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I’ve had six different couples across my career in the book trade come to see me about a romance: someone with the usual profile, man, woman, older, younger (great!), single, single, in a relationship, partnered, separated, divorced, widowed, all in a different place, some married or almost-married, some in committed relationships or just out of them. They all talk about money – “I never paid for drinks. I don’t spend much money,” and so on. Or a story: in an office when the two of them just knew each other, she’d ask for something to be cut and then one of them “ran out of loose change”, like someone carrying handfuls of change on a walk on the beach. Or my friend, who went to run over to her boyfriend’s house when she was blind drunk and kept on going. Or someone who’d spent a horrible holiday away from home and was convinced her mother wasn’t really all there. All women, all worst relationships, all of them different.

“I’m missing him.” “I don’t know if I want to stay with him.” “I don’t like him.” I tell them, to my horror, that I know all this. I know the anxious eye-rolling of the first year and the aggressive love is to come. But I also tell them that I know that this loneliness feels intolerable. hentaiz Loneliness, often disguised as a woman’s “bad luck”, makes her feel like an unknown she cannot conquer. We make excuses to try and survive, and I’ve had a couple of them, like the one who wanted us to take her to France when a relationship had come to an end, like the guy who was scared of losing her heart, like the one who thought that to be pitied by other women was an insult. They all wanted us to feel bad for them.

I notice that all these stories are about the person who ends up being left. I think this is a really original way of talking about it. xvideos People never talk about loneliness for the person who is the loser in a relationship. It’s usually the other way round. Where are the stories of the lonely person left standing? The clichés, the falls, the gazes as strangers pass by who are all bewildered by their companion’s absence? The other pitying ladies, or men, or gents, trying to get the shard of glass lodged between the corner of your ears unstuck? As I write these words, I remember what I feel, but also what I know. Sometimes the ring is just a bumpy stone, but the scars can be of a second attempt at love. xvideo Sometimes the loss is way deeper and far more mysterious. I try to find some voice from the other side.

Brigitte, a French journalist who writes for several magazines, is author of Happiness: Everything She Wants You to Know. Brigitte@twttravel.com