Red Lion, 8.30

Alan doesn’t understand her. He only thinks in numbers. He only drinks in restaurants where the girls are fully covered.

Shut up. I wish he would just shut the fuck up. My boyfriend Adam always sings this line from Deacon Blue’s 1988 hit Chocolate Girl when we are on the brink of a disagreement. When I am getting frustrated with him and instead of him trying to understand the, admittedly mental, place I am often coming from. After four (and a half?) years its hit me that it doesn’t even work because HIS NAME IS ADAM.

It’s one of those things which used to be cute and funny before, and now it has become worn, it’s tired and won’t carry anymore. Like a split Bag For Life.

I can’t believe I am comparing my relationship with a bag for fucking life. When you start to grow up with someone you tend to grow in different directions. Adam has become a familiarity to me, but I find him endlessly irritating, kind of like the way I found my younger brother irritating growing up. The only problem is I am not programmed to love Adam unconditionally, like a sibling. With romantic love, there must always be conditions.

We met in a bar, around the time when people stopped meeting in bars. When single people would only go to bars with friends or dating app matches that were screened 3-5 working days before a 7pm meet up at Gordon's Wine Bar.

The reason I always dismissed, now I dare to admit regretfully, dating apps was that they will often make you picky in a way people just weren’t before. With so much information inorganically presented to you, you start to get into patterns like “I could NEVER go out with anyone that lives in Peckham”, “He’s a CEO? Umm yeah right!” “They are 5’8…No. Thank. You.” Whereas if you were to meet in a more traditional setting, you probably wouldn’t even think of those things if they were charming and funny and kind enough. That’s what Adam and I thought about each other. Both naive, younger and both with a ridiculous longing for “the past” - when people would rent flats above shops, cut their hair and get a job, smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend they never went to school…

Those first few weeks of being together we’d smoke fags on his sofa, drinking tea and watching old episodes of Father Ted on VHS (unironically), saying how it genuinely felt just like the “old days”. We both romanticised the 80s and 90s so much, in hindsight only really bonding over our shared nostalgia. This is ridiculous as now our fingertips are only just touching our 30s, making us yes technically very late 80s/ early 90s babies, meaning we were actually noughties children.

By the time we were allowed to legally get legless, the smoking ban was introduced and most boozers we would have been dragged to as kids were now gastro pubs. We would never live like Common People. It didn’t help that ”millennial” become such a cultural buzzword, so we just slotted into that description, our what would now terrifyingly be considered “vintage” aesthetic slipping away. Our forced cockney accents became extinct. Our friends starting meeting people on Tinder, getting jobs in tech and forming their own lives and groups. I should have known our lifestyle would never last, they only ever made three series of Father Ted.

Adam’s pretty standard admin job at a recruitment company led to a promotion. He became a proper recruiter and I was over the moon for him. We celebrated over a bottle of prosecco because it was just the done thing. Now I know that champagne will always be better and if I am really that skint then Cava will still be better that fucking prosecco. I also know now that recruiters are fucking dickheads. They are basically sales guys with a job title. Adam started to wear proper suits, use expensive hair products and cologne, and go out after work to city bars, doing coke, not coming home until 4am and having the prissy little clerks and receptionists text him all the time. I hated what he’d become, it wasn’t who or what I had fallen in love with. He has also started to want a baby recently, which I never did and still don’t, and it would never work with our lifestyle. I am a florist, one of those jobs that sound lovely but is fucking hard work and very early starts and very long hours. I’ve heard mothering is also all of those things and I am fucking good at my job and make decent money from it, so why would I give that up for a job which is just as laborious that I have no idea if I would be good at it. I also like to get pissed with my mates when the evenings are free and don’t want to reign that in either. Adam doesn’t understand this. Alan doesn’t understand her.

Adam and I argue a lot, about all the big and small things. Our run-ins flit from mind-numbingly ordinary to toxic. He’s controlling and I am too. He wants me to stop smoking, and get vaping like him. I want him to stop taking cocaine and actually use the gym membership he insists on paying 100 odd a month on. He wants me to be more of a homemaker and have his nob end colleagues over for midweek dinners. I want to spend my free evenings down the pub with my actual mates. I want to know what exactly does he mean when he asks me what night the bins go out? He’s lived here for how many years and is he actually thick as fucking shit? He wants me to do anal sex more with him, I want to ask him why he carries condoms in his jacket pocket when I’ve got the coil and if he thinks I am actually thick as fucking shit? He wants his Mum round for Sunday lunch. I don’t because I’ve got a wedding job early on Monday, and his Mum is a Facebook racist who keeps asking when we are getting pregnant. Like fuck off Siobhan, WE won't be pregnant, I will be and I don’t fucking fancy it. Besides, her son's new sexual preferences don’t actually lead to pregnancy. He wants me to stop swearing at his Mum, I don’t want to ever see him or his fucking mum again and that I want to leave this cunting flat. It’s around this point I will dramatically slam out of the flat, purposefully leaving my phone so he has no way of reaching me. This will make him anxious. Manipulative of me I know. I’m sitting on my friend's kitchen sideboard later and they ask why don’t I just leave him and I say that I can’t afford London rent on my own and we both bought the telly and anyway had they’d seen the newest episode of Game of Thrones? And then the subject has changed and forgotten about until the next row. Me, my friend and their partner loves Game of Thrones…they’d both had it written on their Hinge bios and was one of the reasons they matched a couple of years ago. They are still in love and they get on. Go figure.

It is more than just the rent. And the telly. As I said Adam and I are very familiar with each other, which is hard to shake when you’re as unhealthy and codependent as us. We both are from and like the same area of London, both have only lived with each other. Leaving to live with…other people? would just be unimaginable. We are both from broken homes, not unusual these days but it’s made us both with sometimes different but pretty much the same abandonment issues. We have separately suggested couples therapy, our mums separately talked us out of it saying we were “being dramatic” and “there ain’t nothing wrong with ya” and “that’s bloody expensive” and “a waste a’time!”. The familiarity is the dusty sticky tape holding things sort of into place. We have both changed and matured in very different ways, so the familiarity is becoming curdled. What remains is this tense discomfort, which is different from the regular awkwardness you get with people you don’t live with. There is silence, but it is not polite. Just tension. Short statements if communication is absolutely necessary, vacant stares replacing eye contact. Jokes and anecdotes that are so recycled that they have just lost their laughter. I remember the first time I felt it. When the flame I thought we had started to die.

About 18 months ago we went to a fancy dress party where the theme was famous couples. The hosts dressed as Natalie Portman in the pink wig and Clive Owen in a suit from the film Closer. Not technically a couple but they looked fucking good. The couple were new, but you can just tell they would grow old, together and their love will age like a good antique, a mahogany table, rich and sexy. I once read that Victorians found table legs lustful and would cover them to abolish sexy thoughts. Their relationship is a victorian table, so sexy in their early years and will age classically and timelessly. Unlike my relationship, ageing like a fucking plastic bag, which is broken and shit but feels like will take hundred of years to just break the fuck down. We dressed at the Twits, but Adam found the fake beard too itchy. He took it off and then everyone thought we were Fred & Rose West, and they didn’t receive this well. Neither did we. We weren’t a good pair.

Strangely, I don’t recall the night I fell in love with him, if I even ever did, but this was definitely the night I fell completely out of love with him. Like falling out of a cab on a night out that’s gone on too late and no one picking you up from the cold hard rain-soaked pavement.

But I won’t leave him, I just want to drink this bottle of merlot with you and tell you how much I literally fucking hate Adam. And then we can laugh about it. Whilst drunk. Thank you for being here for me. Tonight has been lovely, so how are you?