WORDS Harriet Richardson
This feature is published as part of BRICKS #15 I Support You issue. You can order an issue now from our online store.
In reality, it was much worse: He was a compassionate, attractive, empathetic, 6-foot-2, beautiful man. With beautiful hands, an affinity for fixing things, and a laugh that made you want to apply suncream to his back. But four years into our relationship, our differing attachment styles caught up with us, and I found myself staring down the barrel of my very first adult breakup.
I’ve been through breakups before, of course. You don’t get to thirty as a first-class yearner and not rack up a modest body count of ‘almosts’ – but they’d always been remedied immediately by the next boyfriend. My landlord-special, plaster-over-the-plug-socket approach to dating meant that I’d never truly experienced grief, because the wake was always more of a speed-dating carousel than a vigil.
Before I knew it, I was moving out of the home we shared together, into an apartment of my own. And although the excitement was almost completely drowned out by the nightmarish loss, I couldn’t help but note that this, if it were an episode of Friends, would be ‘The one where Harriet becomes an adult’.
My concerns about this series-finale life shift ranged from the reasonably practical to the existentially unhinged. What if I smell gas? What if I faint in the shower? What if I can’t assemble IKEA flatpacks without someone to prop things on? What if I never manage to cook rice without having to throw the pan away?
All the way to: What if my inability to cook rice, and the sheer magnitude of pans abandoned, hurls me into financial ruin, resulting in me having to take on extra paid work, and because of that I don’t have enough time to pursue my true passions, and I look up one day and I’m 75, still working in the same crappy job I hate all because I couldn’t cook rice? (If it’s not yet been made clear, my ex-boyfriend was the designated rice cooker).
Of course, it’s the things you don’t worry about that actually come up.
My landlord-special, plaster-over-the-plug-socket approach to dating meant that I’d never truly experienced grief, because the wake was always more of a speed-dating carousel than a vigil.
A few days after moving into my flat, I had one of those 21st-century over-the-phone appointments about a new mole I’d discovered on my back. The ridiculousness of this being an audio consultation (seeing me describing the mole as ‘if you fell asleep on a Revel’) was dwarfed by the concern of the doctor on the end of the line, when I answered, “Do you have someone who can take a less-blurry photo of it for you?”, with “No, actually. Not really, no.”
“No one at all?” she asked. She sounded surprised.
“I mean, I could ask my new neighbour,” I offered. “I’d have to introduce myself first.”
“God, no – don’t do that,” she replied, clearly concerned she’d end up as a talking head in a Netflix doc. “Just come into the surgery when you get a moment.”
But this moment lodged itself in an uncomfortable place. Not the same place as the toffee/raisin/coffee crème mole – more in-sight than that. A realisation. That for the first time in my adult life, there wasn’t a designated ‘person for things’. No built-in photographer, nor second pair of hands. No guy who knew where the Allen key was.
That for the first time in my adult life, there wasn’t a designated ‘person for things’. No built-in photographer, nor second pair of hands. No guy who knew where the Allen key was.
That night, slightly drunk and awaiting my perfectly cooked special fried rice in the Chinese at the end of my road, I took a chance, and asked the man behind the counter if he had a moment to take a photo. I’d seen him almost every night since I’d moved in; so it occurred to me at that moment that he was, technically, the most familiar person to me in my postcode.
There was no one else in the shop, and as I sheepishly explained my predicament, in between Pisco Sour hiccups, he didn’t even look up from his crossword before asking, “Portrait or normal?” He held my phone like a professional, tilted it toward the light, and took a series of clinically crisp photographs of the mole on my back. Handing me my phone, along with a bag of complimentary prawn crackers, he asked me to keep him posted on whether or not it was cancer. (It wasn’t).
And there it began. A note in my phone titled: ‘People who aren’t my ex-boyfriend’.
Only a few days later, I was unloading eighteen bottles of the thirtieth birthday party Aperol from an Uber, in the pouring London rain. Two passing women noticed my struggle and, without speaking a word, each grabbed a crate. We didn’t share much, just a conspiratorial smile and the ancient ritual of carrying heavy orange alcohol across a courtyard together.
On the morning of my thirtieth birthday, I got a haircut. After being talked out of the obligatory ‘breakup-micro-bangs’, and the ‘just-shave-it-all-off-my-family-are-visiting’ looks, I started crying in the chair. The hairdresser, a man I’d never met before named Marco, didn’t flinch. He gave me a hug and told the intern to double down on the Lotus biscuits with my tea. When he finished my usual bob-cut, he gently tucked the hair behind my ear and said “everything’s better with a trim,” followed quickly by “oh – and in your thirties”.
And on it went.
Hangover in full swing, the handyman from my letting company who came to fix my mysteriously post-party clogged toilet ended up teaching me how to correctly froth matcha.
The hairdresser gave me a hug and told the intern to double down on the Lotus biscuits with my tea. When he finished my usual bob-cut, he gently tucked the hair behind my ear and said “everything’s better with a trim,” followed quickly by “oh – and in your thirties”.
A few days later, as a girlfriend of mine was pulling on her coat after our five-hour gossip sesh, I asked if she’d help me lift my bed so I could retrieve a rogue oven chip from underneath it.
A week after that, mid-sauté and slightly too short of the shrieking smoke alarm, I was saved by a perfectly timed DPD man, who held the chair steady while I climbed up and jabbed at the button.
As my notes app list grew and grew, even in these few post-breakup weeks, it dawned on me just how much I’d unknowingly outsourced to one person.
How much emotional, practical, existential labour can sit on the shoulders of a single partner. It went both ways, of course – he leaned on me just as much – but reciprocity doesn’t dissolve the weight, it just means we were both carrying it.
And I’m not denying the convenience of having one emergency contact for everything: from moles, to rice, to orange bottles. But the pressure that puts on a monogamous, committed relationship is enormous. To be a lover, a friend, a handyman, a therapist, a co-photographer, co-conspirator, and retriever-of-chips – I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect one person to be all of that, all of the time, without something buckling.
It takes a village to be by yourself, sure. But maybe neglecting the village as soon as we find a man with an Allen key is where we’ve all been going wrong.
Sometimes, I find myself searching “rice” in the WhatsApp search bar. Not for the recipe – I know it by heart now – but for the message that follows: Rinse until the water runs clear. One knuckle of slightly salted water above the rice line. Lid on. Don’t touch it while it cooks, on the lowest of low heat. 15 minutes.
“…and I know you’ll be desperate to peek, Harriet, but don’t. You can do this without me. Home in 10,” reads the message directly underneath.
It takes a village to be by yourself, sure. But maybe neglecting the village as soon as we find a man with an Allen key is where we’ve all been going wrong.
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