Can you reschedule a landmark moment? We talk to a musician, a centenarian, a graduate, an engaged couple and an Olympic hopeful about their special occasion that got cancelled
Philip Doyle
Continue reading...Category Archives: Relationships
Blind date: ‘He seems like he’d give good hugs’
Ally, 30, freelance writer, meets Khai, 35, personal trainer, in our latest virtual date
What were you hoping for?
I had put on makeup and a dress for the first time in three weeks, so I was hoping it wouldn’t be painfully awkward. It’s not as if I could make an excuse to leave my own house.
Dating during the coronavirus lockdown
In this episode of Full Story, producer Ellen Leabeater sets out to find how Australia’s singles are adapting to dating during the lockdown and discovers some creative measures being taken
Continue reading...We are old and in love, but she left me after my cancer diagnosis | Dear Mariella
We might assume better treatment from maturing adults but at least she was decisive, says Mariella Frostrup
The dilemma In the summer I met a wonderful woman online. She is kind, clever, good looking and many other positive things. We clicked from the outset and became lovers after a couple of months. We have a combined age of 127, but we both said the sex was the best we’ve ever enjoyed. She told me she loved me – and it was reciprocated. We live 100 miles apart, but that suited our busy lifestyles.
Everything was wonderful and we seemed to be very much on the same wavelength until November, when I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. The treatment is extensive, but hasn’t yet started. She broke up with me over Christmas. She still professes love for me (though we haven’t been in contact for a few weeks), but says she is too busy with work, family and friends to commit to me, and that I would become too needy of her and her time. I don’t agree that I would, but I can see why she might say that. I have recently retired. I miss her terribly and don’t know how to deal with it.
Continue reading...European love stories: the readers who have crossed the continent for romance
We’ve had 50 happy years of cross-Channel relationships. What’s in store for pan-European couples?
In July 1974 I kissed a girl for the first time. She was called Martine and she lived next door to my French exchange partner, Pascal, in the half-timbered town of Chalon-sur-Saône in southern Burgundy.
I was as in love as a teenager can be, albeit less (I later realised) with Martine than with being 14, English, and in France for the first time, doing things I’d never done before: staying up past 9pm; smoking Gitanes sans filtre; listening to Françoise Hardy.
Continue reading...All Tindered out? The surprising return of the singles night
From naked dating to dirty Scrabble, singles nights and speed dating have been reinvented. Can these increasingly quirky events lead to lasting love?
‘I used to torture frogs when I was young,” the man was telling me, with a stare that would make the most experienced serial killer uneasy. I wasn’t at a Halloween party. It was Friday night in London and I was attending my first singles event. When my friend suggested it, I had expected the evening to be awkward. I hadn’t expected to be nursing a glass of a wine while a stranger described the many brutal ways he had culled the north London amphibian population. After two hours of painful conversation with other guests, we eventually escaped, although not before our new friend leaned in for a bum grope.
I was unlucky at this mixer. But even when attendees don’t turn out to be on an RSPCA watch list, singles events can feel more forced than a 90s school disco. I am not alone in my phobia of organised mixers; a recent survey by the Inner Circle revealed that 41% of daters in the UK would refuse to attend one, citing embarrassment and awkwardness as the main reasons.
Continue reading...How we met: ‘I asked him to move to Berlin with me after a week’
Rob Fox, 37 and Mareike Strahl, 33, met on a farm in California in 2014. They now live in a vegan community in the Algarve with their two rescue dogs
In 2014, Rob left the grey skies of the UK to travel around Canada and the US. “I started volunteering on an avocado and olive farm close to San Diego, where they offered food and accommodation in exchange for work,” he explains. After a short trip to Death Valley, he returned to find a new worker at the farm. “I was telling everyone about my travels and she seemed totally unimpressed,” he remembers. “I thought she was a bit spiky at first, but I later discovered she is just direct and honest.”
Mareike insists she found Rob’s stories “very funny” but wanted to know more. “I asked him lots of questions about his trip. He seemed interesting and I wanted to get to know him.”
Continue reading...The power of celibacy: ‘Giving up sex was a massive relief’
The plethora of dating apps has bolstered society’s obsession with sex, but many people find that a period of abstinence makes them happier and healthier
In a world where you can get a sexual partner faster than a pizza delivery, it has never been easier to play the field. Yet, despite all that swiping right, a surprising number of people are not having sex at all – not for religious reasons, or because they can’t get a date, but because they find that celibacy makes them happier.
Some have never had much interest in sex, while others are taking a break to address personal problems, recover from bad dating experiences or change the way they approach relationships.
Continue reading...TS Eliot’s hidden love letters reveal intense, heartbreaking affair
‘I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead,’ the poet wrote to Emily Hale
TS Eliot’s love letters to scholar Emily Hale, the great poet’s muse and source of “supernatural ecstasy” for more than 30 years, were released on Thursday amid fevered speculation and under tight security at an elegant library on the campus of the Ivy League’s Princeton University.
The Nobel laureate’s correspondence to Hale, whom he met when both were studying at Harvard University in 1912, has long been the fascination of Eliot scholars but remained hidden, on both the poet and Hale’s wishes, for 50 years after Hale’s death in 1969.
Continue reading...‘It gets competitive at jigsaw time’: Christmas with my ex-boyfriends
I’ve been bringing exes home for a family Christmas for years. Now we have to rent a castle to fit them all in
This Christmas you’ll find me sitting around a crackling fire with my family: my mum whomping down her third mince pie, my sister searching for bubbly, and my stepfather burying his nose in the sports pages. One of my ex-boyfriends will be making us die with laughter while another ex polishes off the cava, and a completely different ex tries to pull focus from the first ex, who is on all fours pretending to give birth to a penguin. My actual boyfriend will either be in hysterics or dreading his turn at charades. Christmas is complicated.
People start moaning about how stressful Christmas is around the time Pret release their new festive sandwich. Single gay friends, especially, worry about travelling to towns they left as soon as they could, populated by people they hid from on Facebook and hoped never to see again. I know this feeling, because for years it’s what I did, too. Back in the early noughties, the thought of going home to Jersey was so gloomy that I was forced to take action. I was single, but had stayed pretty good friends with an ex who had grown up in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, so I asked him to come home with me. He was thrilled to have an invite, and that year proved that just because turkey is dry it doesn’t mean the holiday has to be. Having an ally took the edge off, and the lively addition of a guest with ADHD and a gift for candid storytelling meant we all had the most fun we’d had in years.
Continue reading...The joy of sex for the first time at 37: ‘We celebrated and high-fived afterwards’
Libby’s virginity felt like a weight she had to carry around. Determined that 2019 would be her year, she signed up to online dating – with unexpected results
This time last year, Libby was looking back on 2018 with regret. At 37, she was still a virgin.
Libby (not her real name) was one of four thirtysomething virgins to share their stories with the Guardian in June. The piece struck such a chord that there was cause for a follow-up article on the many readers who got in touch to say they started their sexual lives in their 30s – and urged those who were worried about not having lost their virginity not to give up hope.
Continue reading...Jerusalem’s ‘love neighbourhood’: a refuge for star-crossed Palestinians
A bureaucratic loophole has left Kafr Aqab as a district where Palestinians can keep a foot in both Jerusalem and the West Bank – and be with their loved ones
For some Palestinian sweethearts, there’s only one place to live.
It’s an unremarkable suburb, crisscrossed by thin muddy streets and dotted with high-rise apartment blocks that cling to the steep hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Continue reading...My ex was charming but critical. Now I’ve lost all my confidence | Dear Mariella
Work out why you were so susceptible to him – and pursue only what appeals to you, says Mariella Frostrup
The dilemma I’m a woman in my early 30s and six months ago I was dumped. Our relationship was long distance, developed quickly and was the most intense of my life. He is 10 years my senior and is a unique, charismatic, charming man who makes a good impression on everyone. In private, however, he could be unkind, judgmental and emotionally distant. He could also be demanding, controlling and critical. During our relationship he pushed me to enter his world of ideas, books, films and art. If I didn’t show enough interest, he would become disappointed and irritable. He would often ask me to articulate my thoughts and tell him what I needed, but I felt put on the spot and could never seem to act decisively in those moments – including in the bedroom. Now I am suffering a crisis of confidence as I struggle to define what makes me interesting. I can’t seem to separate my own interests from his – and they all remind me of him. I was in the process of moving to his city (for career reasons as well) when he ended it. My plans have become totally destabilised and I have lost my sense of self.
Mariella replies No wonder. That’s exactly what he was programmed to do. Most women I know have one such Svengali-style relationship under their belt. My own took up most of my late 20s, so I know what you are feeling. Often it’s men that little bit older whose inability to achieve their own ambitions gives them a craving for moulding others. These characters thrive on the taste of power it offers and the distraction from their own insecurities. Mostly, such relationships occur in our 20s when we are young enough to still be searching for our true selves and impressionable enough to cede responsibility to someone who makes it very clear that we’re not up to scratch. These “role models” tend to impress upon us our own deficiencies with enough conviction that we foolishly hand over the reins to them to make better people of us.
Continue reading...‘Step away from the porn’: how to have hot sex at every age
From early experimentation to long-term relationships, our erotic lives constantly evolve – here’s expert advice for all stages of life
“Nowadays many people start their sexual journey with porn,” says the sex educator and author of The Curious History of Dating, Nichi Hodgson. In fact in a recent study of 1,000 18 to 25-year-olds, 45% said that porn was their main source of sex education, while in a 2016 study commissioned by the NSPCC, more than a third (39%) of the 13 to 14-year-olds said they wanted to copy the behaviour they had seen in porn. “The upcoming age restrictions [on porn sites] will make it less likely that young people just stumble across this content, but there still needs to be a degree of shame-free porn literacy,” says Hodgson.
Continue reading...The truth about sex: we are not getting enough
In a world that seems so at ease with sex, you’d think we were having it all the time. Think again
We owe a lot to the sex lives of Greeks. Ancient Greece gave us the origins of the names and concepts for homosexuality, homophobia and nymphomania, as well as narcissism and pederasty. The Romans talked freely to each other in toilets and were equally community-minded when it came to sex, with a reputation for lasciviousness and orgies. Georgians, we believe, were smutty, and Victorians were prudes and hypocrites. (All of these are partial truths.) We like to use sex as a mirror of an era, and to make judgments accordingly. What then, are we to make of us right now?
This is the most sex-positive age ever, right? We are liberal and comfortable with sex like no other people have ever been. Our magazines publish articles on how to get on better with your clitoris. Porn is freely available (and accessed by teenagers). Erotic books are bestsellers, however badly written. TV broadcasts shows in which the contestants are naked, or have sex in a box, or make a sex tape on camera. If sexual choice were a shop, it would be a hypermarket, with dizzyingly long aisles of every possibility: straight, gay, bi, trans, poly, fluid, each with its own culture and each widely accepted.
Continue reading...Bedroom confidential: what sex therapists hear from the couch
Sex counsellors have a unique insight into our shared concerns and insecurities. Where once they focused on physical issues, now they are tackling psychological ones
Denise Knowles, a sex and relationship therapist with the charity Relate, says patients often say to her: “There are so many options, I don’t know where to start.” Thirty years ago, Knowles was mostly approached with physical problems: erectile dysfunction, painful intercourse, issues with ejaculation. Now she describes the scope of her work as “bio-psycho-social”. That is to say, everything has got a lot more complicated.
“I think it has gone from being very much: ‘This is the problem; this is how we resolve it,’ to: ‘How do we approach sex? What does it mean to you? How does it fit into the relationship, and how have you got to this place?’” She laughs. “Then we can start to deal with it.”
Continue reading...Cat Person author Kristen Roupenian: ‘Dating is caught up in ego, power and control’
Her short story was read by millions online – then things got weird. The writer talks about viral fame, power games and her new collection of twisted tales
Kristen Roupenian’s short story Cat Person was published by the New Yorker in December 2017 and, to the author’s best recollection, it went up online on a Monday. The 37-year-old was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while completing a fellowship in writing, and for three or four days after the story came out, enjoyed the world’s customary reaction to most fiction, and all short stories – complete indifference – while basking in the achievement of it having been published at all. “I was thinking, ‘Wow: that was the greatest thing to ever happen, and now it’s over.’” She smiles. “Then it was Friday.”
By the standards of true global celebrity, there is only so far a piece of fiction can go; as David Foster Wallace used to say, the most famous writer in the world is about as famous as a local TV weatherman. Still, what happened with Cat Person remains singular to the extent that, for what seemed like the first time in publishing history, it slammed together two alien worlds, social media and serious fiction, in a way that stretched the boundaries of literary fame.
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