On sixteen years as a partner: how did I manage to swing this?
I celebrated sixteen years with my partner Madeleine this week, a number so mind-bogglingly large that we had to count on our fingers to ensure we'd definitely worked it out correctly (look, we're tired parents). We got together at university when we were 21, and looking back at that era now, I can't stop myself from thinking about what children we were.
I was definitely a child back then; perhaps on the cusp of being a man child. In my second year of university I found myself isolated from my housemates and lonely, spending my considerable amount of free time staying up till ungodly hours posting on internet music messageboards. I'd venture outside sometimes at 3am to restock supplies from the 24 hour petrol station across the road: my staples were banana milkshakes and bars of Dairy Milk.
Despite my recent concerns about male fashion and my dress sense, back then I was much more confident: band t-shirts with skulls on them, ripped jeans and hoodies, and a belt buckle in the shape of an eagle were my mainstays. Sixteen years on I'm still unclear what drew Maddy to my youthful self, because it certainly wasn't my diet, dress sense or job prospects.
As an oblivious man I was also fantastic at failing to spot any of the painfully obvious signs that we were falling for one another. We met while working on our student newspaper and our teenage-like infatuation for each other was so obvious and ridiculous that our journalist colleagues snuck coded jokes about us into every edition of the paper, waiting for us to finally get together.
In an infamous exchange which she still reminds me of to this day, Maddy invited me inside her place after a late night working on the newspaper. "Do you want to come in for a coffee?" she asked me. "No thanks," was my immortal reply. "I have Pepsi at home".
In my defence, a) I didn't drink coffee at the time, and b) I was living in mortal fear of misunderstanding things and assuming this was a proposition when in fact it just literally meant a caffeinated beverage. Given all of my above shortcomings, I think it was a reasonable stance for me to doubt that any attractive person probably wasn't making a pass at me, even when they transparently were.
Somehow, interminably, I managed to get my shit together and realise I was at risk of passing up the best opportunity of my life. I took her on what I was careful not to call a "date" to the cinema, bought her some sweets, and a few weeks later at a party... well, the rest is history (and censored, my mum reads this newsletter).
Sixteen years later we've accumulated a house, careers, a couple of kids, and even more stories of me being an oblivious man who's extremely lucky to have the partner he's somehow ended up with.
So I'm dedicating this week's newsletter to all the clueless men who've somehow stumbled into a success story, whether because of the patriarchy (nice work, guys), genuine talent (maybe?), or like in my case, old fashioned inadequacy. Just don't forget to recognise where it all came from, because it probably wasn't you.
Mini feels this week
In which Reddit becomes manly
I saw a Reddit post today called "what's the manliest thing you did this week?" and it's a rollercoaster read. Half the posts are things like "dug a splinter out of my thumb with my pocket knife", but the other half are along the lines of "learned how to braid my daughter's hair so she can have more stuff to do with daddy". Somehow, this has captured masculinity in a microcosm, for me. A mixture of bravado, stupidity, tenderness and humour. And shout out to the guy who answered "my husband".