How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong. Elizabeth Day

the feeling that maybe just maybe, this could be ‘the one’ and then you’d walk into the appointed bar or restaurant and you’d know immediately there was no chemistry but that, by this point, it would be rude to walk straight back out, so you had to stay for at least one glass of wine – two to be polite – and waste another evening getting to know someone you would probably never see again.

      Once, I was set up with an extremely short man and although I found him clever and charming company, I could never get over the fact that when we kissed, I had to bend down and rest my hands on his shoulders. I spent a few days Googling celebrity height differences (I thought it was probably less pronounced than the gap between Sophie Dahl and Jamie Cullum, but more marked than the Carla Bruni–Nicolas Sarkozy height dynamic) and then we called it quits by mutual agreement.

      On one occasion, I did quite like someone. I’m going to call him Dwayne because if he ever reads this, he will hate the name. Dwayne was lovely: tall, funny, erudite, kind. Dwayne was also younger than me and what, in the lexicon of modern self-awareness, one might call ‘emotionally unavailable’. We had a great first date, and consistent communication for a week afterwards, during which he arranged our second date, which was also great. But after that, his communication tailed off. I knew he’d seen my last inconsequential message because of the tyranny of the double blue tick on WhatsApp, which indicates a text has been read and is truly one of the most malevolent inventions in the history of modern flirtation. After the double blue tick, there was nothing but silence for three days.

      I felt myself pitch into a whirlpool of anxiety. What had I done to make him disappear? Had I said something absurd? Was he disgusted by the way I kissed? And so on and so on. This is what happens when you’re ghosted: you have no real answers, so your fevered brain attempts to make them up. If, in the past, you have bad experiences of abandonment, not hearing from someone you like will re-open all these old wounds. You will probably seek to understand the other person’s absence by lapsing into default explanations predicated on your own insecurity.

      For a long time, my default was to think I had done something wrong, rather than believing it might just be that the other person had their own emotional baggage to carry.

      To his credit, Dwayne did get back in touch. He apologised for his silence. When we met up again, he explained what had been going on, and said that he did actually really like me but knew he was going to push me away because he was so fearful of exposing himself to that kind of vulnerability. Which is either a great line or evidence of a mature, thoughtful individual trying to be honest. I opted to believe it was the latter, and we ended it, and Dwayne is now a friend. In many ways, it turned out that we were too similar, that our romantic pathologies were twisted into the same shapes by past experiences, when actually what you need in a long-term partner is strength in the places you’re weak, and vice versa. Your experiences need to dovetail, rather than shadow each other.

      One thing I learned from my dating failures was that, as a writer, I was prone to constructing the most beautiful narratives about falling in love, with plot twists and appropriate pacing and a clear structure that led me smoothly from point A to point B, preferably accompanied by a moving soundtrack of acoustic versions of popular songs from the John Lewis Christmas ad. Life has a frustrating habit of not accommodating these visions. Simply put: real people do not act according to your script because they have their own stuff to deal with.

      Realising this was a major breakthrough for me. For the first time in my life, I had to learn that rejection was not necessarily a personal indictment of who I was, but a result of the infinite nuance of what the other person was going through, which in turn was the consequence of an intricate chain of events, shaped by their own experiences and their own family dynamics and past relationships, that had literally nothing to do with me. I also think different communication preferences play a part. In the early stages of a relationship, I’m a texter rather than a face-to-face communicator because words give me something to hide behind. It’s ludicrous to expect everyone you are romantically interested in to feel the same. Lots of people don’t like texting, the utter weirdos, and therefore won’t reply to your heartfelt missive. Instead, they might call you on the phone, which sends me into a spiral of panic. Why would anyone be calling me?