by Alice Oseman
I’d spent my teenage life feeling lonely every time I saw a couple at a party, or two people kissing outside the school gate. I’d felt lonely every time I read some cute proposal story on Twitter, or saw someone’s five-year-anniversary Facebook post, or even just saw someone hanging out with their partner in their Instagram story, sitting with them on a sofa with their dog, watching TV. I felt lonely first because I hadn’t experienced that. And I felt even lonelier when I started to believe I never would.
This loneliness – being without Jason and Pip – was worse.
Friends are automatically classed as ‘less important’ than romantic partners. I’d never questioned that. It was just the way the world was. I guess I’d always felt that friendship just couldn’t compete with what a partner offered, and that I’d never really experience real love until I found romance.
But if that had been true, I probably wouldn’t have felt like this.
I loved Jason and Pip. I loved them because I didn’t have to think around them. I loved that we could sit in silence together. I loved that they knew all my favourite foods and they could instantly tell when I was in a bad mood. I loved Pip’s stupid sense of humour and how she immediately made every room she entered a happier place. I loved how Jason knew exactly what to say when you were upset and could always calm you down.
I loved Jason and Pip. And now they were gone.
I had been so desperate for my idea of true love that I couldn’t even see it when it was right in front of my face.
I pressed a cold hand against my car, which was as far up the drive of our house as it could get. I’d missed my car.
There were three other cars on our driveway and four more parked on the pavement outside, which told me one thing: all of the Warr family had congregated at our house. This was not an unusual occurrence around Christmas at the Warrs’, but a family party on December twenty-first was a little premature, and it was not exactly the environment I wanted to return to after my university term from hell.
‘Georgia? What are you doing?’
Dad was holding open the front door for me. He’d picked me up from the station.
‘Nothing,’ I said, dropping my hand from my car.
There was a sort of cheer from the twenty-or-so members of my family socialising in the living room as I entered. I guess that was nice. I’d forgotten what it was like to be around that many people who knew who I was.
Mum gave me a big hug. My older brother, Jonathan, and his wife, Rachel, came over for a hug too. Then Mum wasted no time in making me take everyone’s tea and coffee orders and informing me of the hour-by-hour schedule for the next week, including the fact that my aunt, uncle and cousin Ellis would be staying here until Boxing Day. Like a big family sleepover.
‘You don’t mind Ellis sharing your room, do you?’ Mum asked.
I wasn’t thrilled by this turn of events, but I liked Ellis, so it wouldn’t be too bad.
My bedroom was exactly the same as I’d left it – books, TV, stripy bedsheets – apart from the addition of a blow-up mattress for Ellis. I flopped straight on to my bed. It smelt right.
Even by the end of term, university hadn’t felt like home.
‘Come on, then!’ Gran squawked at me as I squeezed on to the sofa next to her. ‘Tell us everything!’
By ‘everything’ she definitely didn’t mean how I’d utterly destroyed the very small number of friendships I’d had, begrudgingly realised that I wasn’t straight and was in fact a sexuality that very few people in real life have heard of, and realised that the world was so obsessed with romantic love that I couldn’t go an hour without hating myself because I didn’t feel it.
So instead I told her, and the other twelve family members listening in, about my lectures (‘interesting’), my room in college (‘spacious’), and my roommate (‘very nice’).
Unfortunately, Gran liked to pry. ‘And what about friends? Have you made any nice friends?’ She leant towards me, patting me slyly on the leg. ‘Or met any nice young men? I bet there are lots of lovely boys in Durham.’
I didn’t hate Gran for being like this. It wasn’t her fault. She had been raised to believe that it was a girl’s primary aim in life to get married and have a family. She had done just that when she was my age, and I think she felt very fulfilled because of it. Fair enough. You do you.
But that didn’t stop me from being deeply, deeply annoyed.
‘Actually,’ I said, trying as hard as I could to keep the irritation out of my voice, ‘I’m not really interested in getting a boyfriend.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said, patting my leg again, ‘plenty of time, my love. Plenty of time.’
But my time is now, I wanted to scream. My life is happening right now.
My family then launched into a conversation about how easy it was to get into a relationship at uni. In the corner, I spotted my cousin Ellis, sitting quietly with a glass of wine and one leg crossed over the other. She caught my stare, smiled a small smile, and rolled her eyes at the group around us. I smiled back. Maybe, at least, I would have an ally.
Ellis was thirty-four and used to be a model. A legit fashion model who did runway shows and magazine adverts. She gave that up in her mid-twenties and used the money she’d saved to spend a couple of years painting, which, as it turned out, she was very good at. She’s been a professional artist ever since.
I only saw her a couple of times a year, but she always caught up with me when we did see each other, asking me how school was, how my friends were, if there’d been any recent developments in my life. I’d always liked her.
I don’t know when I started to notice how Ellis was sort of the butt of the joke in our family. Every time she and Gran were in the same room, Gran would manage to drag the conversation back to the fact that she wasn’t married yet and hadn’t provided the family with any cute babies for them to coo over. Mum always spoke about her like she had some sort of tragic life, just because she lived by herself and had never had a long-term relationship.
I’d thought she had a super-cool life. But I guess I had always wondered whether she was happy. Or whether she was sad and alone, desperately wishing for romance, just like I had been.
‘No boyfriend, then?’ Ellis asked me as I slumped down next to her in the conservatory that evening.
‘Tragically, no,’ I said.
‘Sounding a little sarcastic there.’
‘Maybe so.’
Ellis smiled and shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about Gran. She’s been saying the same things to me for the past fifteen years. She’s just scared she’s going to die without a great-grandchild.’
I chuckled, even though this was something I thought about and felt a little bad about. I didn’t want Gran to die unhappy.
‘So …’ Ellis continued. ‘There haven’t been any … girlfriends? Instead?’
It took a moment for me to realise that she didn’t mean ‘girlfriend’ in the platonic sense of the word. She was asking me if I was gay.
Which, you know, massive props to Ellis. If I had been gay, this would have been a bloody amazing moment for me.
‘Um, no,’ I said. ‘Not really interested in girlfriends either.’
Ellis nodded. For a moment she looked like she was going to ask something else, but then she just said, ‘Fancy a bit of Cuphead?’ So we turned on the Xbox and played Cuphead until everyone went home or went to bed.
The Warrs are one of those terrible families where Christmas Day present-opening is banned until the late afternoon, but that year I didn’t mind too much, having other things on my mind. I hadn’t asked for anything in particular, so ended up with a big stack of books, an assortment of bath products I’d probably never use, and a sweatshirt from Mum featuring the phrase ‘Fries before guys’. The family had a good laugh about that one.
After presents, the grandparents all fell asleep in the conservatory, Mum got into an intense chess match against Jonathan while Dad and Rachel prepared the tea. Ellis and I
played a bit of Mario Kart before I snuck off to my bedroom to chill out and check my phone.
I opened my Facebook message chat with Pip.
Georgia Warr
merry christmas!! i love you, hope you had a good day yesterday xxxxx
It was still unread. I’d been drunk when I sent it midway through Christmas dinner. Maybe she just hadn’t seen it yet.
I checked her Instagram. Pip’s family celebrated Christmas primarily on Christmas Eve, and she’d been posting a lot of Instagram stories. She’d posted a photo in the early hours of the morning – her family walking along the street on their way back from Midnight Mass.
i fell asleep in church lol
And she’d posted another photo half an hour ago of her in her family kitchen, putting a doughball into her mouth.
leftover buñuelos get the FUCK inside my belly
I thought about responding but couldn’t think of a funny thing to say.
Since she posted that half an hour ago, she had probably seen my message on her phone. She was just ignoring me.
She still hated me, then.
I was tucked up in bed by 10 p.m. Overall, not a bad Christmas Day, despite having lost my best friends and the way my singleness was becoming an ongoing family joke.
One day I would probably have to just tell them.
I don’t like guys. Oh, so you like girls? No, I don’t like girls either. What? That doesn’t make any sense. Yes, it does. It’s a real thing. You just haven’t met the right person yet. It’ll happen with time. No, it won’t. This is who I am. Are you feeling OK? Maybe we should get you an appointment with the GP. It’s called being ‘aromantic asexual’. Well, that sounds fake, doesn’t it? Did you hear about that on the internet?
Ugh. OK. Didn’t really want to venture into that conversation any time soon.
I was heading downstairs to get some water when I heard the raised voices. At first, I thought it might just be Mum and Dad bickering at each other, but then I realised the voices were, in fact, Auntie Sal and Uncle Gavin. Ellis’s parents. I hung back on the stairs, not wanting to interrupt.
‘Look at Jonathan,’ Auntie Sal was saying. ‘He’s got it sussed. Married, his own house, his own business. He’s set for life.’
‘And he’s a decade younger than you!’ Uncle Gavin added.
Oh. Ellis was there too.
I wasn’t super close to Auntie Sal and Uncle Gavin. Same as Ellis, really – they didn’t live close by, so we only saw them a few times a year at family gatherings.
But they always seemed a little more uptight than my parents. A little more traditional.
‘I’m aware,’ said Ellis. Her voice took me by surprise. She sounded so tired.
‘Doesn’t that bother you at all?’ asked Auntie Sal.
‘What is there to bother me?’
‘That Jonathan is growing up, starting a family, making plans while you’re still …’
‘Still what?’ snapped Ellis. ‘What am I doing that’s so bad?’
‘There’s no need to shout,’ said Uncle Gavin.
‘I’m not shouting.’
‘You’re getting older,’ continued Auntie Sal. ‘You’re in your mid-thirties. You’re passing your dating prime. Soon it’s going to get harder and harder for you to have children.’
‘I don’t want to date, and I don’t want children,’ said Ellis.
‘Oh, come on, now. Not this again.’
‘You are our only child,’ said Uncle Gavin. ‘Do you know what that’s like for us? You are the sole carrier of my surname.’
‘It’s not my fault you didn’t have any more children,’ said Ellis.
‘And what, that’s it for us? No more children in the family? We don’t get to be grandparents? That’s the thanks we get for raising you?’
Ellis sighed loudly.
‘We’re not trying to criticise your … life choices,’ said Auntie Sal. ‘We know it’s not about us, but … we just want you to be happy. I know you think you’re happy now, but what about ten years from now? Twenty? Forty? What will your life be like when you’re Gran’s age, without a partner, without children? Who is going to be there to support you? You’ll have no one.’
‘Maybe I would be happy,’ Ellis shot back, ‘if you hadn’t spent my entire life brainwashing me into thinking that finding a husband and having babies is the only way for me to feel my life is worth anything. Maybe then I would be happy.’
Auntie Sal went to interrupt, but Ellis cut her off.
‘It’s not as if I’m actively rejecting people, OK?’ Ellis sounded on the verge of tears now. ‘I don’t like anyone like that. I never do. This is just who I am and one way or another, we’re all going to have to put up with it. I can still do amazing things with my life. I have friends. And I’ll make new friends. I was a successful model. Now I’m an artist and my paintings are selling really well. I’m thinking about going to uni to study art, since I never got to go the first time. I have a really nice house, if you could ever be bothered to visit. If you tried, and I mean really tried, you could actually be proud of all the things I’ve done in my life and all the things I’m going to do.’
There was a long, horrible silence.
‘What would you say,’ said Auntie Sal, speaking slowly as if choosing her words, ‘to thinking about trying therapy again? I’m still not sure we found the right therapist last time. If we kept looking, we could find someone who could really help.’
Silence.
And then Ellis said, ‘I don’t need fixing. You don’t get to do that to me again.’
There was the sound of chairs scraping the floor as someone stood up.
‘Ell, don’t do this,’ said Uncle Gavin. ‘Don’t have a strop like last time.’
‘I am an adult,’ said Ellis. There was a contained fury in her voice that reinforced the statement. ‘And if you’re not going to respect me, then I am not going to be around you.’
I watched, hidden in the darkness at the top of the stairs, as Ellis sat down on the bottom step to put her shoes on. Then she pulled on her coat, calmly opened our front door, and stepped outside.
Before I could think twice, I raced to my room, grabbed my dressing gown and slippers, and ran after her.
I found her sitting in her car, vape pen hanging from her mouth but with seemingly no intention of smoking anything.
I knocked on the window, which made her jump so hard that the vape pen flew out of her mouth.
‘Holy fucking shit,’ she said after turning on the ignition and rolling down the window. ‘You scared the absolute poo out of me.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What are you doing out here?’
‘I …’ Maybe this was a bit awkward. ‘I heard your parents being shitty to you.’
Ellis just looked at me.
‘I thought you could use some company,’ I said. ‘I dunno. I can go back inside, if you want.’
Ellis shook her head. ‘Nah. Get in here.’
I opened the door and hopped inside. She actually had a really nice car. Modern. Way more expensive than my elderly Fiat Punto.
There was a silence as I waited for her to say something. She located her vape pen, slotted it neatly into the compartment in front of the gear lever, and then said, ‘I’m in the mood for a McDonald’s.’
‘On Christmas Day?’
‘Yeah. I just really want a McFlurry right now.’
Thinking about it, I was actually really up for some chips. I guess it was a ‘fries before guys’ day.
I also wanted to talk to Ellis about everything I’d just heard. Especially about ‘not liking anyone’.
‘We could go to McDonald’s,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
So Ellis started the car, and off we went.
‘Oh my God, yes,’ said Ellis, dunking the plastic spoon into her McFlurry. ‘This is what Christmas Day has always been missing.’
‘Agreed,’ I said, already halfway throug
h my chips.
‘McDonald’s. She never lets me down.’
‘I’m not sure that’s the slogan.’
‘It should be.’
We were parked in the restaurant’s car park, which was almost entirely empty apart from us. I’d messaged Mum and Dad about where I was, and Dad sent back a thumbs-up emoji, so they probably weren’t bothered. Being in the car in my pyjamas and dressing gown did feel a bit wrong, though.
Ellis had chatted to me the whole way there about the most mundane topics. It was only a fifteen-minute drive, but for that whole fifteen minutes I hadn’t been able to get in much more than a ‘yeah’ or an ‘mmhm’ of agreement. I hadn’t been able to ask anything I really wanted to ask.
Are you like me? Are we the same?
‘So,’ I was finally able to say while she was mid-spoonful of ice cream, ‘your parents.’
She made a grunting noise. ‘Oh, yeah. Jesus, sorry you had to hear any of that. It’s very embarrassing that they still treat me like I’m fifteen. No offence to all the fifteen-year-olds out there. Even fifteen-year-olds don’t deserve to be spoken to like that.’
‘They sounded …’ I searched for the word. ‘… unreasonable.’
Ellis laughed. ‘Yeah. Yes, they did.’
‘Do they get at you about that stuff a lot?’
‘Whenever I see them, yeah,’ said Ellis. ‘Which is less and less these days, to be honest.’
I couldn’t imagine seeing Mum and Dad less and less. But maybe that’s what would happen to me, if I never got married or had children. I would just be phased out of my family. A ghost. Only popping up at occasional family gatherings.
If I came out to them, would they make me get therapy, like Ellis’s parents had?
‘Do you ever believe them?’ I asked.
Ellis was clearly not expecting this question. She took a long breath in, staring at her ice cream.
‘You mean, do I ever feel like my life is worthless because I won’t ever have a partner or children?’ she asked.
It sounded worse when she put it like that. But I wanted to know.