This is on the back of an interesting discussion with Naga Muchetty this morning on Radio Five Live…..about age-gap relationships…so many responses to this…

So, this is my experience…

By Lucy Cavendish

It was a Friday evening and I was waiting for my date in a restaurant in central London. It wasn’t the kind of place I would usually go. For start, it was in Mayfair and it was full of people who looked as if they had a tremendous amount of money. I wasn’t sure why my date had picked this place but I imagined that he wanted to impress me. This wasn’t our first date and I was surprised that he had chosen to take me for dinner at somewhere so obviously eye-wateringly expensive. Part of me was feeling a bit insecure. I was convinced I wasn’t wearing the right clothes. Everyone there was over the age of 50 and wearing suits and soignee dresses. Back then I was 55 (I am 59 now) and I had on a leather mini dress, high black boots and a faux fur jacket.

But that wasn’t the only problem. The main problem was that the man I was dating was 30 years younger than me. I was really worried that people would notice the age difference. Why wouldn’t they? It was pretty unavoidable.

But then 29 year old Darius showed up. He walked through the door with his usual playful swagger. He looked amazing. He was wearing a sharply tailored suit, a long wool coat and a jaunty stylish hat. He was also carrying a huge bunch of flowers and he had a smile that went from ear to ear. As soon as I saw him, I knew we would be OK. I felt my heart lift as he came in. He sat down and held my hand and immediately started making me laugh. We had a great night which turned out to be one of many. After dinner we went dancing and then we ran back to his flat and had absolutely fantastic sex. All sorts of fears about what other people thought of me or him went out of the window along with all my inhibitions.

I had honestly never met a man as infectiously joyous as Darius. It’s what attracted me to him in the first place. I was standing at a bar in a pub in West London and I was buying two pots of nuts. The bar tender told me it was £10. “Ten pounds?” I squeaked. “For two measly pots of nuts?”

Suddenly a voice next to me said, “I’ll buy those for you. Let me give you a treat.’ I turned around and there he was, this handsome, stylish, funny, clever, much-younger-than-me man.

We got chatting and he asked me for my phone number and part of me thought well why not?

I actually thought I wouldn’t hear from Darius but later on that night he texted me and asked me if I got home safely. I replied that I had. The next day he texted in the morning saying “I hope you have a beautiful day” and it just went on from there. A week after our first meeting, we were walking through the park holding hands and kissing.

This all seems particularly pertinent now as the new Bridget Jones movie is coming out in which she dates a younger man. Many years ago this might have been shocking but I think as a society we’ve become more accepting of women who used to be called ’cougars’. There are a handful of celebrities that are currently dating down as it were.

Whilst it’s always been socially acceptable for men to date much younger women, society has always blanched a bit when it happens the other way round. I think this is partially to do with biology; older men can carry on being fertile and may be looking for another mate to have children with (that could be underneath the impetus to date younger women). There is also status - an older man who ‘pulls’ a younger woman is seen as being a bit of a prize. However it is not the same the other way around. The idea of having a ‘toy boy’ is not new. But a lot of people find it very difficult and almost distasteful to think that a man in his late 20s might want to actually be physically involved with a woman in her late 50s.

Yet it is women of my generation who are leaving our marriages in droves. Statistics show that women are more likely than men to fall to divorce, with 63.1% of divorce applications in recent years being initiated by women. Men tend to leave when they have another woman to go to. Women leave because they have just had enough of being married and they see dismal a future of pipe and slippers and endless rewatching of Inspector Morse.

That is not what we want. And true to form Bridget Jones, who has always been a law into herself, looks as if she’s about to enjoy a very sexy very fun time with at least one man who could be half her age. Dating apps also show that women dating much younger men is on the rise. Platforms such as Tinder and Bumble show significant engagement from older women seeking younger partners. There’s also societal norms around age gaps shifting, with a focus on personal compatibility over traditional expectations.

Celebrities are getting in on the act too. Sienna Miller is 15 years older than her partner Oli Miller. Demi Moore married Ashton Kutcher who was 16 years her junior – they have since divorced. Olivia Wilde’s relationship with nine-years her junior Harry Styles was the subject on every gossip outlet. Priyanka Chopra is ten years older than her husband Nick Jonas. Model Heidi Klum is married to a man 6 years her junior, Snow Patrol’s Tom Kaulitz. Even youngster Cruz Beckham is on trend by dating Brazilian singer and songwriter Jackie Apostel 29.

However it is certainly not something I expected to be doing myself. My marriage broke down in 2020 and it was a very painful experience and I just assumed that that would be it for me. I retreated from life a bit to nurse my broken heart and bring my children up and try and regroup. I didn’t want to date. I did get asked out by men but when I did go out with men who were in their 60s and 70s, I would find that they would say things like, ‘I’d like to go for a walk and cuddle up in front of a fire’ and I realised, as time went on, that was exactly NOT what I wanted to do. I started going to live music. I started singing in a band. I started staying out the night at various friends houses in London and something very strange happened. I began to turn back to the me I was in my 20s when I was living as a single woman in London having a pretty fabulous time. I found I was enjoying being single and I certainly didn’t want to put myself in another relationship especially as my trust somewhat destroyed. So I decided just to enjoy myself.

I lost weight (without trying) and I had my hair cut and I started wearing funky clothes. I wasn’t trying to look ‘young’. It was more that I was beginning to feel vibrancy in my soul and body and spirit that I hadn’t had for a very long time - that is what marriage and four children does to you.

So, in many ways, meeting Darius was like the icing on top of the cake. Rather bizarrely I didn’t actually feel much older than him in terms of our energy levels. I’m not quite sure if there’s part of me that hasn’t really ever grown up and has always thought I was about 28 which, coincidentally, was the same age I was when I first got pregnant.

It was just so exciting and he was just so sexy and he was such good fun. He was full of ideas and energy and he was constantly suggesting things for us to do. We went walking through London parks late at night. We went to clubs and parties and dinners. We swam on a summer’s night in rivers. We went dancing together. We went on a romantic break to Paris. It was incredibly brilliant. There was also something amazing - which I think is the case of men of his generation – in that he was just so open and generous in every single way. He held my hand. He stroked my hair. He complemented me endlessly. I genuinely think he thought I was the most amazing thing ever.

However, even though I felt young when I was with him and in many ways I didn’t feel the age gap, at some point it would bite me on the bottom. I remember catching sight of us in a mirror at a restaurant. There he was young and wrinkle free and there I was looking every bit of my 55 years. And although he loved my body, and I would lie next to him and marvel at his smooth beautiful and youthful skin, I would then look at my own and I started to feel older rather than younger. I remember one time he was stroking my hair and I hadn’t had my roots done and I was absolutely paranoid that he would see how grey I was underneath the dye.

He didn’t seem to mind that I was menopausal and greying and sagging. The problem is that I began to mind. I started avoiding mirrors. I didn’t really want to go out in public at some point because I started noticing people staring at us. We went on holiday for week to an island and when we were lying on the beach I could see people looking at us obviously wondering if he was my son or if we were together. Darius kept telling me not to worry but gradually the worries became more and more.

Even worse I was lying to everybody. I just couldn’t tell my children that I was dating a man who was 30 years younger than myself. He’s actually the same age as my eldest son which made things even worse. So I pretended I was staying at friends houses and I was going away with friends and I was staying with family and eventually I knew I was going to get found out.

Darius started to get hurt and frustrated by my reluctance to introduce him to my friends and family. He was perfectly happy to introduce me to his friends but the problem was I didn’t really want to meet them.

We had gone on one night out with them and being surrounded by set of 25 to 28 year olds is not fun when you in your mid 50s. I just felt old. I didn’t understand their cultural references and they didn’t understand mine. I told them I’d been to see a Led Zeppelin tribute band and they had no idea what I was talking about. They also had a habit of telling me things as if they were the first people on earth to think about them. One girl went on and on about how to bring up babies - not that she had any babies - and I had to stifle the urge to say that I had four children so….

There was so many things he didn’t really know; I don’t think he was even alive when Princess Diana died. Bands he liked I’d never heard of. He wasn’t particularly interested in reading whereas I devour books. Our intellectual compatibility was obviously not brilliant.

As time went on, in many ways being with a younger man started making me feel older rather than the opposite. I felt as if I had decades of knowledge, bit like a big heavy encyclopaedia. It started to get a bit wearing every time I had to explain to him who Damien Hirst was or my memories of going to Glastonbury in 1986 before it really went crazy.

Although we saw each other for about two years, I didn’t really tell anyone about it bar a few close friends. My female friends thought it was fantastic. Interestingly, my male friends really found it difficult. They found it really hard to understand that a man of that age would want to date someone of my age.

When I questioned Darius about it, he told me that loads of men of his age wanted to date older women because we were totally sorted and didn’t play games. He told me he found my confidence very sexy. “You really know who you are,” he kept on saying.

We did know that it would come to an end at some point. I found that I didn’t want to keep lying and also that I wanted a relationship with someone who could be by my side. I wanted to introduce someone to my children who could come to family parties and Christmas dinners and meet my friends. Darius felt like a dirty little secret. I didn’t like not telling my children but I just couldn’t bear doing that. I think the idea that their mother was going out with someone of the age of her eldest son would freak them out.

Also I began to find the lack of communication around cultural references rather frustrating. I began to miss being with people of my own age.

It was me actually that ended it. Although I had had the most amazing time - I couldn’t see a future. I honestly knew deep down inside that we were not a match and that Darius needed to go and find someone who he could have children with.

He was very sad when I told him but I don’t think he was surprised. It had become a bone of contention that I wouldn’t introduce him to anybody. He said it made him feel like a shameful secret and that wasn’t fair on him because he’s such a lovely person.

We parted as friends. But we haven’t really kept in touch because the truth of the matter is my world is so far apart from his world that friendship didn’t really feel that possible or even that necessary.

However he taught me a lot. He helped me heal. He showed me that love is warm and generous and fun and honest and in many ways just free and unbidden. He made me love my body in a way that I probably never have done before – mainly because he took such pleasure in it. When I think of him all I do is smile.

Five things I learned from dating A YOUNGER MAN

1) Feeling young and vibrant is a state of mind and it is a good place to be because, otherwise, age can take us over in an unhelpful and negative way.

2) The three key elements to good relationships are resect, consistency and consideration, all of which young men seem to have in abundance

3) I learned how to let someone love me in a very uncomplicated way – he just wanted to make me happy

4) Sometimes relationships can be simple – younger people seem to be basically just less complicated

5) Pretty much anything can be fun if you have a positive attitude – from a walk to food to hanging out

This piece is in the Daily Mail today with a HUGE puff at the top - and also journalist Louise Atkinson writing about preferring the jabs…. the debate goes on…

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First of all, I want to state that this picture and quote is from an interview (not by me) by the i paper so please do read more there.

It’s an important issue. For paid subscribers I willbe doing a video and uploading the six stages of Coercive Control handouts I use for my workshops available o support those who suspect they are in a coercively controlling relationship of for anyone who is worried about a friend/family member of therapists who wish to know about this.

I also recorded a podcast (I will put a link in the comments) with an anonymous woman who bravely offered o talk to me about her experience.

But below is another ANONYMOUS account of life when are in a relationship that involves coercive control. I have permission to tell this story. It is a LONG READ but worth it I believe..

And, as Vicky McClure, says very honestly, it can be subtle…

‘It all began at a dinner party. Back then - 15 years ago - was single, a mother of two children then aged six and eight. My marriage had ended two years previously and it had been very difficult and painful. I had been the one to call an end to our marriage, mainly because I believed it had run out of steam. Yet it hadn’t been easy and I wasn’t entirely over it.

Looking back now I can see that I was just desperate to meet someone. I was worried about being on my own and I was feeling vulnerable.

I was in my 30s. I was working hard and I was looking after my children and I really wanted to have a partner. I was looking for a good man who would love me and love my children. I was convinced that would happen but, underneath it, I was desperately panicked that it might nor happen.

So when my friend Sarah rang me and told me she was inviting me to a dinner party and that I was going to be sitting next to a man who she thought I would get on well with, I could barely contain my excitement. A single man? One I would get on with? Someone who’d take on a single parent with two small children? “Pigs might fly,” I said to her.

But she insisted. “He’s funny and he’s handsome and he’s clever.”

She went on to say how charming he was. “You’ll like him,” she said. So I dressed up, dusted myself down and went for dinner.

When Tim (not his real name) walked in through the front door and gave me a pretty dazzling smile, I was a goner. We spent the evening locked in conversation. He told me that he was a former investment banker but was now trying to run a company making compost loos for festivals. “I want to make a difference,” he said.

I found this intriguing. I liked the idea that he was a person who had decided to change his life because of his values. The night went on and we talked. I was really taken by him. He was so handsome and funny and witty and clever and very charming. When I went to leave, he asked for my number and said he’d like to see me again.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

The next day I called Sarah to get the background on him. Why was this amazing man single? She told me that he’d been married but his wife was Australian and she’d decided to go back to Australia with their two sons but that he didn’t want to go. It all sounded very sad and very difficult. Sarah vouched for him. “I think he’s a good man.” she said.

That was good enough for me.

Tim texted me the next day. In fact he started texting me a lot every day. He told me all about himself. He asked me all about myself. He seemed open and intelligent, interested and interesting.

We went on some dates. We had a wonderful time and it was very romantic. He’d turn up on my doorstep with two tickets to Paris. We would go off to the seaside and eat salmon sandwiches and drink champagne. He bought flowers and chocolates and thoughtful presents for my children and within two months I was totally smitten.

One night as we sat on the dunes on one of our weekend trips when my children were with their father, he told me he loved me.

I felt my heart lift. I thought all my Christmases had come at once. I had never been so happy. I told him I was utterly in love with him.

He met my children. They were wary but then I’d been a single mother and I knew it was going to take a bit of time for them to trust him. He met my family and friends and everyone seemed to like him.

The only downside was that he lived in Scotland so seeing each other was incredibly difficult. One or other of us would fly either to Scotland or back to London where I lived.

After about six months of this not particularly brilliant – and costly - arrangement, Tim said he’d like to talk to me about something. “It’s crazy me living so far away.” he said, “I’m wondering if it would make more sense if I moved in with you?”

I was a bit surprised. It felt very early days and I wasn’t sure if him moving in would work with my children. I asked him to let me think about it. He seemed pretty fine with that. He explained that he was actually renting the cottage on the farm he was living on and so he could keep the rent on so that he had a bolt hole.

I asked about his work. Wouldn’t that be affected? He said that as he was in the process of forming the company and trying to get everything worked out, he could actually do it from anywhere.

All this made sense to me. Also Tim quite rightly named that it was costing me a lot of money to run a household on my salary. At that time, my ex had lost his job and wasn’t contributing financially.

“Why are we running two households?” Tim asked. He then said he loved me and wanted to be with me. It made sense that we should be together.

After a bit of thought - and talking to my children who weren’t particularly keen but not totally against it - Tim moved in. There was a moment when I was concerned. Were we going too fast? But then he would tell me he’d loved me and it would all be fine. So, he packed up Scotland and unpacked in my house in London.

And, at first, it was lovely to go to bed with him and wake up with him every day.

Soon he became very entrenched in our family life. He started doing school runs and helping out. He did the garden. He mended the fence. He fixed the plumbing. He was a very practical man. I felt very supported and it was wonderful. However things started to go slightly wrong within two months of him moving in.

I had been very sociable and had lots of people round to the house and went out to lots of parties. I also spent a lot of time with my family but gradually over a period of time that started to change. Tim didn’t really like me going out even when he was supposed to be coming too. He’d say things like, “wouldn’t it be lovely if we spent the evening together?” He started being a little bit difficult. He didn’t really like most of my friends. If we went to their houses for dinner, he would often kick me under the table after a couple of hours of being there because he wanted to leave. Or he would just be moody and truculent and not talk to anybody. If people came round to the house, he would just ignore them or stalk around glowering everybody. Over a period of time people stopped coming to my house.

I told myself it was because he just wanted it to be the two of us. So I started making excuses when we were invited out. I didn’t want to tell my friends that Tim didn’t like them so I would just say that we were busy.

He also stopped making so much effort with my children. In fact, if I was to be honest – and I feel very ashamed about this - he could actually be mean to them. He’d tell them that they were lazy, that they weren’t trying hard enough, that they should do more to help out. It got to the stage where there was nothing they could do that was right. When I would question him about this, he’d say “I’m doing this for you.” He’d say he was only trying to support me and I would give in, questioning my own parenting skills.

I would like to say that this made me end the relationship but it didn’t. That’s partially because it happened slowly over a period of time. It wasn’t as if he went from Mr Wonderful to Mr Horrible overnight. Also, despite evidence to the contrary, I was determined to get us back to the first bit the bit while he loved me, when it all felt so magical and amazing. I kept telling myself that if I tried a bit harder and tried to understand where he was coming from, things would go back to how they were at the beginning.

I convinced myself he was socially insecure so I stopped everything. Friends no longer came to the house but I told myself that was because Tim just wanted to be with me and wasn’t that romantic and special. I did still see my family but generally on my own and if, Tim did come. he would just sit in the corner and not speak.

But then when we would leave he’d get very angry and very cross with me, telling me that I was being ‘controlled’ by my family.

I would feel sad and humiliated and a bit lost.

This this went on for years. The pattern was it would all start well but it would always end up with an argument. In the end, I gave up seeing anyone. I couldn’t bear the rows. I was desperate for us to be happy as we had once been.

Over time, Tim became increasingly manipulative. If he didn’t get what he wanted, he would often just leave. If we had a small row about something, the next thing I knew I’d hear his car start up and he would just drive away. I found this excruciating. I hated it when he left. I’d text him and ask him what was wrong and I would get no reply. He would literally ghost me for days.

It was incredibly upsetting and I would turn it on myself, telling myself I was a bad person and that I’d done something ‘wrong’.

Quite often I’d drive after him scarily fast, risking my own safety, to track him down. If I found him I would beg him to come home. I look back on it now and it feels so humiliating.

Occasionally I would find a smidgeon of strength. I’d try to talk to him. I’d say, ‘what’s happened to our relationship?’ But he would just act as if I’d lost my mind. “What are you complaining about?” he’d say. He’d then go into a long diatribe about me and how terribly I ran my life and how badly my behaved children were and I would end up thinking that he was right and that I was wrong. He said he had to leave so that he didn’t lose his temper and that if we all behaved a lot better he wouldn’t have to do that.

I was emotionally very frightened of him. He was like Jekyll and Hyde. He would literally turn on a sixpence and lose his temper or leave or glower.

I’d like to say I toppled to this quickly but I didn’t. Six years in and we were still living together, I’d managed to carry on working and I was also living a slightly separate life with my children and then my life with him.

We would often eat together without him as he complained he didn’t like the sound of my children eating. We no longer holidayed together because Tim said if the children came on holiday he wouldn’t come. “I hate holidaying with your children. They are so badly behaved and rude,” he’d say. This meant that I would holiday with them and then I would have a separate holiday with Tim. It all began to feel ‘normal.’

Over time I could see that my friends and family became increasingly uncomfortable being around the two of us. Tim’s business didn’t seem to be happening and I was paying for everything. I knew that was wrong but every time anyone tiptoed near the subject, I would shut it down. In my heart I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t bear anyone pointing it out to me. I was telling myself a lie because part of me was still desperately in love with Tim and not wanting to admit that the man I was living with was not the man I had met.

About seven years into our relationship, it all came to a head when a niece came to stay with me. I’d spent a lot of time nervously telling her what she could and couldn’t do in the house and then she said to me, looking at me straight in the eye. “What on earth has happened to you? ‘ she said. I asked he what she meant. She said, “you’ve gone from being a vivacious funny carefree relaxed person and to someone who is frightened as a rabbit.”

I don’t know if it was the timings or whether or not I just loved this niece so much but it hit home. Finally.

That night Tim came back and I told him that we needed to have a trial separation. I told him I’d had enough. I loved him but I could no longer live like this.

He looked at me coldly told me to go and F myself. The next thing I knew he had gone upstairs, packed his bags and walked out. He roared off in his car. I went to grab my car keys to follow him as I had done so many times in the past but my niece took the car key out of my hand.

“Let him go.” she said. “He’ll be back but you shouldn’t let him back.”

At the time I thought it was over. I was very sad but the next morning , when I woke up, I felt as if an entire weight had been lifted off me. I called members of my family. I called my friends. Every single one of them said the same thing. “Tim is not someone you should be with.” And I knew they were right.

I would like to say that was the end of it but it wasn’t. Tim reappeared two days later and put his bags back in the hallway. I told him he needed to leave. Buoyed up by my friends support, I told him it was my house. He was no longer welcome there and he had to go. He was furious. He ranted and raged. He became threatening. I told him that if he didn’t leave, I would call the police immediately.

Tim turned on his heel, picked up his bags and left.

He never came back into the house again but he did certainly try.

It started with endless messages of love, declarations of loving me forever. On and on the messages went, message after message after message. Eventually I blocked him but then he got friends to text me. He got members of his own family to ring me. He once turned up at my workplace and when I looked out the window, he was standing next to my car.

At some point I unblocked him. I rang him and told me that he was stalking me and that if he continued I would have to report him. I told him his behaviour was scaring me. I told him we were over and that I was never going to change my mind.

That night as I lay in bed I heard his car draw up outside the house. I could feel my heart beating and then I heard a smashing noise. Fortunately my brother happened to be staying and he ran down the stairs and found that Tim had smashed the windows of my house. My brother opened the door to talk to him but Tim sped off in his car.

I called the police and they came round but they said there was not much they could do as I didn’t have any evidence.

The next day the same thing happened again. This time Tim stood on the doorway and refused to move. He was basically screaming that he was going to kill me. He was going to slit my throat. He was going to set fire to my house. I had locked myself in the bathroom and I was trembling with fear but fortunately my brother recorded the conversation - not that it was a conversation - and then called the police. The police appeared, heard the threats and then went around and arrested him.

I was granted a non molestation order against Tim and he was told he was not allowed to contact me for six months and that if he did he would be arrested and charged with harassment, stalking and criminal damage from the smashed windows.

Once again I would like to say that was the end of it. Tim did stick to the legal arrangement but as soon as it was over he found me again and put flowers outside my door.

The upshot of all this is that I actually sold my house and moved. It seems a terrible thing to have to do, that one person’s behaviour can make you so frightened and scared that you actually leave your home. I didn’t feel I had any choice. I have never been scared in that way ever in my entire life. I had to tell all my family and friends not to let him know where I lived and I let his family know that they could not tell him anything about me.

It is five years on now since I last heard from him or saw him. And at that time I went through a whole set of swinging emotions. Sometimes I would actually miss him or miss the beginning of our relationship when I felt we were so happy. It sounds insane to say this but I have to accept the fact that there was part of me that loved him and not feel ashamed about that. I went through a lot of therapy which really helped. It helped me understand the parts of me that fell in love with Tim and the fact that they were not whole. I also made the decision to stop feeling frightened. It was a very good friend of mine who said I had a choice in the matter and that to stay locked away in my house was basically Tim winning and me losing. I understood that I couldn’t keep locked away forever.

Since then I have come to many important realisations about how and why I became embroiled in this relationship. I know a lot more about coercive control and how and why it happened and why I – a strong competent woman – became so embroiled in something so unhealthy. I choose to see it as an awakening and an opportunity to vow to do things differently from now on. Have I felt shame? Of course. But I have also realised that I get to choose how I feel about this. I have made amends to my children, my family, my friends. But, most importantly, I have made amends to myself. Coercive control doesn’t come from nowhere. I now see my desperation to be loved, my romantic nature, my fractured childhood left me available for this relationship. On a good day, I tell myself thank goodness it happened because it woke me up. On a bad day, I tell myself I let myself be hurt and I let others I love dearly be hurt.

What I do know is that I will never ever let this happen again. For that, I am grateful. And, given all the horribleness that happened, I feel resolve and acceptance.

It was a horrible. frightening time. But what I take from t is the knowledge that I will never let this happen again.

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I found this piece of writing.

I must have written it just before I married my now ex-husband on my 50th birthday on the 16th December 2016.

Of course I am now heading to what would have been our ten year anniversary. I am OK with that. But, for years, I wasn’t. It seemed a bonkers thing to marry someone on my birthday, in retrospect.

But reading this makes me cry. Not too much. Just a little bit.

Because this is how crazy love is. I loved him. I honestly thought we were in it for the long term.

But, mostly, what I did was to IGNORE RED FLAGS.

Note to self; NEVER ignore red flags.

So why did I do it? I am going to explore this in later posts but I do think it is linked to what happened to me in the past - see previous posts…

Anyway, here we go…so remember this was written before I married so over a decade ago….and reading it back I can see the red flags in the writing.

I mean, BLOODY HELL….

‘This time a year ago, I had no idea what was about to happen in my life. I was a single parent with four kids and dating a man I’d met three years previously through mutual friends. The first time we went out on a date, he took me to one of my most secret yet favourite spots in the entire of England for a picnic. I knew then that he was special. We walked and talked and ate hard-boiled eggs and then went in to Oxford for some slightly stale coffee and walnut cake and a cup of tea.

He drove me home that day and, for reasons I can’t remember now, he ended up making fish pie for my children. I saw him in the garden, hoofing a ball around with my youngest son and I thought, “Ok, maybe this could work.”

Two weeks later, I went to Devon to spend the weekend with him. In truth it was because I had nowhere else to go. My former partner – and father of three of my four children – was, at that point, spending every other weekend in my house. We’d decided it was important to keep the children steady in their family home so I agreed to move out every other weekend.

But, by this point (two years on), I had run out of places to go so when this new man asked me if I’d like to meet up again, I basically invited myself to stay. It seems madness now but that was where I was in my life – sort of half-crazy, knitting everything together, struggling to survive, putting on a brave face. I think back on it and wonder what on earth I thought I was doing. I barely knew this man (although I can see now that something in him chimed immediately with something in me). I remember quite clearly calling him when I was close by for directions and he told me he’d meet me at the nearest village. I thought, “well, if this doesn’t go well, I can always drive home or find a local bnb.” I rounded the corner and there he was – smiling, handsome, dark haired, tanned and I noticed how kind he looked.

This will be OK, I thought.

And it was. We got together and were happily rolling along dating each other when, last Christmas, we spent our first Christmas together without my children. I was so preoccupied at the thought of being without them for the first time ever, that I couldn’t really concentrate on what being with him really meant. I didn’t see, at the time, that is was a commitment – me, him, my family, togetherness. I had gone from being Me and the kids to being Me, Him and the kids. People sent Christmas cards to the two of us and I’d open them up, puzzling over the names as if it hadn’t really occurred to me that we were, officially, together. Up until then, our relationship had been rather fluid. We had been together but also spent time apart.

Over the last three years, I have come to realise that this is how love is; complicated, tricky, difficult, painful, honest…horribly, horribly honest. Over the years with him, I began to learn lessons about love from him. Every time we wobbled somehow we would find it in ourselves to dig deeper. I gradually grew to believe that in order to love someone fully, it is important to face up to the pain of it. If there’s no pain – at our age with our Louis Vuitton – then it’s not very honest. We have both had to accept that we are too old not to be set in patterns and changing is difficult.

But, last Christmas. something did change. We sat round the big family table in London together and, once I’d stopped blubbing about my children, my future husband held my hand and we had a great day. For me, it felt like a statement of togetherness as a couple.

So, at some point this year, we decided to cement our relationship and get married. This Christmas, we will be there together saying our vows in front of family and friends and I couldn’t be happier or more moved. I almost can’t believe I am doing it and yet I want to do it more than I have ever wanted to in my entire life.

Yet I was never sure we’d get here. In fact, in the first couple of years after the break-up with the father of some of my children, I was never sure I’d really get anywhere in terms of love and relationships. I dated. I said yes to every man who ever asked me out. I dressed up, got my hair done, put my best foot forwards but somehow, none of it felt right. Some men were obviously still obsessed with their ex-wives/girlfriends, some men were just plain depressed, others didn’t even seem to grasp the basic point that, in order to get a second date, it was pretty essential to look interested in the woman sitting opposite them. There were times when after a disastrous first date listening to all these problems, I felt I should actually just set myself up in a confessional box and let them get on with it. They’d look shocked when, on asking me to go on a date again, I’d politely but firmly turn them down.

There were times when I became depressed. I lay awake at night thinking I was never going to meet anyone. It wasn’t that I particularly needed to meet someone. I had no problem defining myself as a single women. It was just that, somehow along the line, I had assumed I would end up being part of a two. I felt a desperate desire to fall in love again and to be loved and yet no one came up to scratch. I began to think I was being too picky – did it matter that one man called the police ‘the boys in blue” (odd, weird, childish, infantalising) or that another really lovely man told me his favourite holiday destination was Dubai (fake sand, fake everything, not much culture). I tried not to judge people on this but I couldn’t help it. I was never going to fall in love with a man who said, after telling me he’d taken his daughter out shopping, that ‘Billy Barclay’s taken a bit of a bashing.”

So, I knew what love wasn’t but it became very hard for me to define what love was/is. I begun to question whether or not I truly understood it anyway. I knew I loved my children but that’s different. Maternal love is hot-wired, protective, volcanic, all-consuming and passionate but it is about those to whom you have given birth. I wasn’t sure, when I really sat and thought about it, that I had really experienced adult love in all its true forms. I think I’d run away from it in a way. I was kidding myself. I wanted to love and be loved but I didn’t really know what it was.

Yet love is so much part of our lives, our growing up. It’s in our DNA. We expect to be loved, we yearn for it. It never occurs to most of us – when we are young – that we may not find it. Not even that…we may not actually understand what love is at all.

I’d love to be able to define it here on this page now. I’d love to tell you that I know what it means, that I have the formula. I once spent an evening with my friend’s teenage daughter. She was studying the sciences, dead set to give an answer to everything. We talked of love and she told me in the way only an imperious convinced-she-is-right teenager could, that love was nothing more than a scientific fact. She told it was based on pheromones and a law of attraction which scientists could actually track. Then she gave me a formula for it.

I was pretty impressed but it also terrified me. Do young people really think it comes down to a formula?

For I know it doesn’t. Love is like a madness. It turns you inside out. It makes the world more colourful, more fun, more extreme, more painful. It makes you feel in a way that sometimes you don’t want to feel. It is uplifting but it can cast you down in a second.

I have often seen the transformative power of love works its magic. People who have felt they have nothing left, who are depressed beyond all words, whose lives seem hopeless and lost can turn from absolute abject miserableness in to seemingly joyous beings in a matter of weeks. It’s all down to love. My friend, who is a psychotherapist, told me about one client who went from being deeply depressed to hopefully, sweetly optimistic within a month of meeting someone.

“It was incredible,” my friend said. “I really didn’t know how to help her. She was dressing in a dowdy way and could barely look at me until, one session, she came in and she looked utterly different. She was smiling broadly and even her clothes looked different on her.”

My friend – an experienced therapist – could only, in the end, put it down to the fact that her client had met a man. Not just any old man, a good man who cared for her and treated her properly – before this her pattern had been of briefly dating slightly abusive men feeling she deserved no better.

Then she met X and everything changed almost instantaneously. ”It made me look at love through an entirely different lens,” she said. In many ways, love, or the feeling of being loved, embarking on a love affair, seemed more curative than weeks in the chair.

Of course, no one knows how long love will last and we all fear the worst, knowing the terrible scorching pain that happens when it goes wrong, especially if we are the ones who are invested in staying with someone when they have ostensibly fallen out of love with us.

But this is why love is worth it in a way. It’s a gamble and, in many ways, it’s the ultimate gamble. How excruciating is it to expose yourself in such as raw and naked way only to end up being rejected. The question is, can we risk it?

So, this time around, I have. I have never been so emotionally close to anyone. My future husband has somehow exposed in me every flaw, every mess-up, yet also every ounce of joy, happiness and love I possess. So this is how it is. He knows me. And I know him. It has taken time but it is important.

So this is why I am marrying him, not because I want to possess him or be his possession. It’s because I love him and I want to make a commitment to him and I want everyone to know this; that love is amazing, love makes my heart race and it can also seem to make it stop. Love is simply worth it every single time. It just is.

I’ve Got The Wegovy

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It all started in December 2021. Or maybe the seeds of my downfall through a successful scam started way before that in terms of how I trust people and why I was chasing money that didn’t exist. But, for all intents and purposes, December 2021 is essentially when I invested £250 in an online platform after an email with the name Martin Lewis in the strapline came in to my inbox.

I trust Martin Lewis, the television financial whizz person who speaks a lot of sense and advises mere mortals rather than the super rich about what to do with their money. I’ve always liked Martin Lewis and I trust his advice as do hundreds of thousands other people. So, whereas I would usually ignore any e-mails, I opened this one up. The e-mail said ‘bitcoin is on the rise - invest now’.

It then went on to say that, according to Martin Lewis, cash is dead. No one has any cash anymore and that we could all get rich quick by investing in crypto currency. It went on to show lots of individuals saying they had tripled their money in a week. There were ‘real life’ stories and a blog by a ‘newbie’ investor who had turned £250 to £2500.00 in less than a week. I read the email about three times. It looked totally believable and plausible (I now know that poor Martin Lewis is a name the pops up in financial scams all the time and that this e-mail had nothing to do with him). All you had to do was click on a link, put up your £250.00 and then sit back and let the algorithms investor bot do it’s bit.

Usually I would steer clear of this. There’s lots of reasons for this; one is that I have never found money particularly interesting (ALERT this is not a good thing, note to self; grow up about fiscal responsibility). Anyway, I know I need it and I also know I’ve never been that good at managing it, but basically I steer clear of money stuff. I’m a busy single working mother with four children. I work full time and I am the main wage-earner. It’s a struggle enough to balance the books, let alone think about investing or speculating. I see money as something that pays the bills and that’s about it. I’ve never had the time or energy to think of it in any other way. I also do what everyone else does - cook, clean, shop, do school runs, go to parent teacher meetings, parent my teenagers, do a lot of emotional heavy-lifting. I am, in essence, incredibly busy and I have never really found the time or interest to focus on managing my finances. I am sure I am not alone in this. As long as I am bringing in enough to pay the bills then I assume everything is alright.

Yet the idea of investing in crypto currency had started seeping in to my consciousness. I’d managed to avoid investing in it so far. I honestly don’t actually know what it is and, because of that, I’ve always switched off when people have started talking about it. However recently I’d met up with various friends who had many stories to tell of how their other friends and sometimes their friend’s offspring had made a fortune investing in crypto (as it’s known in the trade). Before all these ringing endorsements of online investing I had made the sensible decision that since I knew nothing about investing, in money, or crypto or anything really, that I’d just avoid it. But given that my track record of managing money is hopeless, I wondered if I was just being a bit blinkered to the easy riches that were being dangled in front of me.

In many ways, my logic made sense. The year before (2020) I had had a set of very difficult circumstances. I got divorced which cost me money on a financial settlement and lawyers fees. I’d also lost my life savings due to an investment (through a third party) that crashed and burned owing to a combination of Brexit and Covid. It should have taught me a lesson. Had I have been more financially-aware, I would have restructured my investment years ago. But I didn’t. I just put my head in the sand and hoped it would be OK. This is what I do when it comes to money. I just ignore it and hope other people will invest it wisely for me and then I get on with my busy life. The upshot of losing my investment was that I had to sell my family home of 21 years and move in to rented accommodation. 2021 was gruelling and, by the end of the year, I was exhausted in every possible way.

So you could say, when the e-mail popped in to my consciousness, a few things came together; I wanted to recoup a percentage of the money I lost, my home had gone which made me feel all at sea and I also had a bit of disposable income from the sale of my house - not a lot, but a bit. So, this time, I wondered if I was looking a gift horse in the mouth. Martin Lewis plus the entire world seemed to be telling me that by not investing in crypto I was essentially being a backwards-looking Luddite. The world was moving on - why was I not moving on with it? Of course I maybe should have come to the not-very-shocking realisation that I am not great at investing money, but I’m an optimistic soul. I felt that maybe this was the time that I could be a financial-winner.

So, I clicked on the link in the e-mail, reasoning that £250.00 was not a vast amount of money and also imagining how smug I’d feel in a week’s time when my £250 was turned in to £2,500.00 like the person in the blog.

I was immediately redirected to a company called The RoyalFX.com (it’s now changed it’s name to theroyalfx.io). It looked very professional with lots of plaudits and ‘real life’ investor recommendations. I made my account and logged in - all very easy and done via my e-mail - and soon a graph opened up which had lots of confusing statistics and moving green and red lines on it. I could see my investment on the right hand side, my £250.00 all ready to be invested. I had no idea what was going on the graph but it looked very impressive. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do next but very soon a lovely man called up. He told me his name was Jort and that he was my trader. He said it was a great time to invest in crypto and that he’d manage my money and everything was good. He gave me his WhatsApp name and number and Jort Van Meijer became my go-to man. At the time it didn’t occur to me that this might be strange, I’d only invested £250.00 but I assumed it was all part of the service.

Of course I looked up The Royal FX online. It had good reviews on Trust Pilot. I looked up Jort. There he was, a trader from Amsterdam. It all looked great. Then Jort texted me in Dutch so I genuinely thought he was a Dutch trader. “I’m the King of Forex,” he said, once he’d translated his text in to English. He chatted away and told me he’d call me the next day. “You’re in safe hands,” he said.

We arranged to talk the next day and at the agreed time Jort telephoned me to talk to me about my investment and talk me through how it all worked. He got me to scroll around my online account and to see the profits going up and down and everything looked good. He kept on insisting I put aside half an hour for him to explain how it all worked but I told him I was busy. This is because I was busy. I was finishing up work for the Christmas holiday. I was also unpacking endless boxes and feeling exhausted. I was working extremely hard, trying to keep my children’s spirits up after a pretty gruelling year.So I told Jort I didn’t really have time to go through all this financial information. ‘I’m not a trader,’ I said to Jort. ‘You’re a trader. Go and trade.”

That seemed to make Jort happy.

I could kick myself now. I suppose I should have listened to Jort but, really, as I know nothing about investing, I don’t think I would have smelled a rat even if what he was saying was all crypto-nonsense.

That weekend I clicked occasionally on the link to my investment graph and I could see my money was going upwards. It felt good. I went to a dinner party. I told my friends I had invested in crypto. They all looked dubious but I told them it was fine. My money was increasing. I was a winner!

“My ex-husband lost a lot of our money by doing online investing,” a friend of mine told me. She gave me the lowdown. “Don’t chase your losses,” she said.

When I got home that night I could see my £250 was now up to £1k. It genuinely did feel good. I felt that for once I’d actually made a financially good decision. Jort was my trader and Jort was Dutch and I like the Dutch. Anyway, it was £250.00 and it wasn’t going to break the bank.

And I’d had a terrible year. Maybe I was chasing a bit of happiness, a silver lining on a dark dark cloud.

But the next week things ramped up a bit. Jort and I talked every day, we became ‘close’ - he was flirtatious, kind, understanding, sweet. He’d looked me up online and seemed very impressed at my journalistic output and my career as a therapist. Somehow during these online communications, he mentioned ekrona. He said it was a Swedish currency linked to the bank of Sweden and it was a no-brainer to invest in. Once again my brain fogged over as he banged on about the obvious reasons to invest in ekrona. I had the laundry to hang out, dogs to walk, a school run to do and clients to see.

“Just another £5,000,” he said. “You take a contract for a month and in January you’ll be making three times that.”

I wasn’t really listening but somehow Jort put me through to man called George. He sounded young, pucker, English. He sounded like the boy-next-door. George said he’d talk me through how to transfer the £5k in crypto currency. In order to help me transfer money, George asked me to download an app called Any Desk to my computer. I tried to do that but when a warning came up saying it would give George access to my computer, I denied access. George got momentarily cross but then said it didn’t really matter.

Instead, on my mobile, I downloaded an app called Cryptopay.me and then had to show all sorts of proof in order to become verified by that platform. I nearly gave up but George was so encouraging. We chatted away about his wife, where he lived, his children. Meanwhile I was waiting for verification from Cryptopay.me - it is a legitimate site for crypto currency and they have stringent checks in order for investors to become verified. It took so long I almost gave up (how I wish I had). But every time I’d drift off back in to my own world, Jort and George would ring and encourage me and then, one day, I became verified and George talked me through how to send £5,000.00 to a cryptowallet address provided by Jort.

And there it was. The extra £5,00.00 on my stocks and shares crypto graph - my ekrona purchase in my name. By this time I had actually done more research. Ekrona came up as a legitimate currency on many seemingly reputable websites (it turns out is isn’t according to the Swedish National Bank so, beware, there are many fake traders trying to sell eKrona). However Jort Van Meijer in Amsterdam who I found on Instagram obviously wasn’t my Jort. He didn’t actually work as a trader. I started to wonder who my Jort actually was. So the next time he rung I asked him for proof of who he was. He said he was 49 years old, divorced, two kids living in St John’s Wood. “Are you reassured now?” he asked me. I told him no. Anyone could say that. He put me through to boy-next-door George. I quizzed George. George said Jort was completely trustworthy. George said he grew up near me. He cited schools and pubs and shops. I told him I couldn’t afford to lose my money. He was most reassuring. “Stop worrying,” he said.

Then, to show willing, Jort put just under £500.00 back in to my crypto wallet. “Go and have a massage,” he texted.

From then on it went from bad to worse. It’s humiliating even to write abut this and to admit to how gullible I was. But I also know that this is what scamsters trade on. The fact is, most people who have been scammed just want the whole horrible sorry, scary, threatening, embarrassing mess just to go away. They don’t want to admit to being scammed, to being vulnerable, to being greedy, to being open to flattery. Yet I was. I was tired and lonely and a bit financially-desperate. I was keen to recoup some of the money I had lost. I was also convinced that somehow there was a world out there - the world of online currency - that was thriving and I was somehow being left behind.

And, at heart, I guess I’m a risk taker, a bit of a gambler. I have tried to curb this is myself but, once in a while, it rears its head. I equate risk taking with being alive. I have come to realise that this is a fault in me. And I so desperately wanted to tell my children I’d made money. We could pay the bill without worrying. Maybe we could go on holiday. Maybe it would lessen the blow of losing our home.

I was the perfect target.

I was on a roll now. I started obsessing about my profits. I looked at my investment graph endlessly. The ekrona profits were rising. And Jort was so lovely! We’d chat away and text and then it got to a point over nothing more than ten days that every time Jort rung and suggested a new money-making scheme, I agreed. I’d resist at first, saying I didn’t have any money, But he’d ring and text and flirt, backed up by his super-dependable and likeable side kick George, and somehow I found myself transferring more money in to my bit coin wallet.

And as I invested my profits grew. I invested in oil and forex (the Royal FX invests in forex, not that I actually knew what that was). Jort would talk ‘shop’ about oil and American wage schemes and he’d send me articles and I’d listen to none of it. I’d resist for a few days and Jort would ring endlessly and somehow I’d end up transferring more money - another £5k in to one scheme, £10k in to oil and gold. The online graph became more complicated. I started to get nervous. An inner voice was clamouring for me to stop. George rung to request more money. I told him I was stopping investing. I told him that I was now £20k down. I told him I couldn’t afford lose the money. “I’m a working single parent,” I said. He acted surprised. “Jort is a great bloke,” he said. “He’s a good trader.”

But I was beginning to feel a terrible sense of dis-ease. Jort called. I told him I wanted my money back. He said I was making huge amounts of profit. I told him that no, I wasn’t. In fact, I was now £20k down so, until the profits were in my bank, I wasn’t making any profit at all.

Jort then transferred another £1k back to my cryptowallet to reassure me.

But I wasn’t reassured. I began to realise that when someone says you can increase your money tenfold in ten days, I should have smelt a rat. But a combination of many factors came together and made me a sitting duck. The most humiliating factor is that I somewhat secretly took pride in the face that I can sniff scamsters out a mile off. My octogenarian mother is always getting phone calls from people trying to purloin the little money she has left and it has taken me years to explain to her that no everyone is as well-meaning and trusting as she is.

Yet her good nature is obviously something I have inherited.

I am a natural born optimist. Even when life goes very badly, I’m always looking for the upside. So in many ways I am prone to believe the best in people. Maybe this is why when ‘Jort’ kept on texting me and chatting away and telling me things about his life, I started to believe he was real. After all, I’d told him I was a single parent, I’d lost my money, I’d got divorced. I’d even told him very plainly that I couldn’t afford to lose any money and that, if I did, my misery would be blood on his hands. I guess part of me really couldn’t believe that another human being on the planet couldn’t care less.

It all came to a head when, one day (Dec 17th to be precise), I told Jort I’d had enough. By this point I was so stressed out about my ‘investment’ that I couldn’t sleep. He told me that he’d pull all my investments. He texted “you’ve made $77,000.00! he said). We talked. He was delighted. “You can give me a bonus!” he said.

Then he claimed I needed to pay Capital Gains Tax on my profits. He got his secretary to make up a pro forma invoice. All I had do was to transfer £12.7k in to my bit coin wallet then, hey presto, I’d be 55,000 dollars richer. I asked Jort why he hadn’t told me about the CGT before I made an investment. ‘Everyone has to pay it,” he said.

I looked it up online. I’s true that traders do have to pay CGT, or that’s what I read online. So I told Jort I’d pay it. He was pleased. But when I tried to transfer it, the bank blocked it. I tried again. And again. By this point Jort was getting increasingly concerned, telling me the banks were stupid.

Then my bank called. A very helpful lady from the fraud squad quizzed me in great detail and at great length about what was going on. She told me that all traders should be registered and suggested I look at a list of traders. Jort wasn’t there. I texted Jort. He told me that he wasn’t a trader but an ‘agent’. He said the company was registered off-shore. He said the banks were being difficult but that he absolutely was going to give me my money.

I went back to the bank lady. By this point my head was spinning. I asked her what I could do. She told me she’d stopped all payments and that the best thing to do was to try and play the long game in order to get my investment back. “Its not that likely,” she said, “but you never know.”

So, how did I get scammed? I have read up endlessly about it. I’ve realised that, despite the fact the fact I thought I was un-scammable, that everyone can be scammed. We are all targets. Was I a target because I feel for a bit of flattery? Probably. Apparently scammers contact everybody - the rich, the poor, the desperate, the sensible savers, the reckless investors. We all have a chink. I think mine was that I wanted entry in to a world I knew nothing about. I didn’t have the time or the energy or financial know-how to check what was actually going on. And I was given my ‘own’ trader called Jort Van Meijer who sounded incredibly convincing. And he flung lots of stuff at me - graphs and contracts and red and green lines and words like ‘eKrona’ and Simplex and Gas Fees and Priority Type Transactions. I looked all of these terms up and I honestly cannot tell you if they are real or not. Every website I look at tells me something different - eKrona seems to be real yet not real all at the same time. Fees do apply but I’m not sure when or how they apply. It’s an absolute minefield. And Jort rung every day and sent more and more confusing data on sure-fire investments and I just got caught up in it all.

Of course there’s part of me that’s desperate to believe this is not a scam. Maybe I have actually got $77k in a fund somewhere that Jort is just desperate to pay me. Unfortunately there’s still the small matter of what Jort claims is my outstanding capital gains tax of £12.7K for me to transfer via my crypto wallet in order for me to see the alleged $77k paid back to ‘me immediately’ as Jort says in bitcoin.

Yet despite my desire to believe this is true, all the evidence points to a scam. I have talked to crypto experts all of whom say that, unfortunately, my money has probably disappeared forever. “You don’t need to pay CGT,” one expert, Matthew told me. He works for a company called Claims Justice who deal with forex scams all the time. “It’s on the rise,” he says, “because although crypto currency is more regulated than it used to be, there’s still rich pickings for scammers.” He also told me that I shouldn’t hand over any more money although, apparently, he has had clients who are so desperate for their money not to have been swallowed up in a scam that they continue handing over money even though they’ve talked to Claims Justice.

So where am I now? I did try playing the long game. I told Jort was mother was seriously ill in hospital and that he needed to release my £23.5 to pay her hospital bills. Jort was suitably supportive, sending me lots of text messages telling me how sorry he was for me.

Yet still my money stayed resolutely not in my account. Our last communication was by phone. He told me all I had do was hand over the CGT and…. I told him firmly I wasn’t going to do that. I told him I knew it was a scam and that I wanted my money back. He started saying it wasn’t possible because of this and that and it couldn’t be released until I’d paid….yada yada yada. In the end, I got so angry and bored I put the phone down on him.

That seems to be it now. He has my money. I don’t have my money. It hurts. It hurts so much I just try not to think about it. Sometimes it feels as if it’s just not real. But then I look at my bank account and I know it is. For some people £23.5k is a relatively negligible amount of money. But for most of us, it’s a huge amount. Back then I was living in a rental property with my four children. My eldest son, then aged 25, had been let go from his job - it was a temporary hiring so he didn’t qualify for redundancy. He was hoping to finally move out in to a shared small rental flat in Reading. He’d been saving up for the deposit. I’d really wanted to help him put down money and maybe pay the first month’s rent for him.

He’d had such a difficult time. He got a first class degree in drama and scriptwriting but he graduated just as Covid hit and his life - the life he should have been living - had been put on hold. My second son, then aged 19, was struggling to find work. He’d chosen not to go to university as he didn’t want to be holed up in halls during a pandemic. He’s a grafter but it’s wasn’t easy for him back then (or now actually). He wanted to train to be a Personal Trainer. I’d been hoping to help him out with that financially-speaking. My third son was going to university in September and I needed to find some money to help him with fees and accommodation. I could go on….

But it’s not just the money. It’s the fact it has seriously damaged my trust. I’m terrified that somehow Jort has insider information on me. I’m convinced he’ll steal my identity or drain my bank accounts. Every time my computer flickers I think it’s because he’s somehow put a bug in it that means he has all my details. I’m also completely paranoid that everyone is a scamster. Apparently scammers - once they are rumbled - sell your details on to other scammers. The fear of all this is keeping me awake at night. I’m not even convinced Jort has gone away. He texts me occasionally saying he wishes to resolve this situation. It’s almost unreal. I just ask him to give me my money back and he conveniently goes silent again.

My final thought on this is that greed has its part to play. Jort told me that, as I transferred more money. “Everyone is greedy my dear,” he said. It stopped me in my tracks. I don’t like to think of myself in that way. The only good thing to come out of this is that it’s made me finally realise that I need to me financially-savvy or, at the very least, to run all transactions by a third party who I trust. It’s time for me to grow up around money and take some responsibility finally.

Once again, please feel free to ask questions about anything not necessarily weight and body image!

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I knew something was very wrong in our household when my usually health-conscious 18 year old daughter marched into the kitchen and deposited some cheese strings in the fridge.

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This year I’m turning 60, one year older than the age my sister Nicola died, far too young and very unexpectedly. That was in 2022, on the hottest day, the 19th of July, when temperatures soared to over 30C. Although there was initially no definitive cause of death - apparently that is quite common and it gets chalked down to ‘sudden adult death syndrome’ - eventually the coroner said she died from viral pneumonia exacerbated by Covid.

There was also a spike in deaths on that day. The heat was probably an extra deadly factor.

A week after that I went on a long-booked holiday to Greece. There is a madness that happens when someone dies. I look back on that now and think, should I have gone on that holiday? But I did. It actually felt quite necessary. I was with my daughter and a friend. I spent most of the days crying. But what I really remember is diving into the sea and swimming as if my life depended on it. With every breath and every stroke I told myself that this was something my sister would never be able to do again, and that I must be determined to lead the best life I possibly could do. Anything short of that would be a travesty and an insult to her memory.

She was such a warm and loving person. She made time for everyone and was unfailingly generous in her care for her family and friends. She had such an infectious laugh. I am terrified I will forget the sound of it.

Ever since then I’ve tried to live my life to the fullest. I haven’t always succeeded. But throughout the grief and the tears, I have tried to motivate myself not just by listening to what I know she would say to me - “Come on Luce. You can do it” - but to challenge myself to do things I wouldn’t usually do, but really want to.

And now, as I’m about to turn 60, I can feel a fear seeping through me. It has been a creeping realisation that, unknown to my sister, that was the last year of her life. I keep thinking: “what if this is the last year of my life?” When my children ask me what I would like to do for my 60th, I find myself thinking, “I won’t be here then.”

This is not uncommon. As a therapist I know perfectly well that people suffer from thanatobia - an existential fear of death - and that this gets exacerbated when people we love die; whether it is a child, a parent, someone we are very close to. I have had clients whose fathers have died of heart attacks in their early 60s and they have come to me being convinced that this is when they will die, too. Grief works in mysterious ways.

I’ve been acutely aware that my sister’s premature death has galvanised me to do things that I would never usually do. One of which - and it has been utterly life changing – has been to join a band.

It all happened about two years ago. I was and still am a member of a singles club called The Otto Connection, set up by Sophie Ziegler, who is now also our part time key board player. The idea behind this club isn’t that it’s about dating per se, it’s about like-minded people meeting up and doing interesting things. At some point one member put up a suggestion that whoever felt like it and was musically-inclined, might like to get together and play. The idea was that we would all meet at a rehearsal studio in Putney, just have a jam and see what happened. At first I decided I wouldn’t do it. I don’t live anywhere near Putney. But I kept finding myself pulled back to wanting to go along and do some singing.
I used to sing – I was a chorister at the local church. I sang in the Royal Albert Hall with my church choir. I was also in a band as a singer when I was in my teens – we used to play Beatles and Stones covers. At university, I joined a Blues Brothers band and sang backing vocals wearing dark glasses and a black velvet mini dress. We actually performed at Liston Hall in Bristol.

However I hadn’t really performed or sung for over 30 years. I’ve done a couple of karaoke songs at friend’s parties but that’s the sum of it.

But one day - repeating my new mantra of doing things I wanted to do but felt a bit frightened of - I decided to go to a band rehearsal. I walked into the studio feeling very nervous. The band was quite formed already – lead, bass and rhythm guitar, drummer and a rotating group of singers. I felt rather out of place – everyone else had been practising together for a few months; but everyone was welcoming and kind, handing me some sheet music, and off we went.

From the beginning, we played all sorts of music; The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac, a bit of T Rex, Van Morrison… There were songs that we practised and then rejected because we weren’t very good at them. People came and went as the band formed and reformed. We rehearsed once every two weeks, then once a week, and the playlist eventually became whittled down to 12 songs.

We ended up with four singers and now, we all take turns as leads and also collaborating with each other when we all sing together. As time went on, I began to write the harmonies. At first I didn’t really tell anyone. I sat at home, played the tracks and then sang along and re-recorded them myself. I then started sharing that with the singers and asking them what they thought. Soon I got the soubriquet of Choir Mistress.

Over time I began to realise that I absolutely loved it. It’s not just the singing. I love messing around with the harmonies. I love being in my car and practising high parts and low parts and then recording them all when I get home and seeing how it sounds.

And it’s not just the musicality I enjoy, although that is a huge part of it. I just love being in a band. We have the best time. Do we get on all of the time? Of course we don’t. We have ‘artistic differences’. We get things wrong sometimes. But we get things right a lot of the time too, and the sense of companionship and belonging I feel with my bandmates is absolutely joyous and life affirming.

I’ve also realised that I love performing and being on stage. I was like that as a child, but was constantly told I was a show off. So for years and years and years I thought that was something I shouldn’t do. But now I am having a ball. I have realised that if you go on stage and dance and sing your heart out and wave your hands in the air, everybody has a great time.

We did our first performance last December at Dingwalls, the celebrated music venue in Camden, north London. There were over 300 people there. We were all nervous, but we got out on stage and had an absolute blast. Everyone was dancing and singing – it was completely electrifying. I will never forget at some point turning around and looking at the band and the singers; all of them looking absolutely deliriously happy.

On October 21st we are playing the Half Moon, the live music venue in Putney. We’ve added new songs to our repartee. I have done the musical arrangements. I cannot tell you how excited I am to be back on stage, singing, dancing and looking out over a crowd of people enjoying themselves. My nephew is playing main keyboards. One of the singer’s sons is coming on with his trumpet. It’s a family affair.

My children and other members of my extended family came to our first gig – even my 92 year-old mother. I found her in the crowd, sitting down to one side. It made me want to cry seeing her there, smiling and singing along.

Did I feel my sister was there watching me?

No, I didn’t. But what I do know is that she would be absolutely thrilled to see me up on the stage. She would say that phrase I heard her tell me so many times “Come on Luce. You can do this.” And I would thank her for somehow giving me the courage to stand up on stage and show off.

This is a place where I am attempting to start something new here - a place where I will be writing (and speaking) more honestly and expansively about love, relationships, dating, desire, body image, affairs - ba…

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It all started in October 2024 ago when I found myself at my local doctor’s surgery looking at a poster talking about how to lose weight by using medical injections. The doctor came out and saw me reading it and he told me he had a spare half an hour. ‘Would you like to come and talk to me about it?’ he asked. I was a bit surprised. I knew I was a bit overweight but I hadn’t thought it was that obvious.

But I said, “why not?”

The first thing I did was get on the scales and I couldn’t believe it when the arrow went up to 14 stone (around 90kg). Even I could see that that was on the heavy side. The doctor looked a bit surprised. “That’s quite overweight,” he said as he put my statistics into his computer. He then told me that, in terms of my BM I, I was in the obese category. But I wasn’t just a little bit in it. I was bordering on morbidly obese. He then ran through the health implications of being this overweight – too much weight on my joints, fatty deposits around my heart, onset of diabetes

I told him I didn’t feel ‘fat’ and that I exercised regularly. I did yoga and dance classes and I considered myself a pretty active person. I walked my dogs every day. He told me this was all good but that, essentially for health reasons, I needed to lose weight. We then went through my options and by the time I left the clinic I had signed up to taking a course of the Mounjaro weight loss injections. It involved jabbing myself in my stomach with a small injection every month. I started on the lowest dose - 2.5mg - for a month and then I gradually went up – a month on 5mg then 7.5mg. I then settled on the 10 mg dose and I was on that for three months, so six months in total before I went down to 5mg for weight maintenance.

The doctor told me that what happens is the effects of the drugs means that you just don’t feel hungry. He told me that would happen very early on and I noticed it that literally within a few days. He also told me there would be side effects such as nausea, constipation or even vomiting.

.

So I was full of trepidation back then when I started on the drug. And within a few days I did feel slightly nauseous. But that was offset by the fact that, for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t compelled to eat every single thing I could see. I was brought up in a family where we were encouraged to eat everything on our plate. And of course I’m of the generation that puts probably too much on our plates and so consequently I’ve been eating too much.

In the first week I cooked myself a usual size dinner which was salmon and mackerel with brown rice and fresh vegetables. I piled my plate high as I usually would do and only managed to get through half of it before I actually couldn’t eat anymore. This was the first revelation I had and my desire to eat food from then on literally went out of the window.

At the beginning this was difficult for me because I was having to reassess myself as someone who has a completely different relationship with food. In the past I would consider myself a foodie. I’ve eaten my way round the world. I love food. It’s a source of great joy for me so when I found out that I had ceased to have any interest in it - and in fact was only really eating to stay alive when really I’d rather not eat at all - it was like having a massive character shift. If I’m someone that doesn’t really very much food and goes out for dinner and pushes the food around the plate and has a couple of mouthfuls of something, who on earth am I?

This concept of not eating very much is not new to me. I have for a long time studied people who are thin and it became obvious to me over many years that they just didn’t eat the amount I did. I went on holiday with a very slim friend of mine and whilst I was eating everything I could possibly find because I like to taste all the local dishes and we were in France and that meant things laced with cream and butter, she’d just have a couple of mouthfuls and say she was full. If someone put a croissant in front of me with unsalted butter and some beautiful fresh jam I’d be eating as many of them as possible. She’d just have half of one and then she was done.

But more than that, and rather shockingly , was the reaction of some of my close friends . I’ve never made any bones of the fact that I’m on weight loss injections. I haven’t pretended that I’ve been on a diet. I have told everybody who have asked that I’m losing weight because I inject myself on a weekly basis.

The reactions have been interesting and unexpected; some people have literally curled their lip and said things like, ‘don’t you think it’s cheating?’ I want to reply that if they had spent their lives having food chatter in their brain - and you actually don’t know you have food chatter in your brain until you go on these injections and it just literally stops overnight which was another revelation to me - they would be signing up for injections tomorrow. It’s not fun being overweight. We spend a life on diets, most of which cost a fortune and leave us hungry ,depressed and worse off than we were before because we put all the weight back on when we stop drinking nothing but protein shakes.

I’m fortunate that I actually liked my body before but it’s also become obvious to me that other people didn’t. So I have some friends that say things like ‘gosh that’s amazing you must feel so good about yourself.’ When I reply I felt quite good about myself beforehand, they look confused because obviously overweight people aren’t supposed to like their bodies very much. Then there’s people that congratulate you as if you’ve run a marathon or donated thousands of pounds to charity or are working for medicine sans frontier.

“You must be feeling such a sense and achievement,” they say. I know they are actually being kind but, once again, I don’t really feel a sense of achievement because I’ve ‘cheated’. There is definitely this attitude that we should only lose weight by taping our mouth shut and doing 25,000 step ups a day.

Others have actually ignored the fact that I have shed three stone in weight in front of their very eyes. I find this quite difficult. I’ve gone from a size 16 to a size 10/12. I don’t think it’s possible to ignore that and yet some people have managed to completely pretend they haven’t noticed.

Some friends have been positively unsupportive about it. They’ve had quite an extreme reaction. Some keep trying to feed me food which I don’t actually want. Others have really not held back at telling me how upsetting they find it that I’ve now got slimmer. The other day one of them - who is a size 8 - told me that I’d lost too much weight and that I needed to stop immediately or else I would get too thin. I wanted to say that, given the fact that I was still two sizes larger than her, I wondered if she thought that she was too thin?

Some people have got really angry with me and accused me of starving myself and fasting and being on some ridiculous diet. When I say no, I just don’t eat when I’m not hungry and I only eat when I am hungry, they get even more angry. It’s actually like being surrounded by a set of alcoholics. Addicts don’t like it when you change your addiction and they don’t like it when you call it out. In same way that when someone stops drinking and everyone tries to slip a vodka into their coke because they want people to drink with and they don’t really want to look in the mirror how much they’re drinking, I find friends piling my plate full of potato dauphinoise followed by huge amounts of puddings and lashings of cream. They, of course, barely eat a mouth of this themselves.

I have – so far – not really called anyone out, but it has put some of my friendships in jeopardy. It’s made me see some of them in a different light. Why don’t they want me to be healthy?

The main revelation I want to take forwards with me is that now I don’t feel hungry. My relationship with food has completely changed.

I’m also aware that although it’s wonderful my appetite has gone eating now seems a bit pointless. I don’t eat much, don’t enjoy the food so I am wondering how do I change my life around this? I have watched thin people and they just order a starter and play around with it. I find that really difficult to do. It’s a whole new way of living for me. It is not how I see myself. For me, eating and drinking and not constantly watching calories and complaining that I’m going to put on weight because I had a chocolate mousse is sexy and seductive and redolent of someone who really enjoys their life rather than keeping themselves thin and pinched and in denial. It’s a huge psychological shift for me to think about this differently. I’m not sure I’ve managed it yet.

I am also now far more critical of my body. Whereas I used to look in the mirror and see a curvaceous, bountiful body, I’m now critical of every little hint of ‘weight’.

I’m at my target weight of 10 stone 7 lbs having lost over 3 stone (66kgs from 88/90).

All and all, taking the weight loss injections has been a game changer for me. I don’t think I would have lost this amount of weight any other way and believe me over a lifetime I have tried. The idea that I could not maintain this weight is something I feel very positive about. However I haven’t had hunger and now I guess I will. The key thing is what I’m going do about that and only time will tell.

I’m attempting to start something new here - a place where I will be writing (and speaing) more honestly and expansively about love, relationships, dating, desire, body image, affairs - basically Why We Do What We Do.

Subscribe if you’d like to come along…. there is extra content for paid subscribers

Why am I so fat continuing - or On Being Fat on my substack....
A person commented - and thank you for taking the time to comment - that I/we should eat less and move more....
So, this is for all of the larger people, the body dysmorphic, the people who think they are 'large', the yo-yo dieters, the body-haters, the self body-shamers out there and on here;
WE KNOW THIS.
weknowthisweknowthisweknowthis....
It is not that simple and here, I am attempting to explain why (briefly)...
Have you had this? PLEASE TELL ME!

IT”S EMOTIONAL!

Let’s keep this dialogue going…. and for all of you who SPEND YOUR LIFE thinking about your body and your weight - an dyes this is me - I am here for you…

The other morning I looked in the mirror. Looking back at me was someone who I know very well and whose body I know very well. Yet now having been on Mounjaro off and on since October 2024, I can honestly say I’m not exactly sure what I look like.

Sometimes I think I’m big and I find myself sucking my stomach in. Other times I worry that I’ve got too thin.

But the truth is matter is, I don’t seem to be able to look at myself with anything other than a distorted sense of self. And given the fact I have ricocheted between being a size 10 up to a size 16 to 18 nearly all of my life, I’m aware I’m not a great judge of what I actually look like. There have been times when I’ve been fat but I thought I looked thin and vice versa.

This rather warped sense of self got worse when I looked at all the female celebrities at the Oscars. Most of them are actually worryingly thin. And I’m sure that’s because they’ve been on weightloss drugs. Yet on social media they don’t talk about that. This leads to is an unrealistic body expectation as many of us are told that celebrities eat less and work out more and that’s how they’ve got their tiny bodies.

I just know that this isn’t true. I’ve never lied about being on Mounjaro because I don’t want anyone to feel that I have lost just under four stone in weight by eating chia seeds and slaving away for hours at the gym.

Yet recent posts on TikTok have showed that most of us who have been one GLP-1 weightloss drugs have a very strange idea of our body size.

Some tik tokers believe they’re terribly thin but actually aren’t very thin and equally some of them are very thin but still think they are larger than they should be.

So the question being asked is does being on the jobs help with realistic body image? Given how I feel about my body I would say the answer to that is no. And I’m not alone in this.

A new study has found that the NHS has seen a huge rise in those coming for help for body dysmorphia - a mental health condition which causes sufferers to worry about supposed flaws in their appearance. The blame seems to lie fairly and squarely with social media images. Apparently, it is clear to both clinicians and patients that outside pressure is part of this. And of course now we can control our weight and get ever thinner by taking weight loss drugs, there’s nothing to stop us from disappearing altogether especially when we’re not seeing ourselves clearly.

Body dysmorphia has plagued me all my life. Somehow I seem to have got everything in reverse. When I look at photographs of myself I can see I was a chubby child. My mother has sepia tinted pictures of me sitting on a see-saw. My face is round like a great big inflated balloon. I’m wearing hot pant dungarees which were all the rage back then. My chubby thighs are almost cut into by the bottom of the denim shorts. My tummy is protruding as if I’ve got a football placed around my midriff.

However when I was that age - let’s say about eight years old - I thought I was quite slim. My best friend was very beautiful half Spanish, half Irish and everyone used to talk about how lovely she was.

But no one ever really said that to me. I look back at it now and think was it because I was so tubby?

Since then my body has been through a variety of sizes. I was ashamed of my body when I got to about 10 years old because I by then I’d realised that I was overweight. When I went into shops, I had to try on bigger jeans than my friends. If I wanted to get boots, I could never do the backs up because my calfs were too big.

So at this stage I thought I was really fat. Then by the time I got to teenage years I had slimmed out. I became obsessed with being thin. I barely ate. I was almost anorexic. Once again I look back of photographs of myself when I was about 15 or 16. I can see that I was very very thin. But I remember quite clearly looking in the mirror and thinking I was fat.

This is the problem with our body image. We often don’t see ourselves clearly at all. And I think this is most common if you are someone whose weight has fluctuated. So in many ways weightloss drugs should help this. The idea behind it is that you get to a certain weight - your target weight - and then you stay there.

I started taking Mounjaro in October 2024. By this time I’d gone up to nearly 14 stone in weight. I was clearly overweight. My BMI was in the obese to nearly morbidly obese scale. Yet I had actually grown to love my body. I told myself I was at peace with my weight. I felt what was most important was that I was healthy. I was going to the gym. I was doing yoga. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see a fat person.

Yet I was quite clearly fat. If the doctor hadn’t have actually asked me to get on the scales for a health check it would never have occurred to me at that time to take the weight loss drugs. But standing on the scales shocked me. I was clearly overweight

Now I scroll through photographs and see that I had yet again got a full fat face. I was also wearing clothes that were quite a figure hugging and I can now see I probably looked quite horrific in them really. I have a photograph of me in one dress where there were literally rolls and rolls of fat on me yet I was quite happily wearing that dress and strutting about the place.

There so many incidences of body dysmorphia for me. I once tried to get a flight home from Spain and they told me I couldn’t get on it because I was 36 weeks pregnant. I didn’t have the bravery to tell them that I wasn’t pregnant at all. I had a woman stand up for me on the bus a few years back when I was way too old to have a baby. When I waved to her no it was OK, I didn’t need the seat, she curved her belly with her hand and said, ”you must sit down in your condition.’

In the past, people didn’t just think I was pregnant they thought I was heavily pregnant and yet I just couldn’t see it.

Now I’m a size 10 and all that has changed. No one thinks I am pregnant. I have stopped wearing floaty dresses. As I’ve spent a fortune on weight loss drugs, I’ve actually decided to dress up pretty much all day every day. I wear mini skirts. I wear tight dresses. I’m really enjoying being a size where I can actually fit into fashionable clothes. That for me feels like a revelation..

Yet I don’t actually feel thin. When people say things like, “gosh you’re so slim” I assume they’re talking about someone else.

I’d like to say I’ve relaxed into all this but I haven’t really. I think the problem about losing weight is that you’re constantly terrified you’re going to put it all back on again. When people ask me how I’ve managed to keep the weight off the answer really is that I’m very strict about what I eat. I’ve decided that hunger is my friend. I do those things that I think supermodels do. If I want to eat I drink water. If I still want to eat I have an apple.

I’ve tried to break my habits but not totally succeeded. In the past I would do bargaining - all people who’ve had yo-yo weight know about bargaining. I’ll tell myself that if I ate six biscuits - because I love biscuits - I would skip lunch or dinner or something.

So now we can deal with the body but it’s much more difficult to deal with the mind. I don’t weigh myself now mainly because I’m completely terrified I’ve put on weight. It never caused me that I might have actually lost weight. This is the psychological space most formerly overweight people inhabit.

Once we’ve hit our target weight it just doesn’t occur to us that we might be underweight. In my mind I am always slightly overweight.

In many ways, being on weight loss drugs has changed so much for me. I love wearing my new clothes. I love not lugging that four stone around with me. It has changed how I exercise. I feel lighter in every way.

Yet my identity is of someone who is overweight. That is much more difficult to shift. I think this is why taking weight loss drugs is like being in a hall of mirrors. Everyone can tell me that I look good - although obviously not everyone does especially as I’ve lost a lot of weight very quickly. You can try on clothes and see that you are a size 10. I can now look in the mirrors in my yoga class and I can see the I’m as slim as all the other women.

But does that mean I can relax about my weight? No it doesn’t. In my mind I’m always assuming people are looking at me and thinking ‘what a big fatty. ‘

We can train our bodies. We can take drugs. We can eat nothing but two apples a day. We can diet and intermittent fast.

Yet nothing stops the thoughts of “what if everyone else gets smaller and I don’t?”

My fear is that it never will.

If you are interested in listening to more, I talk to the columnist Sarah Vine on How To Have Extraordinary Relationships podcast… I will put a link in the comments

It occurred to me, as I sat alone on a beach in Greece, that despite my best efforts, I was still here by myself.

It feels sad in a way that is hard to describe. It’s as if there is this other person who used to be here with me, that existed within me that is no longer here. It’s as if I am reaching for something - a memory, a feeling - and I cannot grasp it. Maybe I will never have it again; an easy love, a joyous connected relationship, a family that is here all together in one lace living and loving and laughing.

I often get that feeling; I watch couples and families with young children and I think, ‘that used to be me.’ I used to be the young person in love with my other young person; holding hands.

And I don’t think I really thought about it back then. It never occurred to me that there might be someone older than me - someone heading into their 60s - who would be looking at me and my boyfriend and seeing it for what I see now; two people who in many ways are completely unaware of the rest of the world around them. They are totally wrapped up in each other.

Sometimes it’s quite casual. One of them has a foot resting on the other one’s calf as she’s reading a book. Their fingers are gently touching as they lie slumbering. Without being asked they put suncream on each other’s backs. They get in the sea and mess about. They kiss. They caress each other. They have a physical ease and their bodies are generally absolutely beautiful. together

I watched them and I found myself thinking, ‘I wonder what drew them to each other?’ Have they made a choice? Have they met loads of other people and decided that this person is their person?

Have they even thought about what that really means?’

I find it completely fascinating. Why does one person want to be with the other person? I look at them and I wonder if it will last. This time next year will they still be on holiday with each other? Or would it be someone else that are on holiday with or maybe like me they’ll be by themselves.

Because I’ve also realised that sometimes the loneliness isn’t about the relationship that you are in. It’s about the loss that you are carrying.

Maybe young people aren’t carrying a vast amount of loss.

I came to this island - to my island home in Greece - a week after my sister had died.

I think I was numb really.

I had asked them to postpone the funeral so that I could come to Greece with my daughter and her friend because it had been arranged.

I had been to see her at the Funeral Home before I left. I took my mother. I will for never forget hearing her wail.

“But that is not my daughter. This is not her you have the wrong body you have the wrong person she is not dead.”

When I got to Greece I got in water and I swam. I swam and I swam and I swam. I dived through the waves. I went out in whatever the weather ,whatever the wind. I pushed myself until my lungs almost burst.

I wanted to do all the things she couldn’t do. I just cried and cried and cried and then I did more swimming. Despite the fact I had people around me - and people who really cared about me - I felt utterly lonely.

I had no one with me his arm I could casually touch. I had no one I could say please hold me to. I had no one to look after me. I sat on the beach and watched the lovers, watched the families, watched the children and I felt a deep aching pain in my heart.

You can be surrounded by people and still feel alone.

Loneliness isn’t about who was sitting next to you or not sitting next to you. It’s about who isn’t there anymore - and the space they leave behind.

But it’s also about lives not lived, opportunities not taken, relationships walked away from. ones that maybe you shouldn’t have walked away from.

I sat and grappled with all my anger against all the people who had let my sister down. Those who hadn’t loved her properly, who didn’t save her although to be perfectly honest she was very stubborn and didn’t really want to be saved.

Sometimes I find myself going back to that lonely place. When I see couples with children and I can see how difficult it is with all those nappies, with all that sand, the ice creams dropped on the hot tarmac, the burned skin, the outraged tears, I want to imprint the images on my mind.

I am terrified of forgetting.

I don’t want to forget my children’s childhood.

I don’t want to forget the feeling of being loved and having someone’s hand resting in my hand.

I don’t want to forget the ease that can exist between people before we get so defended and hurt and cover up our vulnerability.

Loneliness isn’t just about being alone it’s about the loneliness of missing what went on before.

And when you lose someone there’s a great big hole with grief written over it and it’s very hard to know what to do with that.

On this week’s podcast I talk to Kathryn Flett about the loss of her son and it puts everything into perspective - what it means to feel alone and what it means to truly miss someone

So the man I was eventually going to marry turned up on my doorstep.

I didn’t think he was particularly handsome although as time went on I began to think he was amazingly handsome.

And it’s what everyone said about him.

“Gosh look he’s so handsome isn’t he?”

People would stop me at parties and tell me how good looking he was and how charming he was and how charismatic he was.

We once went on a couples weekend. I was training as a couples therapist and we needed to do a weekend to experience the training.

He was a day late as the day before he’d been taking my third son - essentially his stepson - to see the football. It was the only child of mine he actually liked as it turned out.

And it all sounded so good; I was married to a man who was coming on a couples course to support my training. He was spending a day with his stepson doing something this child really liked to do.

Then he appeared in Bristol where the course was being held and he was amazing.

He was brilliant at stuff like that. He had massive enthusiasm for new things. It was very attractive.

I felt that we were ‘the couple’.

I also now know this to be a red flag. There’s a grandiosity about it. I always had a feeling that he and I were somehow a couple that knew more stuff than other couples.

We knew about life and loss.

We knew about obsession.

We both liked to delve into the the recesses of our beings.

It was as if we had discovered stuff that other couples didn’t know.

They did things like play golf together. Or cook. Or talk about recycling or go cycling.

I now realise that these couples were actually probably steady. Their normality was alien to me – unattractive, dull and boring - but I now realise that the person who got it all ‘wrong’ was actually me. I felt we LOVED fiercely. That we understood the complexities of deep love whilst these other mere mortals were just skating over the surface with their….. yawn….. tedious every day lives.

I was wrong. I have learned since that calm steady love, daily commitment, giiving attention to small details, is important.

I didn’t know that back then.

I was brought up by two parents although let’s face it I was actually really brought up by my mother.

My father was not a handsome man in the same way that my husband was. He was geeky and tall and couldn’t see anything very much and hopeless at sport.

I once found a set of diaries that he had left in a box in the attic and they were full of anxiety.

As a young child, sent to boarding school because that’s what you did back then especially if you were the son of a vicar as he was because you got free schooling essentially, he had endlessly run away.

His diaries were full of him trudging home a bit like Laurie Lee walking across Somerset with the intention of finding freedom. My father’s were the opposite. He was constantly trying to go home.

There is a romantic quality to them. He gets lifts in bread trunks. He stops and scrumps apples in an orchard. He drinks out of water troughs.

Eventually he gets home and what happens?

His mother - my grandmother who I never got on with - would send him back to school.

And I think as a defence, later on in life, he became charismatic and funny and charming and louche and devastatingly attractive to women.

He said things you shouldn’t say. He got drunk and challenged people. He became sexy. He loved women. I know that to be true. He absolutely loved women. He found them interesting in a way that he didn’t find men interesting and people like to be found interesting.

My ex-husband had this.

At the end of the weekend the woman who was running the course- someone who I absolutely think is an excellent person and a brilliant trainer - turned to me and said, “he’s a keeper.”

I was so thrilled. I thought I’d actually got it right, finally.

But of course it turned out that I hadn’t.

And the difficulty is that people can be good people and bad people all at the same time.

They can love you but act in very unloving ways.

They can be loyal and faithless.

They can want to be better people but they often fail.

All these things are true.

Because really we can hold many things all at the same time.

We can be a totally messed up destructive human being whilst also being kind considerate and thoughtful at times.

I think it’s a concept that people find hard;

How can we be a kind person and at the same time at times also be a mean person?

For example, is it true that my now ex-husband who behaved incredibly badly was a very bad person?

Yes he’s a very bad person. Lots of bits of him are very bad and he would be the first person to tell you that.

But he could also be a very kind person.

He made me a rose garden.

He tried very hard with my children at times.

He was funny and clever and he could talk about literature and religion.

You can be a very special person and a very destructive person and you can all reside in one body.

You can love two people at the same time. You can love them in the same ways. You can love them in different ways.

It takes someone quite special to encompass all these things.

This is what we can fall in love with; the complex, the difficult the compelling, the fascinating.

The ‘bad boy’.

Interestingly enough, men ask me about this all the time.

They always ask me why do women fall in love with the bad boy and my response to that is well that’s not necessarily true.

But a more nuanced response is this is to do with their psychopathology.

Is it for example a very good idea to fall in love with a bad boy?

No of course it’s not.

I’d have been much better off marrying my first boyfriend who ended up being a highly successful lawyer living in New York with beautiful children a fantastic wife and a long and happy marriage.

He was stable and together. His parents were long term married. They were decent people with good hearts.

They gave him clear morals and values and boundaries and all the things we actually need in successful relationships. This man went on to do precisely the same thing his parents did..

And I went on to re-enact my parent’s marriage.

And the question – and the learning – is in the why?

When a version of my father turned up on my doorstep carrying a picnic, why did I not say no?

To be continued….

It all started when I was 13 years old. I had just enrolled at my new secondary school – a state grammar school about 20 minutes away from my home in leafy Buckinghamshire.

Like most teenagers, I wanted to fit in.

I was at that age where everything was beginning to move on. I’d been to the local state primary school in the village. It was a supportive environment and I had lots of friends. I played netball. I rode ponies. I walked my dog by the river.

I lived with my parents, my older sister and my two older brothers. Life felt good.

But when I was 13, everything changed.

I was a clever girl who was trying not to be too clever because that would make me unpopular. I didn’t think I was particularly pretty and I was surrounded by very pretty, very thin girls.

I certainly didn’t feel very confident.

Then – unexpectedly - my father left the family home. His sudden absence caused a tremendous amount of insecurity and upset in my life. One day he was there. The next he was gone. It was devastating.

I went from feeling safe and secure to feeling lost lonely and as if I couldn’t really confide in anyone, even my closest friends. Our family carried on as usual, not really telling anybody. Divorce was very stigmatised back then. We pulled in close and didn’t say much to anyone. No one really talked about this kind of stuff back then. Neither of my parents had been brought up to talk about their emotions. They were not of that generation.

One day, as I went to the local arcade the local town, I noticed a new shop had opened. It was a hairdressers. I hadn’t been to the hairdresser before. My mother used to cut my hair into a rather unflattering pudding bowl. I’d been growing it out because I could see the other girls at my school didn’t have hair like that. Some of them dyed their hair. One of them, who I thought was particularly pretty and trendy, told me that she had modelled for a hairdressers in her local town, which sounded impossibly glamorous.

So when I saw that this rather modern-looking, newly-opened hairdressers, I thought I’d go in and ask what they could do with my hair.

A tall dark-haired handsome man in his 30s came over to talk to me. He was slim-hipped, shirt slightly unbuttoned and he smelled delicious.

He told me his name was Ali and that he and his brother Shabs had been hairdressing for years in their native country of Turkey. But they had moved over here a few years ago and decided to start up their own hair salon.

His brother was at the back of the salon. He gave me a wave.

Ali sat me down in a chair and spun me around to face the mirror.

He asked me what sort of style I wanted and spent quite a lot of time running his fingers through my hair and fluffing it up.

‘You’re such a pretty girl,’ he said, ‘but your hair is terrible. Who’s been doing it?’

I told him it was my mother. He laughed.

I remember telling him my father had left home and I must have looked really sad because he gave my shoulder a squeeze. Then he said the words I so longed to hear.

‘We’re looking for models,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come and model for us?’

I was so excited I said yes immediately. I imagined myself going back into school and telling everyone that I’d been asked to be a model just like the trendy girls in my class.

That’s how it started.

The next week I went in. One minute I had this long straggly hair, the next I had a bouncy long bob and honeyed highlights. ‘You look beautiful’ Ali said.

Gone was the ugly duckling. The person looking back at me in the mirror was someone sophisticated, soignee. I barely recognised myself.

‘I love it,’ I told him.

After that going to the hairdressers became part of my weekly routine. Ali never charged me. He said I could have the haircuts and styling for free because I was ‘modelling’ for the salon – although I never actually saw him use any of the endless photos he took.

Ali would curl it, straighten it, put some red in and take the red out. Every time he would tell me I was beautiful.

Over a period of a few months – as I grew to trust him - I started telling him my life story. I wasn’t used to that much attention. Although I was making new friends at school, it was early days. At home my brothers were busy doing sport and my mother was ferrying them around endlessly. My sister had a boyfriend and they were very wrapped up on each other.

Ali was attentive. I told him I missed my father. I told him I was lonely. I started telling him all about my life from my friendships to my family to my hopes and dreams.

He seemed to understand. Sometimes he would give me a hug. Sometimes he’d stroke my hair. One time he kissed the top of my head.

He was so attentive and kind and I thought he really cared about me – like a benevolent uncle.

After about six months something changed. His attention went from being kindly to being more demanding. He started kissing the back of my neck when he thought no one was looking. I began to feel awkward.

One time I saw his brother look over at him while Ali was giving me yet another long head massage. He gave Ali a very dark look. I now suspect that Ali had done this sort of grooming before and that his brother was aware of it.

Then one day Ali rather furtively told me that he’d got some new hair products at his flat in the nearby town. He suggested I went with him in his car then we could style my hair with these new products and then he could do a photo shoot in his flat.

Part of me knew that that wasn’t the reason why he was inviting me into his home. But although I knew I should be wary, I was also terrified that if I said no, he would drop me as a model. The idea of going back to a world in which I was yet again the ugly duckling was unthinkable.

So that’s how I found myself in his two seater sports car being driven to his bijou new apartment.

Even though it was many decades ago, I remember it very clearly. It was done up in 1970s décor and seemed very neat and tidy. He mixed me a drink – I didn’t see what he put in it - but I didn’t actually drink it. Then he got out some clothes - essentially lingerie - and suggested I got changed.

He kept murmuring, ‘you will look so pretty, so pretty.’ He kept coming towards me and hugging me, pulling me closer and closer towards him.

He was beginning to put his hands underneath my clothes.

I started feeling incredibly nervous and worried.

I said to him I didn’t want to wear lingerie. I suddenly felt very young very vulnerable and very very panicked.

I remember pushing him away and him looking very angry with me.

‘We are in my flat,’ he said. ‘No one else is here.’

Then he came back and started hugging me and trying to put his hands under my clothes again. I could feel his hands heading towards parts of me that I didn’t want him to touch.

I started to cry. I said I was uncomfortable and that I wanted to leave. I told him I hadn’t done anything with anyone ever. I was a child. I hadn’t even kissed anyone. But he absolutely wouldn’t have it.

He lunged towards me and tried to kiss me. I turned my head so his lips landed on my cheek. They were wet and horribly fleshy. But he was making these horrible moaning noises. It was terrifying.

Then suddenly there was a knock at the door.

Ali pushed me towards the loo.

‘Stay in there,’ he hissed.

It turned out to be a plumber who was coming to look at all the flats because someone had said there was a leak. Ali told the man to come back tomorrow, but he wouldn’t leave. He had to see all the flats and he was coming in.

Ali told the plumber to give him a minute.

He came in to the bathroom and hissed at me to get out and go down the fire escape at the back of the building.

I didn’t need any excuses.

I ran out and five minutes later as I was walking out of the car parking area, Ali picked me up. He didn’t speak to me.

He was furious, white lipped. There was no more loving talk, no rubbing of my shoulders. Suddenly he saw a car coming towards us. He pushed my head down towards his groin.

‘That’s my wife,’ he said. ‘Keep your head down.’

(i)Wife(i)? I’d had no idea he was married. He’d never said anything and I had just assumed that he was single. The whole terrible situation suddenly felt horribly real.

By the time we got back to the salon, I was in such a state of distress that I got out of the car ran home.

The next day I woke up and I felt absolutely terrible. I’d had torrid dreams about being locked in places and being forced to have sex and all sorts of anxiety inducing nightmares.

I kept telling myself I’d had a lucky escape.

But at the same time I found it hard to stick with that narrative. I felt dirty. I felt ashamed. I went through every moment since Ali and I had first met, constantly questioning myself; had I lead him on? Was it my fault? I couldn’t get away from it. I kept chastising myself for putting myself in a situation that could have led to full on sex.

On one level I knew it wasn’t my fault, but on another I felt very lost and confused.

With very few friends at my new school, I withdrew from life. I avoided going anywhere near the salon. If I saw his car, I froze.

Then in a way that’s almost inexplicable, I missed him. I missed the way he made me feel when he’d first started doing my hair. I longed for the way he asked me questions and talked to me about my life. Until those memories of being locked in his flat flashed into my mind and I remembered how terrified and powerless I was at that moment.

It was a horrible cocktail of emotions. All of which I kept to myself. By telling someone it would feel much more real and I couldn’t face that.

Eventually after six months of spending huge amounts of time in my bedroom alone, my eldest brother 17 years old at the time, sat me down and asked me what was wrong. The relief was palpable, it all came spilling out.

‘You should go to the police,’ he said. But this was the 1970s. There was little point in going. We had all heard of stories where women were not believed. Or the rape cases that were so gruelling that nobody would choose to go through them.

In the 70s, going to the police without being physically injured seemed anathema - there was little public awareness of predatory paedophiles or grooming. These things were typically laughed off.

I look back now and I can see how scared - and psychologically scarred - I was.

I developed an eating disorder. I went down to a size 6 from a size 10. This went on for a year or so. I wanted to go back to being a child that predatory men wouldn’t notice so I just starved myself.

For most of my teens and my twenties I found it hard to have relationships with people of the opposite sex. I assumed I had please men in order for them to have any interest in me. I said yes many times when I actually wanted to say no.

When I look back now, age 59, it makes me so sad and angry to know that as a child of just 13 I was made to feel responsible for the actions of a grown man.

I can see that this hideous experience has shaped my relationships with men ever since.

I basically seem to have no boundaries. On the one hand I really wanted to be loved and so I got involved in relationships I shouldn’t have got involved with. On the other hand if I met someone who seemed to be genuinely lovely and caring I would freeze terrified that they were going to be as duplicitous as Ali.

When I was 19 and at university I just wanted men to like me so I would have sex with them even if I didn’t fancy them. At the age of 24 I ended up in a long term relationship with a man who was abusive for two years just because I didn’t know how to say no.

It took me four decades, two long term relationships and one marriage until I really learnt how to stand up for myself.

It’s only now after ten years of therapy – on and off and including my own training as a therapist and coach - that I have finally been able to trace back my behaviour to this relationship.

I think what people find difficult to grasp is how much these types of experiences shape us forever. And they can happen to anyone and they probably have happened to many many women. But when you don’t think anyone will believe you and will dismiss it as a bit of slap and tickle - you just keep quiet.

All I know is that the relationship with that hairdresser at the vulnerable age of 13 made me see the world as slippery. That men aren’t always who they say they are. I trusted people but afterwards my innocence was shattered. Taken away from me forcibly.

The sad thing is I’m not convinced men’s attitudes to women have changed. Just the other day, I was at a dinner and an older man kept putting his hand on my thigh. Eventually I said to him: ‘Please remove your hand from my thigh.’

He looked taken aback. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it,’ he said. Then when I shared this story with female friends some of them looked at me as if I’d gone mad.

‘Oh just bat them off,’ one of my friends said. ‘Men can be silly. You’ve just got to tell them off.’ I was totally appalled.

I don’t think they understand the scars an experience like mine can leave.

If I had been able to tell my parents or speak to my friends - never mind the police - about being groomed by a man nearly 20 years older than me, perhaps my life would have been very different.

Maybe I would have had a wonderful long term marriage that was safe and secure. Maybe I wouldn’t have endured the bad behaviour from the men I had relationships with subsequently.

We should never underestimate the damage that is done. The effect of abuse from men to women - whether it’s a grooming gang whether it’s rape, whether it’s inappropriate touching - lasts a lifetime.

The knock at the door. The telephone ringing. The text messages pinging.

I was with a walking therapy client when my phone exploded. We were - coincidentally - walking in the valley below the beautiful church where my sister had got married. It’s a place I know well. We had tobogganed down these hills. We’d crashed in to fences. We’d scrumped apples, eaten blackberries.

We’d come and picnic together next to a small offshoot of the Thames. One day a man came and exposed himself to us. It was when ‘flashing’ was popular. He opened up his mackintosh and ran off. At first we were shocked. Then we thought it was funny. I don’t even think we bothered to tell our parents.

Tiny Rowland - the media tycoon, owner of the Observer and Harrods - lived in the big gated house near the brook. He had geese who attack us, honking loudly. We found them more scary than the flasher.

One day, his wife came out and shoo-ed the geese away. She then asked me if I’d like to teach her daughters to ride. So I began to get to know the geese - and the family. The wife and the children were lovely….I didn’t see Tiny…

But being there became part of my family life. We spent what seemed to be gloriously warm days messing about in the stream,

One Halloween our brothers dared us to come with them to the deserted folly. It was cold and dark but off we went. We had torches and a thermos of hot chocolate. It was terrifying. We walked up the hill. The shadows made scary figues from the turrets.

We stayed for five minutes then ran home.

It’s a bijou house now.

My sister and I wore matching clothes and then she grew up and I got her hand-me-downs.

She was my protector. When my parent’s separated and everything went wrong, she looked after me. She’d put me in a bath, sorted out my school uniform, sewed tags in to my PE knickers.

She made salads from hedgerow - a proto forager. She experimented with nettle soup. She painted her nails green. She got a boyfriend who she talked endlessly to on the telephone.

We ribbed her. We gagged at her ‘hedgerow salad.’ We took the mick out of the green nails. My brothers mimicked her voice when she coo-ed to boyfriend Number One.

And I’d like to say that she was cool, but she wasn’t. She was quite shy. She had little self confidence. But she could also be strident. She turned vegetarian. She stopped wearing leather - way before we knew what being a vegan was. She was kind to small children and animals.

She wasn’t so good with humans. She’d be nice to people’s faces but rude behind their backs.

We had a chequered relationship - I wasn’t like her. I was born extrovert, sociable, non-stop chatty, confident….I was the youngest child. I skittered through life with no one taking much notice of me. This meant I could go river swimming, fish for newts, ride ponies bare-back (who weren’t mine)… No one really minded what I did. Other ‘stuff’ was going on….

I had hoped - imagine and dreamed - that once our children were older, my sister and I would spend more time together. Neither of us made long long relationships - unlike my brothers who have been married to their wives since dinosaurs walked the earth.

Although we seemed so different, we couldn’t make lasting relationships.

I once told her we were similar like that. She was appalled…. but we found love in children. I had four. She has seven. One would grow a bit and she’d pop out another one… I always thought she had her children round her like a cloak. You just couldn’t get close to her.

But, the dream…..we’d go to see Puccini on the lake near Lucca. We’d hang out. We’d take a campver van to Norway. Maybe we’d ride ponies across Iceland (my sister hated the heat).

Then on July 20th 2022 the call came.

It was from my brother.

My sister had died on July 19th - the hottest day in decades.

And no one knew why……

I will continue this thread but if anyone wants to know more about grief an dmissing an dlosin gloved ones, I talk to Kathryn Flett journalist and author about the loss of her son Jackson on this week’s How To Have Extraordinary Relationships podcast out now…

I was 46 years old when I met the man I was going to marry. I hadn’t been married before. I had four children - and I still have four children. Their fathers were called Michael the 1st and Michael the second. I had intended to marry both of these men and they had both asked but somehow we never got round to doing it.

I never think about any of this as being particularly different. But when I go on dates when people ask me my romantic history, I realise that it’s much more complicated than many other people’s.

There is an assumption - which I understand - that I must have got married and had children with one person. When I say no I’ve got four children with two people, most people understand that that’s not that uncommon.

But then when I talk about my marriage to a man who isn’t the father of any of my children, that’s when it gets complicated.

And of course many of us spend a lot of time pondering on the question of why do I do what I do?

Because what I now know is it what I have done in my life and the way I’ve behaved and the relationships that I have or haven’t had are obviously going to have a profound effect on my children.

And in turn the relationship my parents had and the people they then went on to have relationships with has had a profound effect on me.

But let’s get back to the day I met my husband. He’d found me on Facebook. He’d read some of my columns we had mutual friends.

He messaged me. He was funny and clever and handsome. He was also rather self deprecating and he could write really really well.

I called a mutual friend and asked her about him. She said oh he’s totally your cup of tea.

Totally my cup of tea?

I should have asked her about that of course I should.

But I didn’t.

We arranged to meet. It was in the Easter holidays and it was the first time since Michael the 2nd and I had separated that I was without my children.

I couldn’t cope.

Instead of thinking goodness me look I got all this time to myself and then gone and done yoga or learnt Greek or studied the classics, I spent the whole week crying.

In fact I spent the whole week drunk.

The only way I seem to be able to get through the excruciating emotional pain was to inebriate myself every night and then just fall down asleep or basically in a coma. This person had messaged me he had suggested we met up he would bring a picnic we would go for a walk. It sounded romantic and I felt desperate.

So I said yes yes please come to the house bring food bring wine bring your body bring yourself.

But the day before he was due to come, he texted and he said he was cooking something up with some on near where he lived and he didn’t think he was going to come.

I was completely devastated. It was the only thing that was going to happen for me the entire week.

My entire body was aching I was missing my children so much. It seemed so unfair and I know that sounds petulant. But I hadn’t grown these children in my body just to let them go. I couldn’t bear the not seeing them in the morning. I couldn’t cope with not watching them breathe as they slept.

I’m not saying this is normal I’m not saying this as healthy but this is how it was.

So I messaged the man and I told him he was a total heel and a cad and I wanted him to rot in hell.

To give him his due he responded saying he agreed.

“I’d shoot me like a dog,” he said.

That made me laugh. It shouldn’t have done but it did.

It was a red flag though wasn’t it?

And what I’m interested in is the fact that for so many many many years I have ignored red flags in all of my relationships.

I know I’m not alone in that.

So this is what I want to write about; our patterns why we do what we do and how we stop falling into unhealthy patterns and unhealthy relationships and every part of our life.

I wish I had known this so many years ago I wouldn’t have made the mistakes I made.

I have spent years tracing back all the feelings where they started where the hurt began and what I can do about that and what I can’t do about that.

This feels important we don’t get fully healed of course we don’t. It’s not about that it’s not about just expunging our past.

But the best thing I can do for myself and have done for myself is to work out what is going on and how I can change that.

It’s like peeling an onion,

Every time I think I’ve got to the centre I haven’t but it’s a great journey.

Two weeks later he turned up with a picnic. And I’m going to write about this in the next substack.