Love Lives - Bonus episode: An exclusive extract from the Millennial Love book

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Support Millennial Love with a donation today: https://supporter.acast.com/millennialloveThis is a very special episode of Millennial Love. Regular listeners might notice that we're outside of our usual schedule – that's because instead of a normal show this week, we're releasing an extract from the Millennial Love audiobook, which is being released on 8th July along with the written book.For those who might not know, the Millennial Love book is about examining the contemporary dating landscape, memoir, social commentary and interviews with previous podcast guests like Elizabeth Day, Munroe Bergdorf, and Raven Smith.It covers everything from how MeToo has changed the way we think about consent to what Love Island teaches us about female sexuality.In this bonus episode, Olivia reads an excerpt from chapter one. Enjoy!Pre-order Millennial Love here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Millennial-Love-Olivia-Petter/dp/0008412308Pre-order Millennial Love, the audiobook, here: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Millennial-Love-Audiobook/0008412332Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. will not die hosting the Hills after show. I get thirsty for the hot wiggle. I didn't even know a thirsty man until there was all these headlines. And I get schooled by a tween. Facebook is like, and now that's what my grandma's on. Thank God phone a friend with Jesse Crookshank is not available on Facebook. It's out now wherever you get your podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. might notice that we are outside of our usual schedule. That's because instead of a normal show this week, we are releasing an extract from the Millennial Love audiobook, which is being released on the 8th of July along with the written book.

For those who might not know, the Millennial Love book is about examining the contemporary dating landscape, combining memoir, social commentary, and interviews with previous podcast guests, including Elizabeth Day, Monroe Bergdorf, and Raven Smith. It covers everything from how Me Too has changed the way we think about consent to what Love Island teaches us about female sexuality. You can pre-order it now at all good bookshops and audiobook outlets and links to these will be in the show notes. But without further ado, here is an extract of me reading chapter one of the book.

I hope you enjoy it. Chapter one. Cool Girls and Fuckboys. I should have loved a thunderbird instead. At least when spring comes comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I think I made you up inside my head. Extract from Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath. If I were a cool girl my love life would have been very different. I would not have spent eight years pining after someone who wasn't interested in me.

I would not have lingered by countless bars waiting for someone to look at me. And I certainly would have had sex more than twice by the time I was 23. The cool girl has existed in one form or another for years. But it was author Gillian Flynn who brought it to life most memorably in her best-selling thriller Gone Girl. Protagonist Amy Dunn spends the first half of Flynn's novel pretending to be someone she is not. Then, in a series of sentences, Amy carefully dismantles the identity she's been feigning. Here's how she describes the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don't they? She's a cool girl. Being the cool

girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's biggest culinary gangbang while somehow maintaining a size two. Because cool girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool girls never get angry. They only smile in a char-greened, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don't mind. I'm the cool girl. Women have spent a lifetime being pigeonholed into stereotypes like this.

There's an entire cast of caricatures. Some are generic, manic pixie dream girls, spinsters, career-obsessed bitches, and others are specific to minorities, Asian nerds, quirky lesbians, angry black women. The journalist and author Pandora Sykes lists these tropes and more in her book How Do We Know We're Doing It Right? and explains how the flattening of the female identity in this way is a key element of consumer capitalism. Once you identify a trope, you can sell something to it, she writes, which explains why we see these tropes projected in so

many advertising campaigns. But we also see these tropes operate within the dating world. At least we do in almost all the romantic comedies and TV shows I grew up watching. These two-dimensional characters were typically straight, white women like me, whose existence was almost entirely shaped by the male gaze. The manic pixie dream girls, ditzy, ethereal, beguiling, were found in Garden State, 500 Days of Summer, and There's Something About Mary. The career-obsessed bitches, harsh, cold and married to their job,

were in The Devil Wears Prada, The Proposal and Morning Glory. And the rest were in Sex and the City. But let's go back to cool girls. It's a label that stands out from the rest because rather than being one that women fear, it's one they aspire towards. The cool girl trope was established long before Flynn's book came out and unfortunately is still relevant today.

How to be the perfect cool girl now. Don't be like other girls. Have three female friends who are not as hot as you. Wear suits. Chain smoke Marlboro Lights while maintaining perfect skin. Be French. Be the last person to leave the dinner party, but the first to offer everyone high quality cocaine. Always order fries. Be vegan. Wear matching underwear on weekdays. Do Pilates. Have no social media except for Instagram. Post photos of yourself posing with your less hot

friends in an empty bath for no apparent reason. Have angular arms. The Cool Girl is artfully examined in Elizabeth Sankey's critically acclaimed documentary Romantic Comedy, in which she and a chorus of critics, actors and filmmakers discuss how some of the most popular films on love warped their perceptions of dating, romance, sex and sexuality. The documentary homes in on films like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, in which the protagonist, Andy Anderson, Kate Hudson, rejects her natural cool girl persona and adopts its antithesis by becoming needy and overly emotional, all so that she can repel Benjamin Barry, Matthew McConaughey, for a magazine article. Spoiler, it works.

Sankey's documentary also looks at how some films have experimented with the cool girl trope by turning it on its head, such as Ruby Sparks, in which a male novelist stream woman, a stock model cool girl, magically comes to life after he writes about her. Once she's made real, he's able to completely control her personality, the way she dresses and the way she speaks. This, writer and star Zoe Kazan suggests, is in essence what male filmmakers have been doing for years.

By having cool girl characters as the objects of desire in their films, the implication is that this is how a woman needs to behave in order to be considered attractive by men. The cool girl trope has been around forever, Sankey told me. It just changes slightly with each generation. Women are taught from an early age to be quiet, submissive, not to make a fuss, to be diplomatic, to let things go, to not get angry. When it comes to relationships, that translates into this idea of being easygoing. I've heard so many men complain about an ex-girlfriend who was crazy when I was younger and I thought, well, I'm going to do my best to make sure no ex ever describes me that way. Whereas now I think, was she crazy?

Or was she just expressing herself and you didn't like it? Films like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days amplify this toxic breed of conditioning. That film taught me that in order to find a man and keep him happy, a woman should be laid back and fun, said Sankey. I should never complain if my date changed plans last minute or was insensitive. I should be into the same things he's into. I should hide any insecurities I might have about myself, and I should be thin with a huge appetite.

The nightmare of it is that it encourages women to pit themselves against each other. I'm not like your crazy ex. She sounds awful. I'm so chilled and easygoing. You can treat me like shit and I won't mind. I would say that I wasn't really myself in relationships until I met my husband and finally allowed myself to drop the idea that there was a specific way I needed to be in order for him to love me. The cool girl trope is more likely to impact straight women than those of other sexualities because it's a character designed to please men. This is one of the reasons why author and illustrator Florence Given said that she finds it so much more liberating being on a date with a woman or a non-binary person as opposed

to being on a date with a man because she doesn't have to perform a gender role. There's so much freedom to just show up and be my authentic self, Given said when she came on the podcast, as opposed to when I'm on a date with a man, which I don't do very often, it's entirely different because you're constantly, or subconsciously anyway, performing around his masculinity. At least that's what I felt and realised I was doing after I journaled about it. I felt like I was going into a shrinking machine designed to cater to his ego and the version of myself that he would love the most. designed to cater to his ego and the version of myself that he would love the most. When author and journalist Dolly Alderton came on the podcast,

she confessed to being very good at doing the cool girl act, particularly in the early stages of dating someone. Men never knew how much of a psychopath I was, she teased. Like so many women I know, including myself, she had mastered the art of feigning disinterest in men who she was consumed by. It's something many of us do. Send one text when we want to send 20. Say we're busy on nights when we're not. And act surprised when they talk about the holiday we already know all about from Instagram.

I have never been terribly good at playing the part of the cool girl. I once dated a guy called Zach. We met on Bumble and had two fantastic dates together. One was at a cosy Soho pub, famous for being poet Dylan Thomas's haunt, and the other was at an Italian speakeasy, both of which were pretentious enough to impress me. But Zach and I didn't work out. Maybe it was because he was in the middle of exams, or because he purported to be too old-fashioned to subscribe to modern methods of communication. He took regular breaks from social media. Whatever the reason, his distance obviously only made me fancy him more. So I got creative. Here's a selection of messages I sent Zach when I felt him pulling away. Lord Byron would have had his incel moments. I know about a lot of naughty things. And the world would be a better place if all worm dance

moves were heartfelt and carefully orchestrated. And because I wasn't going to go out without a fight, here's a selection of texts I sent Zach when he stopped replying to me. You're not so into this phone business, are you? I've pretty much forgotten what you look like at this point. And apologies for getting in touch on WhatsApp. I know you would have preferred a more rustic method, but our mail is unavailable past 8pm. Apologies for getting in touch on WhatsApp. I know you would have preferred a more rustic method, but our mail is unavailable past 8pm.

Being the cool girl is not just about playing it cool. You can lose yourself in the persona you create, which will vary depending on the man you're trying to be a cool girl for. If he supports Chelsea FC, the cool girl will post Frank Lampard memes on Twitter. If he's into French New Wave, the cool girl will get a fringe. If he likes 18th century literature, the cool girl will have books about the Age of Enlightenment in her bedroom. I tried very hard to adopt a lot of these roles.

So much so, in fact, that for a long time I couldn't work out which parts of myself I had crafted for a man and which were my own. I recently looked back at some of my old Spotify playlists and found so many that had been curated to suit the tastes of the man I was dating at the time. I don't listen to any of those songs now. Take the time I dated a guy called Mark, who really wanted people to know that he was left-wing. He had a Momentum sticker on his laptop, and his Hinge profile proudly stated that he had never kissed a Tory. Mark also lived in a two-bedroom flat in central London that his dad bought for him, by the way. I knew embarrassingly little about politics at the time, but I really fancied Mark, even if he was a raging champagne socialist, and I needed him to fancy me. So I ordered a copy of British Politics for Dummies from Amazon and got to work. Mark's cool girl needed to be a connoisseur in everything from Churchill to the Iraq War, even if she hadn't opened a history book since the age of 13.

If you pretend to be a cool girl for too long, you will get caught out. It was all going well with Mark until he started talking about the then Labour MP Chukwuramuna. Only Mark didn't say he was a Labour MP. For all I knew, Chukwuramuna could have been an up-and-coming saxophonist with a passion for liberal politics. Far too embarrassed to ask who he was when Mark started talking about him, I nodded and pretended to know exactly who Chuka Umunna was. It worked until Mark asked what I thought of Chuka's latest column

in a national newspaper. Oh, it was great. I agreed with every point. What do you fancy for dinner? Then he asked if I agreed with every point. What do you fancy for dinner? Then he asked if I agreed with the bits about the EU. Of course, I'm thinking pizza. Then he asked about the part on Keynesian economics. I don't know much about Kenya. Frankamanga? Mark dumped me two weeks later and I gave my copy of British Politics for Dummies to a charity shop. later and I gave my copy of British Politics for Dummies to a charity shop. If you've ever felt like you want to be a cool girl as Flynn describes it, let's call her the stock cool girl, chances

are it's because you think you've actually met someone like this. The woman who really does love anal sex, never done it, never will, as much as pizza and swallows her partner's cum. The one time I did this, I vomited, before washing it down with cheap beer. At my university, I branded countless women as cool girls. They would line the bar in my student halls, beer in one hand, packet of licorice Rizla filters in the other. While I was standing awkwardly by the ping pong table, sipping vodka lime sodas, I'd heard they were the most slimming drink, having insipid conversations about gap years. The cool girls were slunk reclining in corners, coronas in hand, trading tales about older men who fancied them. Most of these women

knew each other before university and were in tight-knit cliques, bonded by their wealthy upbringings, second-hand designer wardrobes and the fact they all had names like Foxy and Fluff. They had cohorts of male friends too, all of whom wanted to sleep with them. I tried to befriend one called Bing. I never found out her real name. She was sitting next to me in an English seminar, and I asked where her jacket was from. It's vintage Dior, but I found it in a budget bin in a charity shop in Rio. I tried to ask why she was in Rio but by the time I had wrapped my head around someone throwing a Dior jacket into a budget bin she had turned to talk to her friend

about a guy called Otis who was rubbish at fingering. Perhaps Bing was just pretentious, rude, blind to her privilege, or all three. But all the boys at my university fancied her and not me. She was still cool, and I hated her for it. That's the trouble with cool girls. If you believe they exist, you will loathe them, because you are not them. Like Sankey said, the concept pits women against one another by perpetuating a hierarchy of attractiveness that places cool girls at the top and everyone else at the bottom.

This meant that I couldn't bear the cool girls until one became my best friend. Lydia wasn't in the Bing crew. She was more of a loner but still cool to her core. She made her own clothes, danced like Shakira, and had long blonde hair that was in dire need of a wash, but still somehow looked glamorous. Men gravitated towards Lydia like bees to a sunflower. We couldn't have been more different. I liked organisation. Lydia craved chaos. I was the first one to leave a party. Organisation, Lydia craved chaos. I was the first one to leave a party, Lydia was the last. I questioned everything I said before I said it. Lydia my friend. I was tenacious and drunk, so I stayed. I've got it, Jack cried, finally working out who it was that Lydia looked like. Giselle, he said, as Lydia erupted into a fit of giggles,

as if the idea of her looking like a supermodel was that far-fetched. Who am I? I asked. Jack looked at me for the first time in the entire conversation. You look like the woman who sells engagement rings on QVC. She has nice hands. I do quite like my hands, and I'm sure the woman on QVC is lovely, so this didn't bother me too much, but I suspect it would have felt better to have been compared to a supermodel. Hey, it's Mitch from SideNote Podcast, and I'm here to tell you about the new Google Pixel 9 powered by Gemini. Anyone who knows me knows the Pixel has always been my favorite out of

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Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. I couldn't understand why Lydia wanted to be friends with me, but we bonded quickly over a mutual hatred of organised fun. I still don't get pop golf. And a mutual love of flared trousers and velvet. Our conversations quickly turned to love and I realised that even though Lydia had been in relationships before, I hadn't, and was far more sexually experienced than me, I was still a virgin at 18, we had many of the same anxieties and neuroses about dating. She had just broken up with someone and was unsure whether it was the right time to move on with the guy down the hall who already fancied her. Note that we'd only

been at uni for four days. I had a crush on a boy in the block opposite ours, but was pretty sure he was sleeping with the warden. This was the dynamic, her pondering whom to reject, me pondering whom to pine after. But it worked. Being friends with Lydia taught me that cool girls don't exist beyond the periphery. But this is the problem. The periphery is the space in which we now date. It was easy for me to fake it with Mark because I'd only known him for four weeks. And like Zach, I had met him on a dating app where you can be whoever you want, whether it's a cool girl who designs their own clothes,

one who makes terrible jokes about owl mail, or one who reads everything Chukarimuna writes. Your identity is yours to optimise via the photos you select for your profile, the information you choose to share in your bio and those first few messages you spend hours agonising over. The same goes for Instagram, one of the first places people go to get more information about someone they've just met. Scroll through someone's Insta and you'll get a carousel of filtered photographs and fastidiously considered captions, chosen by someone who wants you to think that this is who they are. But that carousel will never paint an authentic picture of that person, because Instagram, the same as dating app profiles, is about personal branding. It's about creating a version of yourself that people will like and given the option why would you be your insecurity ridden self when you could just as easily be a glossy sparkly cool girl. When we discussed cool girls on the podcast a lot of listeners asked what the equivalent was for men.

And the truth is that there isn't one. Because the cool girl is an idea fuelled by societal ills that men don't experience to the same degree as women, namely sexism. But it's also about the way women are conditioned to be people pleasers. The poet Charlie Cox raised this on the podcast when we discussed why women tolerate being treated poorly in relationships. We're constantly told that we have to be liked, she said. You've got to be the soft girl, the funny girl, the pretty girl. Then the problem is that you find someone that likes you enough and you're like, OK, how do I keep up this facade? So there are no cool guys, so to speak.

But there are fuckboys. Lots of them. The term fuckboy originates from hip-hop culture. Rapper Cameron was the first artist to use it in passing in his 2002 track Boy Boy. But it didn't make its way to the mainstream until 2014, when Google searches of the phrase spiked. This was around the same time that American hip-hop duo Run The Jewels released their track Oh My Darling Don't Cry, which featured lyrics such as

that fuckboy life about to be repealed, that fuckboy shit about to be repelled. Since then, the phrase has featured in countless songs about womanisers and has subsequently become common parlance among millennials to refer to a man who sleeps with women he has no intention of pursuing a relationship with, despite his behaviour indicating otherwise. But the term has acquired countless other meanings too, and is often used to describe a set of behaviours far more damaging than simply enjoying casual sex. How to be the perfect fuckboy now.

Tell people you are really bad on your phone and you need to sort your life out. Never actually sort your life out or stop being really bad on your phone. Poke people on Facebook but don't message them. Pontificate about the futility of labelling a relationship. Reply hello whenever someone tries to make plans with you. Don't talk about your family or ask about anyone else's. Use the phrase we were hanging out to describe every relationship you've ever had. Spend two weeks telling someone they are the most amazing

person you've ever met, then block them and move to Mexico. Have messy hair or no hair at all. Every straight woman I know has dated a fuckboy. These are the men who treat women like toys. They are terrible at communication, have commitment issues and typically have an expiration date of two months before they're off being someone else's fuckboy. But because nothing in the dating world can ever be simple, fuckboys can also be kind, complimentary and, well, really, really hot. Hence why we're so quick to defend them. YouTuber Lucy Moon addressed this dilemma when we spoke about a fuckboy she had dated. He lied to me constantly, she said, and I was just so sick of it to the point where I was like,

well, I don't want to sleep with you at all anymore. Then he did a full routine of guilt tripping and emotional blackmail to convince me I had made it all up and he really liked me. That was confusing. It's the second part of Moon's story that made her partner a fuckboy. Here was not a man who just treated a woman badly. Here was a man who treated a woman badly and then manipulated her so she would think he had done nothing wrong. He made it so that Moon would be the one questioning her behaviour, not him. Had she overreacted? Could she have been a bit melodramatic or maybe even unfair? That's the thing about fuckboys, they pretend to be the good guys. Fuckboys are flourishing in the modern dating scene, where new technologies have created

countless opportunities for them to behave poorly. But the way that fuckboys behave is subtle. They won't recognise their behaviour as cruel and will brush off claims that it is, with phrases like, you're overreacting. Many of the fuckboys' favoured tactics have names, e.g. haunting, when someone likes your social media posts

long after you've stopped dating them, and r-bombing, reading your message and not replying, while knowing you can see it's been read thanks to read receipts. These are both classic fuckboy behaviours. For the sake of ease and fun, let's call them fuckboyeries. One of the most brutal fuckboyeries is breadcrumbing, which Collins Dictionary defines as dropping hints to someone that you are interested in them romantically with no intention of following through. This happened to me when I dated a fuckboy called Justin. He had all the classic signs of a fuckboy from the start.

Keen, polite, nice hair and terrible at communication. We had been dating for around two months when he told me he was going to Canada for five weeks and the signal would be patchy but he'd love to see me when he got back. We kissed goodbye outside Kentish Town tube station and I went home feeling confident that in five weeks time I would have a boyfriend called Justin. I didn't hear from him for six months but even though Justin hadn't messaged me, he liked all of my Instagram posts, including ones of me in a bikini. Every like or breadcrumb from Justin made me think it was only a matter of time until he

got in touch to meet me for a drink so we could dive back headfirst into our dizzying romance. In fact, when he did eventually get in touch, it was to ask if I had any contacts for getting tickets to Glastonbury. The fuckboy has become an integral part of our dating jargon, but it's also one that needs to be examined, possibly now more than ever. When you give something a name, it becomes normalised. The problem is that the fuckboy is a gendered and typically heteronormative term, so this behaviour is only really normalised for straight men, despite the very obvious fact that people of any gender or sexuality can be just as cruel and manipulative. I've treated men badly before, I'm pretty sure I've even dropped a few R-bombs in my time,

and I know I'm not the only one. So why is it fuck boy and not fuck girl? Or better yet, the much more politically correct fuck person? To answer this, let's take a look at popular culture. In Cruel Intentions, it was Sebastian Valmont, a character who wooed women with lines like, God, you're beautiful, I'm going to take you to lunch, and who would later decry these same women insipid Manhattan debutantes. In Bridget Jones's diary, it was Daniel Cleaver, and in Alfie, it was, well, Alfie. These characters cheat, lie, schmooze and manipulate their way into women's lives, and yet their actions almost always seem vindicated, if not glorified, thanks to charisma, charm or really good hair. TV shows are littered with fuckboys too.

He's Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl, Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries, Christian Troy in Nip Tuck. And so is music, where songs like Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines erode female autonomy and present sex as something that men do to women with or without their consent. The issue is that despite this, Blurred Lines was a number one track, just as every TV show and film I've mentioned here has been a huge hit. These attitudes and characters are so ingrained in us socially and culturally that we often don't even question them. Hence why some

women expect men to behave like fuckboys and men sometimes expect it from themselves. Jordan Stevens, actor and Rizzle Kicks singer, told me that he used to be a fuckboy. I needed to face some really hard truths about my own behaviour, he said, explaining how Me Too forced him to reconsider how he had acted in previous relationships. I have never physically assaulted anyone, but I had deep intimacy and commitment issues, and I can also recognise my own emotional neglect and coercive control. and I can also recognise my own emotional neglect and coercive control. I asked Stevens what he thought about the fact that these behavioural patterns are more attached to men than to women.

It's very damaging to men, and we don't want anything to do with them, but it's a space created by societal expectations, he replied, before going on to discuss what he thought was the root cause of these societal expectations. The male sex is more physically dominant, just biologically, and in my mind that leads to a sense of entitlement and an abuse of power. If you truly believe that men and women are equal, as I do, Jordan's theory might be hard to swallow because it requires you to acknowledge the physical superiority that men have over women and accept that this superiority breeds hubris, the kind of hubris that entitles a man to treat a woman like crap. I'll touch on abuse in chapter eight, or in other words, to be a fuckboy. At least, that was Jordan's argument. If you've ever been with a fuckboy, you will know that getting rid of them is easier said than done.

These are the men our friends tell us to dump, ignore and move on from. Simple. Except it never is. Because after a certain point, the manipulation, game playing and perpetual ricochet between hot and cold starts to have an impact. game playing and perpetual ricochet between hot and cold starts to have an impact. And before you know it, the fuckboy is the boy you want the most because you can't have him. When this is something you've been feeling for longer than just a few months, it begs some harsh questions. Why are you keeping this person around? How much of the pain you've suffered at their hands have you facilitated or romanticised or even created? These are all questions I've been asking myself for years.

Jack didn't seem like a fuckboy at first. He was in the year above me at school. He had honey-coloured curls and a dry sense of humour. I was 14 when we were introduced by my friend Lucy. humour. I was 14 when we were introduced by my friend Lucy. She and Jack had been messaging on MSN and she'd asked me to tag along to meet him and another guy from school one afternoon. Lucy decided she preferred the look of the other guy and told me I could have Jack if I wanted. I didn't but we became friends and soon found out we lived in the same pocket of North London. We started going for walks

in the evenings after school, poking fun at each other's habits and sharing stories about our divorced parents. Soon we were meeting most nights and texting furiously in between. We didn't kiss, I'm not really sure why. Nonetheless our conversations were intimate enough that it felt like we were dating. Or at least it did, until one night I kissed one of his friends at a party. It was a drunken mistake, one I deeply regretted. But it was enough for Jack to call it quits on our almost relationship. I was devastated.

When we arrived back at school the following September, I was sure he'd want to give things a go between us, for real this time. But the only thing Jack wanted to do was spend time with his new girlfriend, who, unfortunately for me, but fortunately for her, had legs like Kate Moss and a face from a L'Oreal campaign. I was in my final year of school when Jack messaged me on Facebook to ask if I'd like to go for a spin in his new car around our local area. It had been two years since we'd spoken. And despite what I'd told myself and my friends, my feelings for him had never wavered. So I went for the spin. After that, we met every few weeks. He'd ask me out for coffee and complain about his girlfriend,

who had become difficult. I'd pretend to like the coffee and listen to him moan about how his Kate Moss-alike didn't clean up after herself and was a bit rude to his mum. I convinced myself that I was more of a catch than her. I'm clean, friendly to mums and an all-round better person. I was the one he should be with, not her. On the surface, our meetings were harmless. We never got too close and barely even hugged to say hello or goodbye. But I would always leave recounting the details, every conversation, every question, every glance, as if they meant something.

Something massive that I could never quite articulate. One night, Jack asked to meet for a drink at the pub. It was the first time one of our meetings involved alcohol. It felt weird. He sat next to me on a tiny bench outside, offered me his scarf when I was cold, and at my door, after walking me home, he kissed me. The next day, a text. I've been waiting for that kiss for six years. I can't deny that I have feelings for you. I didn't hear from him for months after that. Facebook messages and texts went unanswered.

Phone calls rang to voicemail. It wasn't until a mutual friend's party six months later that I saw him again, but he didn't even acknowledge me until we left and got on the same bus to go home. Strangely, the minute we were away from the group, we were back in our groove and catching up as if nothing had happened. At my door, we kissed again. The next few years followed a similar pattern of events. Jack and I would go months without speaking, but every now and then his name would light up my phone with a joke about our local pub or about a tweet I'd posted.

Sometimes he'd congratulate me on work achievements or even wish me a happy birthday. I analysed the minutiae of every message he ever sent, from the wording to the grammar. Occasionally we would go for drinks and catch up, but nothing ever happened between us. We bumped into each other a few times too, and I'd find something to hold on to every time. Like the moment from a 21st birthday party, when he said that if we had stayed together as teenagers, we'd probably still have been together

then. Or the time we spotted each other at the pub when he shared a secret he claimed to have never told anyone else. My friends told me I was nuts for holding on to a silly teenage crush and that Jack was only ever being friendly and polite. Maybe he was, but I found transcendent meaning in everything he ever said to me. We never spoke about who we were dating, though I eventually heard he and Kate Moss alike had broken up, which fit neatly into the narrative I was forming in my head. Jack and I were meant to be together, but we would have to overcome a few

hurdles first, because that's just how love works. It's supposed to take time. It's supposed to be complicated and it means more if it is. Jack and I don't really talk anymore. Occasionally I'll check in with him to see how he's doing and he'll reply in his polite way but he won't ever initiate a conversation with me. Over time he stopped asking to meet me for drinks and whenever whenever I asked him, he would say yes and then cancel at the last minute. The happy birthday texts eventually dried up too, as did the sporadic jokes. I still don't know how to describe what happened between us. To me, Jack was a significant person in my life for a very long time. He was someone I cared about, respected and really liked. But was it love or infatuation? And was he a fuckboy?

Or did I turn him into one to rationalise my obsession with our non-existent relationship? Even now, I can't answer any of these questions because I never knew how Jack felt about me or if any of the things that meant so much to me meant anything to him. I still don't. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoyed this bonus episode, you can pre-order Millennial Love, the audiobook or the physical book, or both. Right now, all you have to do is head to the show notes for all of the relevant links. Bye-bye.