by Poorna Bell
As much as I railed against bozos I dated who didn’t treat me well, full disclosure: je suis bozo, because I wasn’t always careful with men’s hearts. ’Til death do us part? I was lucky if I could make a relationship last until the next tax year.
And yet, and yet . . .
No one pressured me, but still the pressure of marital love and companionship was all around me. I ate it as a child, I breathed it as an adult. After a while it became the very air I moved around in. There was no depth gauge to measure how deep it went, how purposeful and intense. It commandeered every need and want; it sat quietly behind every thought.
I was seven when I spotted the first boy I ever liked. We were over from England staying with my grandparents in India. As I lurked in the shadows of the apartment block watching him, entranced by this creature, I finally decided to declare my love by tossing a load of heart-shaped pieces of paper over his head from a third-floor balcony. I was so sure he would instantly fall in love with me. Instead, as the hearts fluttered over his head, he just looked confused. As if, well, some nutbag had just thrown a load of paper at him.
I was fourteen when I fell into my first intense, one-sided love affair. A bored, suburban kid from the Home Counties, I was just hitting a stride in my Goth phase when, lo and behold, I came across a boy named Dan, all floppy black hair and Doc Marten boots. Every Saturday, he hung out in a crew of older kids outside HMV in the town centre.
I scoped which bands he liked from his T-shirts, so, inside the store, I dangled myself like a piece of bait in front of the CD racks, in the hope of bumping into him.
‘Ah, you too like Cradle of Filth,’ I imagined him saying. ‘In that case, you must be my one true love. Come, let us away, and snog in the park.’
I unravelled my unrequited love for him across the pages of my diary. I doodled his name on every school notebook.
‘I love him,’ I breathed to my friends, all similarly kitted out in fishnets, poorly applied eyeliner and garments resembling various interpretations of lingerie.
My bedroom was next to the garage, and frequently I would go out onto the roof to smoke while my parents were asleep. After lighting a Silk Cut like an unholy stick of incense, I would pour every ounce of my being into looking up at the stars and asking them to grant me Dan, because if that happened, I would forever be happy. I wouldn’t ask for anything more.
All my woes, from passing my exams to feeling lonely, would be fixed if he loved me too. Needless to say, Dan did not know I was alive, let alone fall in love with me, but I did pass my exams and won a book prize.
When I met the first man I actually fell in love with, as opposed to stalking him from behind dustbins, I was nineteen. I was the first person he ever loved too, and we marvelled at how lucky we were to have found each other. Our relationship didn’t last more than six months, however, because, though we loved each other, we didn’t know what to do with it, how to treat each other. We didn’t understand yet that love holds respect in one hand, and kindness in the other. Neither of us was happy.
When we eventually broke up, we said goodbye in the softest, most poignant of ways. It was summer, during a break from university. We were hanging out at my parents’ house in Kent because they had gone away on holiday. When the time came for him to leave, we knew it would be the last time we would see each other.
I was emotionally exhausted, and he sat on my bed and stroked my hair until I was almost asleep. And then he said, ‘In years to come, when you tell people about the first person you ever loved, this was it. Don’t rewrite it, don’t second-guess it. I loved you, and you loved me. We were the first to love each other.’
When that relationship finished, I didn’t pay attention to its ending. I thought we broke up because we didn’t love each other enough; I didn’t consider that we went wrong in the way we loved each other. So, by the time I was in my next relationship, I was already lost in the narrative of love and the excitement that came with it. It was my hair of the dog to all the sadness and discomfort hanging over from my last relationship, and I was only too relieved to find happiness in someone else. This happened over and over again.
And every time something ended, I was left with that same sadness – but also, increasingly, despair. At being lonely again, at having to start over. Because away from trying to establish my career and the sparkle of experiencing urban life through the bottom of a shot glass, I was convinced I couldn’t be truly happy without a significant other in it.
In my early twenties, this began as a romantic yearning, and towards the end of the decade, as more and more people paired off, I started to feel an urgent prickle beneath my skin.
No one specifically said the words, ‘When you grow up, you are going to have to meet someone, and then you are going to settle down with them and get married and have babies. You are going to need to do this before you turn thirty. And you have to do this because otherwise you won’t be happy. You will die alone. And if you don’t want to be paired up, then you are weird.’
Yet that doesn’t mean it wasn’t and isn’t implied in every single way we conduct ourselves, in the storytelling around happiness, in the millions of conversations we have over lunch, drinks after work and at family dinners. And if I felt like this as a heterosexual woman, I have no idea how my gay friends felt growing up in such a constrictive framework around happiness.
In life, when you go scuba-diving, down in the depths of the sea, you are given all manner of instruments to survive the pressure of all that water: a regulator, a compressed oxygen tank, a lifejacket that inflates to bring you back up to the surface should you get into difficulty.
But the love that we are taught to expect by right, the story we are told that marriage and kids are a guaranteed route to fulfilment and happiness – how can any of that survive the pressure of real life?
When Rob and I fell in love, it was the deepest love I have ever known. There was no lightning bolt, no dramatic music, but I knew it wasn’t like the others. It wasn’t teenage love, or desperate and needy love. It wasn’t the love of a person desperately seeking the solution in someone else, or love to alleviate loneliness.
It shot up fast like bamboo, yet it had the long, immense roots of a banyan tree, and the feeling we had when we were both together was one of immensity. One of us didn’t love the other more; we were gifted the same amount equally.
But I don’t know that Rob and I really understood what to do with life once we had found love with each other.
On our first mini-break, to Rome, three months into our relationship, we stayed in a hotel that looked as if it was decorated by an unhinged interior designer obsessed with rococo. We got drunk at the gilt-festooned hotel bar and finally said what was on both our minds: ‘I want to marry you and have your babies.’ We said this because we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, and it seemed like the obvious next step. It seemed as simple as:
• Meet the love of your life
• Marry them
• Ideally have children biologically with them; if not, adopt
• Live to a ripe old age together and be happy
It didn’t occur to me that anything could go wrong because our love felt so pure, so right and so solid. It felt like the stuff of fairy tales.
We grow up believing that once we have achieved our happy ending, we are guaranteed a happy life. So we believe, in this world that sometimes jolts and cuts us with its rough edges, that it is the lighthouse on the hill. It is warmth and safety; its pursuit and attainment will keep the dark loneliness at bay.
What no one seems to want to talk about is that loneliness exists regardless of whether you are with someone or not. That even with the light of another person casting a glow over you, loneliness within yourself cannot be fixed by the proximity of someone else. But because it’s easier to interpret when we see someone going at life on their own, we automatically assume they must be lonely. We say, This is what loneliness is.
We don’t talk
about the times when our partner is lying next to us in bed, when we can’t tell them our fears, when we worry because they aren’t telling us theirs.
What romcom starts with ‘my partner has depression’? What Disney film begins with the princess asking herself the hard questions so that she is prepared for when shit gets tough? Which one ends with the prince saying to her, ‘I need help. I don’t know if I can do this’?
The glittering bauble of the happy ending is a trap – both in the story it sells, and in the prison it creates for anyone who bought into it and finds life is more complicated than that. And also, because it isn’t an ending: it is merely the first act, and yet we base our aspirations around love on an incomplete story, and then wonder why its attainment cannot sustain us for an entire lifetime.
We got married and aspired to have kids because that was the ‘normal’ thing to want to do, and because we genuinely wanted to do it.
But we also didn’t ask ourselves the right questions about the big decisions we undertook, like, for instance, how an illness like chronic depression might affect Rob’s role as a husband or our ability to have and raise the kids we so wanted.
About a year after we were married, Rob’s behaviour gradually started to change on account of his depression. He had good days, days filled with gardening, films on the couch and big dinners, but he also had bad days. Days spent in bed, withdrawn, quiet. Worries knitted on his brow but translated into words as ‘I’m fine’ when I asked him about it.
Eventually, three years into our marriage, came the confession: ‘I’m not just dealing with depression. I’m also a heroin addict.’
After that, what I thought and knew of love was altered for ever. He also told me the most devastating news, that he had tried to take his own life a few months prior so that I wouldn’t find out he had become an addict. So my anger at being lied to flowed in the same deep waters as my concern.
The sense of being betrayed billowed in my chest. But I wanted more than anything for him to feel well and not carry his struggle on his own, so I helped him with his recovery. That’s not to say it was easy, or that it didn’t come at a huge cost. My sister was the only one who knew for a long time. To the rest of our friends and family, we had to pretend that everything was alright because we were afraid of judgement.
In my most angry of moments: ‘I can’t believe you lied to me and betrayed our marriage.’ In my saddest of moments: ‘You’ve broken my heart.’ In my most hopeful of moments: ‘We will get through this together.’
Now, I’ve come to properly understand how formidable a drug heroin is. How much it is moralised, how little is understood about how it affects the mind and the body, drawing it deeper into sickness until using it daily is the only way to maintain a normal life. How it doesn’t care whether you are rich or poor, whether you came from a loving family or not, whether you are in banking or on benefits. How recovery is long and difficult.
But back then, I didn’t know any of it. I could deal with Rob having depression. I could even deal with the addiction part, even though the road to forgiveness would be long. But at points he seemed so blasé about his recovery and, in the meantime, kept lying about whether or not he was clean and how much debt he was in until I thought I was going mad.
Worse, he could not bring himself to ask for help, despite all evidence to the contrary that he couldn’t do it alone and in secret. The final straw was the insistence that he was clean so that we could start trying for children even though he had relapsed on heroin weeks before.
I was so deeply unhappy, I asked for a separation. I needed space to think about what I needed, and whether Rob was capable of being in a relationship. He went to New Zealand to stay with family, while I stayed in London.
I didn’t know how I could be without this man, who was so soft in his handling of me, who made me feel like the most beautiful woman on earth even when I looked like something dredged from a drain. But, on the other hand, I didn’t know how I could be with him as he was.
I knew then that love wasn’t enough. That only Rob could save himself. I knew that as long as we were together, his recovery would only be conducted because he thought he’d lose me, rather than because he was actively choosing it for himself.
While he was still in New Zealand, I told him I didn’t think we could work things out, and, eight days later, he killed himself in Auckland.
And this love, this immense love connecting two people like a beam of light, snapped, as one person fell into darkness and the other was left standing at the edge clutching her broken heart, soaked in grief, finding she no longer belongs in the land of living, but not having the courage to follow him to the land of the dead.
When you start learning to dive, one of the first things they impress upon you is how important it is to go back up to the surface slowly. You are told lots of important things about pressure, how it affects the body, and buoyancy-control devices.
But when you are actually inside the ocean’s belly, it’s another thing altogether.
You have been taught the practicalities, but not the poetry of it. Your body slips past the grasp of gravity as you sit, weightless, perfectly caught between two realms.
When Rob was alive, I was too afraid to try diving. It felt too otherworldly; dark and hissing and hidden. But after he passed away, it appealed to me for the same reasons I had found it frightening: I wanted to float in a world that moved in such fluid ribbons of darkness and light.
The first time I tried it, shoals of fish had swum around me in a ball, their silver scales like suits of armour in the light, the dance of lionfish fin rays cast spotted shadows on the sea bed, baby clownfish nestled in pudgy, waving anemones, moray eels stuck their sharp little teeth out from their burrows, bright-purple clams pursed their lips the nearer we floated.
Save for the hiss of my regulator and murmuring bubbles of out-breath, I was enveloped in silence. It rolled over and under our bodies with the current.
Away from the world of starfish and spiky black sea urchins and into the distance, I could sense the susurration of water, the feeling of such vastness out there. As with all places that blurred the lines of existence, wrapped in a valley of quiet where two worlds seemed to join, I felt the skin between my world and Rob’s pressing together.
I looked down, the peaceful colour of that world now lost through a gateway of algae and murk. But then I looked up, and saw the surface shimmering, like a dazzlingly bright portal. I knew that when we went all the way to the top, I would feel the sun on my skin, the waves licking my face and, eventually, the hum and tick of my routine back on land: coffee, reading, lunch and maybe a run.
The first year after Rob died could be summed up in that moment of looking back at the surface of a world I didn’t belong to. Knowing I wanted to, one day, but I wasn’t there yet.
I was living in our rented flat in St Margarets, south London, after he died. My friend Hasiba – or Has, as we call her – moved in with me, and although at first I wasn’t sure about living with another person, it helped to have moments when I wasn’t in my own head.
I didn’t know how I was going to get through the next day, let alone a week, or a year, or a lifetime. It seemed too much to comprehend. So my world became very small and divided into sunrise and sunset – these were the markers I used to get me through one day to the next.
I would wake up and remember. Then I would shower, get dressed in whatever didn’t require ironing and go to work. I would somehow make it through the day talking to people, sitting in meetings, and then I would get on the train home. I would fiddle with my Spotify playlist because there is something about grief that completely shits on your ability to read. I would pop into the supermarket, pick something to grill, like a chunk of salmon, and make a big salad.
During the day, my friends would text me, or my parents would call. Everything became small: I could only handle small conversations, small groups of people. I couldn’t take on anyone else’s problems during this
time.
As night fell, I would put on one of Rob’s old T-shirts that I had brought back with me from Auckland after the funeral. I would inhale it even though it no longer smelled like him, as if somewhere the fabric and thread were holding the memory of him within. I would get into bed and set my alarm. And then it would come – the wave of it, the crest of a hundred thoughts that he wasn’t here, that he would never be here, that I should have saved him, that I couldn’t do this without him.
At some point I would fall asleep, then wake up and do everything all over again the next day.
I don’t know how I looked to other people – probably fragile, barely there, distant and far away in the eyes. But they knew I was different now. They knew that Rob’s death was altering me one painful molecule at a time; only the end result remained to be seen.
I wore the detached look of an observer, because I was. I didn’t have a husband, and I didn’t have to date other men. My status on kids was unknown; my womb might forever lie empty. I did not have to buy a house, I didn’t have to involve myself in petty arguments, I didn’t have to attend people’s weddings, baby showers, hen dos, kids’ parties.
People were amazed when I did basic life stuff like go to work or manage a conversation, so I had dispensation to do whatever the fuck I liked.
That didn’t mean the grief didn’t bubble out at strange and inconvenient times.
A few weeks after the funeral, I was having a sad day at work. Nothing in particular had happened, but I knew the signs, and I had to leave the office before I started crying at my desk. It was lunchtime, so I decided to distract myself by getting some food, and as I stood in line at our local takeaway place, I started crying. All of a sudden, I heard someone say, ‘Deciding what to get, hey?’
It was a male colleague of mine who wasn’t exactly known for being soft and fluffy. I tried to stop crying but couldn’t, and in the end blubbed, ‘I’m just . . . sob . . . trying . . . sob . . . to decide . . . sob . . . between a chorizo chicken hot box and . . . sob . . . Sicilian meatballs.’