Shop 'til you're dropped

JUST when I thought things couldn’t get worse, I received the phone call that made my heart skip a beat and my mind go into overdrive.
It was from the ex. Worse, my favourite ex — newly single from a long relationship, with too much time on his hands to think what might have been. And what could still be.
I hate to say it, but I had been waiting for this phone call since he told me that he and his now ex were moving in together.
When I spoke to him last they were getting ready for the big move, talking about decorating, joint bank accounts and even a new addition to their newly formed family — a cat.
Instead of weekends out with the boys, he was now trailing round B&Q and deciding whether it would be ‘Whiskas’ of ‘Kitekat’ for tea.
Hearing about his new found ability to cope with proper co-habiting relationship sent out the warning signals to me straight away. Firstly, I couldn’t comprehend that this was the same person I used to know, and secondly, if he was coping with the whole big, bad, scary world of commitment, why was I still terrified of it?
In the end, he was trying to be something that she wanted him to be and in doing so totally lost all idea of what he wanted. I haven’t got to the bottom of it yet, but I figure she must have realised that he just wasn’t that person, no matter how hard he tried.
Now she claims he’s too good for her and that she wants him to go out an find someone better than her, which I take to mean: “I’ve changed my mind about you. I want you to move out so I can find someone better than you.”
Although it’s been put to me, I don’t think for a minute that I could be that ‘someone better’; not for the moment anyway.
The reason our little adventure together worked so well was because we were, and still are, the male and female equivalent of each other — we knew what we were like without having to find out unexpectedly months down the line. We were at college, we were having fun, with each other and others.
The whole relationship was treated like the preliminary months of a normal one. There was no talk of the future as we both knew there probably wouldn’t be one.
To transfer that into a proper relationship, circa now, wouldn’t work. It would be mistaking lust for love for the very beginning, and I try to avoid that at all costs.
But what if we do mistake ‘the one’ for just another one?
How many of us have shrugged off a club/holiday/work/college romance as just another thing? Who’s to say that they are not the soul mate that those in the know say we have, somewhere in the world?
What if we do actually find each other but then miss each other completely?
After hearing about the lovely Dutch rugby player I met recently in an Edinburgh club, my mother, who I’m sure has been saving up sayings to pass down to future generations, warned me that I as going to ‘let all the bonnets go by for a hat’.
We’ve kept contact by email since this chance encounter, and this single Dutch truly brings a new meaning to ‘double Dutch’
So now I’m being haunted by the ghosts of love past, present and future. I feel like I’ve been plucked from a modern-day Scrooge story, where Jim Bowen is parading these three suitors in front of me saying: “Here’s what you could have won.’
Thank the Lord for my ‘Samantha’; my eternally single girlfriend, with more balls than most of the men I’ve been out with, who filled my weekend with wine and window shopping,
Instead of looking for Mr Right, she says, I should be looking for Mr Right Now.
When you’re shopping, it’s always better to try something for yourself first, as it might look very different on someone else.
With my ex, he tried the whole ‘relationship’ thing for size and realised it didn’t fit. By this point, his girlfriend had already decided he was an accessory that no longer went with anything else she had. So now he’s back on the shelf.
I have been trying something myself. It’s one of those things that you really want, but you just don’t need. The thing that you keep trying just in case this time it fits, but you just keep getting disappointed, The thing that you worry might be gone when you go back for it when it will fit, only the next time you see it, it’s draped round someone else.
I thought it suited me, but every time I ask for an opinion, my nearest and dearest do that face that tells you they don’t want to tell you that’s it’s not right for you, because they know how much you want it.
So for now I’ll just sit on this shelf, like the ex, until I get an offer I can’t reuse.