Me, too?
(Dedicated with love and gratitude to the many courageous women who made me feel brave enough to share this)
“I’m afraid I wasn’t…a gentleman,” he said.
“I’m glad you weren’t,” I replied. At the time, I think I meant it.
I was 26, bored, broke and broken up with. My life really had nothing to recommend it, and I was profoundly sad. Not depressed, as such — I think anyone would have struggled to be sunny, under my circumstances. At work, I’d been given a strange sort of promotion that was really a kind of punishment, made worse because my best friend had left for a better, more glamorous job. My other best friends were no longer my housemates, because the property we were living in was being sold, and they were all about to start cohabiting with their partners. I’d been dumped by someone who was constantly and creatively cruel — to the extent that they restarted the relationship in order to dump me all over again a month later. I really had nothing going for me, beyond the fact that I was quite young, and really not nearly as fat and unattractive as I believed myself to be at the time. Also, I had a lot of free time, and I wasted it on Twitter, because it was easier to flirt there than in real life and I liked to tell stupid jokes
When one of my favourite writers started following me, it was the most exciting thing that happened to me in months. When he started sending me messages, I was beside myself. What on earth could he possibly see in me? How could he find me interesting, in any way? I had nothing to offer this clever, successful adult man! He had a good twenty years on me, surely he’d find me trivial and silly? But the messages increased in their intensity, and I was so twitchily obsessed with our communication that I constantly felt slightly sick. When he invited me out to lunch, I panicked. I made up a story, in order to have a credible reason for taking a day off work with barely any notice. I convinced myself he’d cancel. I spent thirty pounds I didn’t have on new lipstick, and worried about how I’d pay the bill if we split it. I remember shaking my hair out of my coat, walking up the stairs to the restaurant bar and worrying, worrying. What if I disappoint him? I can only disappoint him.
Ten hours later, I came to, blinking. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I think I got carried away,” he said, and I replied the way women do when they assume they must be the ones who have done something wrong. “It’s OK, it’s fine, it’s fine.” We were in a hotel, to which I had gone willingly. Even though I was so drunk that the bar staff refused to serve me, when he’d sent me to get another bottle of champagne. I know we’d eaten lunch, we’d been to another bar, we’d met his agent — and then, here I was. I got drunk. I was the one who had decided to keep drinking. And this was a story! The hotel was far more fabulous than any of the other places I’d ever been surprised to wake up in.
I was still trying to piece together parts of the night when he started putting his shoes on, looking for underwear under the bed, gathering his real life together. “My situation is…perhaps more complicated than I led you to believe. I need to leave. But you stay here. You can have anything from the mini bar, but don’t touch the Moët!” He laughed. A joke. And I felt like the punchline.
We met a few more times, always in hotels. There was the occasion when he became paranoid about itemised credit card bills, and asked me to pay. He gave me cash. I can’t remember who made the joke about me being a prostitute, but I did not find it as funny as I pretended to. He also ordered a bottle of very expensive wine that I ended up paying for, and I felt too shy, poor and gauche to tell him that I earned less than £20,000 a year, and really, really couldn’t afford to part with eighty unexpected pounds. There was the moment when he was going down on me, and I felt his teeth and told him he was hurting me. He said “No, I’m not.” He was more embarrassed about the quality of the hotel than the fact that he had caused me some pain and unhappiness.
What I hated the most, the part that made me feel the most empty, the most sad, was the fact that even when we were in a room together, he seemed absent. I craved intimacy and tenderness, and I felt so stupid for wanting those things when he was scrolling, twitching, one eye on his phone feed and the other on the telly, with the golf. I really, really tried to pretend that I was interested in golf. The keener I became, the more casually he treated me. I thought I was lucky. I thought that according to his currency, that was all I was worth. I would do anything to put myself at his disposal, even though he made me feel increasingly disposable.
The ending was gradual. It helped that he cancelled on me so regularly, often just when I was struggling with the snap fastening on a suspender belt, that I didn’t feel as though there was any kind of relationship to break up. He moved abroad, and I met and fell in love with someone loving and kind, who showed me what a fully functional relationship looked and felt like. In spite of this, I still felt devastated when he started seeing a good friend. I hated her. It took me a long time to see that perhaps my hate had been misdirected.
At the time, I consented to everything willingly and enthusiastically, even retrospectively. I told him I was glad that he’d had sex with me when I was too drunk to see. I was a groupie with nothing to lose. I believed I should be grateful for his attention, grateful that someone with his talent was interested in seeing a picture of my tits. If this was someone else’s story, my heart would break for them, but I struggle to move past the idea that this was all my decision — and my fault.
It’s only now that I realise how little power I had, and how keen he was to encourage me to give it all away. I was convenient, and I was collateral. He did not treat me like an equal, in any way. He warned me that he wasn’t looking for a relationship. I don’t think I ever believed that if I hung around for long enough, he would change his mind, but I did hope, against all mounting evidence, that he might make me feel as special and important as he did when he first shocked me with that initial shot of attention. I felt utterly dehumanised. He’d seen me, picked me up and instantly become bored of me.
You can’t criticise a man for simply going off someone. I can’t claim that he owed me anything. But he found me when I was vulnerable, and left me feeling significantly worse. He pursued me, he knew how I felt about him, and he made me feel as though those feelings were failings. I think he believed his success, career and status needed constant feeding, and I should consider myself lucky to be tossed into their jaws. He was, I think, a product of a world in which men — maybe creative men, especially — are given tacit permission to see young women as a perk to which their genius entitles them. Women cannot flourish in this world. We are told, literally, to go suck a dick.
We’re made to believe that Bad Men will be visibly and obviously terrifying. We’re told their cruelty will be deliberate and purposeful. We’re not warned about the men who seek to destroy us with their dismissiveness, who don’t believe in our personhood enough to try and take it away in the first place. Even now, I’m furious with myself for being so, so stupid. It’s hard to acknowledge that I’m probably in the middle of a long line of women who weren’t stupid. We were just encouraged to believe that we were not worthy, and sacrificed to serve the ego of someone who really wasn’t worth it. If telling my story has any purpose, I hope it’s this. We’re culturally conditioned to believe our power isn’t worth holding onto, and men are told to take it. When we come together and talk, we might just get angry enough to grab it back.
