didn’t clearly have my best interests at heart. And, also, in some ways, it’s quite good.
Because, each time, Lizzie concludes that it was either him, or us, as in we just weren’t right for each other, or it was the wrong time, or, in fact, a myriad of other reasons, none of which are that my relationship fails were because I can’t have relationships.
Obviously I can’t, but it’s actually kind of nice to have it pointed out by a straight-talking friend that a lot of the failures I’ve been carrying with me as my failures were in fact someone else’s mistakes or downright shittiness, or an ‘our failure’ situation, or just one of those things.
‘So.’ Lizzie takes a long drink of the water we both now have because we finished the bottle of wine and agreed that we do not want hangovers tomorrow and moved on to water.
Then she rolls her neck and stretches her shoulders before adjusting her position, curled up in the corner of the sofa, which we moved to about halfway through the analysis of my relationship demises. ‘Where have we got to?’
‘We’ve got to the end,’ I tell her.
‘Or the beginning,’ she says.
‘The beginning of…?’
‘The beginning of your realisation that you are totally able to have great relationships. And something I forgot to mention: you and I have a great relationship. You have great relationships with all your other girlfriends. I love you. You love me. You are a person who is so capable of having great relationships.’
I’m just staring at her because on the one hand everything she’s been saying makes perfect sense, but on the other I’m pretty sure she’s wrong.
‘I love you too,’ I say in the end, because I’m not sure what else to say.
Lizzie reaches over and we share a lovely, big, long hug before we settle back into our sofa corners.
‘Would you think about all of that?’ she asks. ‘For me?’
I nod. I feel like I do now have stuff to think about.
‘And will you come for drinks at the weekend knowing that Jake will also be here? And quite a few other people.’
I nod again. I care about Lizzie too much to make things awkward for her with Dan. Jake and I can totally be polite to each other for a few minutes and then chat to other people. Totally.