All the men I've loved - the hedonist

(This is an archived post from 2023 moved from my Patreon)

Third in the series of 'all the men I’ve ever loved' is T. If you missed the first one you can find it here and the second one here. 

I met T at university. He was best mates with a friend of a friend's boyfriend. Seven degrees of separation and all that. He was extremely tall, very handsome, built from farming stock (could easily pick up a hay bale or three) and hell bent on indulging in everything that might give him a thrill. He was naughty and I liked him. 

Nothing happened between us at uni. He regularly turned up on nights out and propositioned me, despite having a girlfriend back home. I always took his offers with a pinch of salt. I would laugh and tell him to stop being so silly; that we both had partners. He would follow me to the loos and say he was serious. It sounds a bit creepy writing it down, but it wasn't. He was such a smiley, self deprecating and non threatening character that it felt anything but. 

Suddenly it was 2005 and I was living in London. I'm saddened to say that I can't recall how we got back in touch. Either we bumped into each other via mutual friends (unlikely) or he cold-texted me (much more likely). We met up and both being single, the time was right. There were fireworks. 

He lived in Bristol at the time in a chaotic continuation of a uni style house share. Worked in sales. Hated his job and colleagues with a passion. I would drive to Bristol on a Friday night, resenting those hours spent in M4 traffic jams as I considered my advertising buddies drinking in Covent Garden bars. I'd arrive to squat like conditions. I cleaned his kitchen on more than one occasion. He was almost always a bit worse for wear by the time I arrived at 9ish. This would annoy me. We'd row. We rowed a lot. 

Being in a relationship with T was a rollercoaster. One early evening in south London he popped out to buy me a newspaper... and didn't come back until the next morning. Another time I was driving us around Bristol and he pulled the hand brake up 'to see what would happen'. We went away for a weekend to a cottage in Westward Ho! and he was allergic to the cat who had clearly slept on the bed before we arrived. He hated it there, found it boring. He obsessed over finding some drugs. I seethed. We fell asleep on a golf course the next day because we'd argued for most of the night.