Like One Day’s Em & Dex, my relationship started as a slow burn – here’s why I’m so glad it did
on only being with the right person once you’re in the right place, when you know you can be with them in the right way.
Back in 2009, I was a 15 year old girl who knew nothing of love or heartbreak. I lived a simple life with simple joys in South Wales. That was, until I read David Nicholls’ third novel, One Day, the story that visits Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew and their lives, friendship and eventual love on St Swithin’s Day for twenty years. It’s the finest will-they-won’t-they story of them all and I can so vividly remember sitting in my bed reading and re-reading the line that told us of Emma’s fate, frantically pleading with the pages that I had somehow read it wrong. I hadn’t, and for years I was unable to forgive Nicholls for this first shattering of my heart.
This year, I turn 30 and the story has been turned into a 14-episode Netflix series with Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall. Despite the pain I knew it would inflict again, I watched the show with my husband last week. He hadn’t read the book or seen the film and had no idea what was to come. You will not be surprised to learn that I am banned from riding my bike for the foreseeable future.
But there was something that shocked me more than Em’s fate when I watched this new adaptation. Although I had always seen so much of myself in the character of Em, watching the Netflix series threw a big jolt of realisation into my already shattered heart (thanks again, David Nicholls). In my own friendship-turned-great-love story, it was actually Dexter I related to more. I too, took too long to see what was stood in front of me all along.
This year, my husband and I will have known each other for eight years. But we have only been together for half of that time. We both joined a dog food startup in the autumn of 2016 – me first, then him a few months later. In a company of less than 40 people, we were the youngest employees by a good few years and found ourselves drawn to each other at the Christmas party, where we talked all night. On my way home, I remember thinking that I’d never met someone like him before. And then I called my boyfriend.
After that, we spoke every day at work on Slack and our friendship began. He would send me links to songs on Spotify with a message that said, ‘Hey! I thought you might like this??’ and I would smile, listen and send a song back. (We have since turned those songs into a playlist that forms the soundtrack of our everyday life.) Eventually, we did things outside of work too. We’d meet for gigs of the bands who played the songs he sent me links to. ‘I’ve got a spare ticket to see Phoebe Bridgers, do you want to come?’ I’m pretty sure those tickets were never actually spare, but bought deliberately and hopefully.
Just a few weeks into our friendship, he went on holiday to Lapland with his family. When he got back, we saw each other at Friday Beers (the company’s monthly pub night) and he said, ‘Oh hey, I got you something.’ It was a bag of reindeer crisps that he’d seen and bought for me because I’d once said that crisps were my favourite food in the world. What I hadn’t said was that I was a vegetarian, and so those bizarre meaty crisps still exist today, kept unopened and untouched for all this time in a box of very important things at home.
But when he invited me to the zoo, I said no. When he invited me bowling, I said no. When he invited me to the cinema, I said no. Those were things you did with boyfriends and I already had one of those. This man was my friend and although there was an undeniable spark, I just couldn’t and wouldn’t let it ignite. The better friends we became, the more I didn’t want to risk losing him.
When we spent time together around friends from work and friends of his who would join us at gigs, I’d get asked about ‘us’ all the time. One of my husband’s very good friends (who is now a very good one of mine), drunkenly pulled me aside in a pub garden to ask me why on earth we weren’t together. Also drunkenly, I confessed that I didn’t think it was the right time for us, although I knew he was probably the right person.
I left the company we both worked at and our friendship continued until it no longer could. We saw each other most weeks and we spoke most days and eventually, he told me he thought he was in love with me and I said that I didn’t feel the same way and he said he didn’t believe me. Eventually, just like Emma Morley, he told me didn’t want to be friends anymore because it was just too hard. And so we didn’t speak and it was awful. Just as I’d feared, I’d lost my friend – not through taking too much of a risk, but by not taking one at all.