An ex once told me that relationships, both romantic and friendly form in the exchange of information.

I’ll tell you something about me in exchange for something about you.  Favourite holiday destination. Top tier cinema snack.  Earliest memory.  Wants, dreams, hopes, desires, kinks, needs, deepest darkest secrets.  Amazon Prime password.  We trade until we’re bound together by a shared knowledge of one another until there are nuances that only the other person knows about you.  Stupid things like the song you listen to on a Sunday morning whilst drinking coffee in the kitchen.  The movie that sparked your sexual awakening.

What bothers me is the intimacies exchanged & then sadly lost after you’ve explicitly opened yourself up to another person.

When you find yourself face to face in bed with someone, bare skin touching beneath the sheets recounting a moment of your life you’ve not shared before.  And when you’ve finished you pause and say shyly “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that before”.  Almost embarrassed.  Through the slight glow of street light that crept through from the window, you see a small smile form on their lips and feel them draw you into them.  Arms around waist.  Face buried in hair.  A knowing squeeze.  Lips on forehead.  An unspoken “thank you for sharing that with me”.

In those days, weeks and months after a relationship, the middle of the night when you’re struggling to sleep or when stuck in traffic listening to the hum of your window wipers; those are the moments that hit you like a drunken memory from a night out that you’d rather forget.  The kind that make you squeeze your eyes shut, shake your head and block it out.  Kinda like trying to get rid of a picture from an Etch a Sketch.

If you’re too young to get that reference you’ll just have to trust me and my old lady retinol.

You see yourself in that bed, telling that story, naively thinking ‘this is the person that I’m gonna be with for the rest of my life* and I want to let them into this part of me’.

(*give or take a few months)

It’s the moments where you gave so much of yourself to something or someone that didn’t quite end up lasting that bothers me.  2 months here.  5 years there.  A couple of weeks maybe.  One date where you drank way too much Malbec on an empty stomach and were emotionally slutty too soon.

Each time starting over there’s less and less of those stories and less and less of yourself to offer to someone new.  One less story that you’ve held on to.  One less story you “never told anyone that before”.  Until you’re left with not a single story that’s yours alone.

They almost begin to roll off the tongue like an anecdote that someone has told so many times before that it feels almost rehearsed.  Irritatingly so because the sentiment is lost.

Hope this makes sense.  No worries if not.