Hello friends,
My podcast, So, Life Wants You Dead came out this week! I’d love for you to give it a listen. I did this episode with my friend, the comedy writer (and really funny person) Christine Cestaro. This series was made in collaboration with Soho House and premiered this week on their site. You can read about it here.
And now, on to part two On Love…
I moved back to London in 2018 and started dating again. I was fresh off the boat from New York City, back in the town of my childhood and adolescence. The return to a place where I did a lot of coming of age, the return to a place that feels so much like home. I was convinced I would meet someone now that I was back in London; I would jump feet first into the dating pool. I would emerge triumphant.
I got on the apps almost immediately upon moving to a tiny one-room flat in a beautiful building in Maida Vale with a shared bathroom and a mentally ill woman who lived in the attic and left me menacing notes and scratched at my door in the wee hours of the morning. I went on dates, and it was underwhelming and mostly terrible.
I got into a fight with one of my dates. He was an hour late for our midday coffee — he overslept after staying out til 4 am (he told me over text). I had another plan, so couldn’t wait. He was angry I wouldn’t wait, and I was so happy he got angry because…?!
I went to the pub with one of my dates. He stared at me blankly when I ordered sparkling water and, in a thick Italian accent, said, “So…you don’t drink?”
“Not really, no. Occasionally I’ll have a glass of wine.”
I don’t have the language or the words to describe the sober that I am. For the vast majority of my life, I spend it sober. After a few interactions like this, I remembered how much the culture in the UK relies on libation to get us all through social interaction and how much I relied on it as a kid to get me through, too.
The only date that stood out was with an actor. He suggested we meet at Sketch, which was a funny choice, but I was into it. I arrived early and was relieved — I could order my drink without commentary or question, and maybe we could avoid the conversation altogether. After a few dates with other people, and awkward interaction after awkward interaction (especially with the topless, disappointed Portuguese guy in Regents Park who showed up with eight beers and two packs of cigarettes), I figured avoidance was the best approach. I sat at the bar and ordered myself a non-alcoholic cocktail. It was nearing Christmas, and the bar was adorned with beautiful holiday decorations. It felt festive.
When he arrived 20 minutes later, he ordered himself a whiskey. We didn't discuss what I was drinking. Later on, after we decided to order another round, he found me out. And there was the moment that happened on every single date. The moment when they’re taken aback by it. I braced myself for the conversation. The — let’s be honest — very boring conversation that I had become so sick of having.
Suddenly nervous, he commented on his own drinking and went into a whole schpiel about how he sometimes liked to do dry January. He always felt so much better. It’s a great way to start the year.
Eventually, we left the bar and stood in Oxford Circus station kissing for a while, the commuters and Christmas partygoers rushing past us. We said goodbye. The next day he texted:
“Do you want to jam next week?”
I said yes, and we made a tentative plan.
And then he ghosted me.
I blocked his number, irate. I was not about to get back into the dating game only to be ghosted. Fuck this guy! My inner monologue went wild: “I didn’t NEARLY DIE just to BE GHOSTED after I managed to CHEAT DEATH.”
But this is what happens now, so I should have gotten off my high horse. We ghost each other, and we think it's okay. I’ve done it too. It's easier not to say anything than to say the thing. To say, “I just don't want to go out with you again.”
In mid-2020, the masterpiece that is I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel’s incredible TV show, was released. I was enraptured from start to finish.
The actor popped up on my screen. He plays a minor part. I thought of our date, of the awkward moments — the line he gave me about not wanting anything serious, just wanting to have fun, how he was going to America for work the following year and didn’t have much time for relationships.
Each time another episode came on and there he was, I took my phone in my hand. Wondered whether I should do the unthinkable…should I text him? We were at the height of the pandemic, and I was desperately lonely, having shielded for the better part of three months. I didn’t leave my house for 11 weeks in 2020, so a date that ghosted me in 2018 sauntering across my screen was bound to make me a little nuts.
I unblocked his number and the last two texts I sent suddenly apeared, which had gone unanswered. Rather than allowing psychosis to take hold of me, I pulled myself together, dug deep for my self-respect and didn’t write a thing. Still, it was a low point. I stared at his WhatsApp photo for a while, willing him to write to me. Reader, he did not write to me.
I reopened the apps, then — and decided I needed to get back into it.
My re-entrance to the dating world coincided with my own awakening at the ripe old age of 31 that I was queer. I'm bisexual, and this was a new dimension for me. And for someone who came to that realization when I was already quite old — it all felt very foreign, especially considering what my body had been through. I guess you could say I was closeted, but it doesn't make sense to me to say that because it wasn't something I was even aware of for most of my life.
I said it to a room of people earlier this year. I was at a comedy show upstate by myself during pride, and the host asked first who the gay men were in the room, then who the lesbians were and then if there were any bi people. I put my hand up, and he said, “Everyone’s got a chance, folks!” Well, Berkshire-based comedian, if we look at the history of the past seven years, nobody’s got a chance.
This week I had my fingerprints taken in downtown Brooklyn. I finished the appointment and went in search of breakfast on Court Street, starving. I stopped at a cafe and got myself an egg and some toast. A woman in her miid-50s walked in to order as I sat down. I didn't give her much notice.
Then I heard her voice — so uncanny, so recognizable — it was soft, almost like a whisper. How do I know this voice? So familiar. I looked up, and her back was still to me, so I didn't make much of it. She then sat down in the corner in my eye line.
I realised it was Lili Taylor, of Mystic Pizza and Say Anything fame. The big one for me, though, was High Fidelity. I must have seen High Fidelity at least fifty times. I can recite the script word for word. And the Lili Taylor character always stood out — I wanted to see more of her; I wanted to see more of that person. I was a little bit in love with her in the way I was a little bit in love with the hapless muso John Cusack. Of course, I wanted to go up to her and tell her how much she changed my life and how iconic she is, but I did not because this is New York.
Like any child of the 90s, I grew up on the rom-com. My big three were Clueless, Empire Records and High Fidelity. These films shaped me, and yet — the love stories in them are so far from anything that exists in real life. It skewed my sense of reality, and it's only now, after all this time, that I'm allowing myself to claim what it is that I want, and it’s not the dynamic between Cher Horowitz and her stepbrother Josh. The examples of intimacy that I had on the screen messed up my ideas about what I think love should look like. (Though I will always and forever consider the relationship between Moesha and Q one of the greatest loves of all time). Seeing Lili Taylor this week reminded me what love feels like in my body, that it’s a real thing — to love art so much that it pierces your heart, that it makes you feel like life is worth living even amidst grief and sorrow.
On my way home, I opened my phone and found a new dispatch from Fariha Roisin’s newsletter, How to Cure A Ghost, in my inbox. This week, she wrote about intimacy. In it, she writes: “deep intimacy is uncomfortable because it requires trust on both ends — trust that not all of us have (or want to give) and it also requires a desire, on both ends, to want to be intimate.”
So, sure everybody has a chance. But only those who fit the requirements of trust, desire and intimacy. And maybe remind me of how I used to feel watching High Fidelity. I’ll claim that and keep claiming it — even if I have to have seventy-five more conversations about my drinking habits.
With love,
Nora x
Thank you for an illuminating piece on your journey. Onward and upward. Love is real and is the answer.