I am feeling the best I have felt in days and it’s all thanks to love. Well, love and maybe having my appetite back. Oh, and I suppose the codeine is probably helping quite a lot too, but really it’s mostly love.
I had a long chat with my Auntie Val, over multiple cups of tea and far too many custard creams, about how she can attract and potentially keep men around for longer. With my mum giving us some peace and quiet to get on with work (not sure if she meant me or her) we had a natter about the ins and outs of my auntie’s love life. Sure, at first it seemed a little bit odd, but as soon as I put my working head on, that’s when we started making progress.
Understandably, since my auntie and uncle broke up (which it turns out was down to infidelity on his part – no pun intended) her man-eating ways are really just a front. Of course she wants to someone to spend her time with and of course she doesn’t want to grow old alone, but she’s scared about getting hurt again and so she puts up this tough front. Men being men, they don’t see this as a front, they just see my auntie as a woman out to have a good time with them, not a long time with them. Once we realised this (it’s amazing how much a sympathetic ear and a packet of biscuits can draw from a person; I might retrain as a therapist) it was easy to offer advice to my auntie from there. All she needed to do was change her approach – not the way she dresses or her young personality, but just the way she interacts with men in the initial stages.
It might not be immediately obvious to women that if you go in all guns blazing, spilling with sexual innuendo and blatantly flirtatious touches of their arm, you might be giving men the wrong end of the stick. We’re brought up to be under the impression that men need things spelling out for them, that they’re visual and overly sexual, and that giving up the goods is the only real way to show them that you’re interested but that’s just not true. I explained to my auntie that if a man approached her in the street and told her she had ‘nice tits’ she’d probably slap him, or at least assume he just wanted to sleep with her, and that’s a fair assessment. Sure, you could do it, but you wouldn’t hop into bed thinking something long term was going to come out of it, would you? This works the same both ways. If you come on too sexually strong with a man, sure, he’ll probably be into it, but he might not necessarily assume you want anything more than sex from him – and he probably won’t mind that, but he also won’t call, and he won’t even think that you expect him to call.
Men don’t need a blatant sexual advance to know you’re interested; they need a hint, a suggestion, something that starts the chase in a way that makes them not even all that sure if you’re interested at all. Give a man a come on and he will have sex with you for a day, but give a man the mere suggestion of something he has to work for and he will pull out all the stops to try and spend his life with you.
Armed with this knowledge, my auntie went home and started the groundwork with her roofer. I wasn’t expecting her to text me back by tonight, saying he had asked her out on a date (or ‘a proper date-date with dinner and drinks and dancing’ as she relayed it to me) but he has, much to her delight and much to my mum’s too. I’m not sure she’s ever really understood my job. I always wondered if she thought I was just some kind of overpaid madam, but today she saw me in action and she seems weirdly proud.
In other news, Patrick called. We had a long chat and everything was fine. He was home and knackered after his business trip, so it must have been pretty full-on. I feel guilty, for feeling the way I did, thinking he should have been checking up on me every few minutes. The poor man had work and he knew I was in safe hands here.
He sounded exhausted, yawning every other sentence, so I told him to get to bed and that we’d talk tomorrow. The last thing he said to me, before we said goodnight, was that we would go on a proper holiday when I was back on my feet, as a treat for me, and a break from work for him. This really lifted my mood but it’s also given me something to do for the past hour, hunting for somewhere for us to go, checking the calendar for important dates.
I’ve found a gorgeous little island, just off the coast of Italy, which looks like the most gloriously romantic, luxurious destination – perfect for what we want, but as I check the calendar for work commitments, birthdays and friends’ weddings, I realise the most important thing I am forgetting to check.
I fire up my period tracking app. I hate that I have to do this, it seems so unfair, but I also know that I don’t want to go somewhere hot for two weeks and spend most of the time in big knickers, sobbing over a hot water bottle. A quick scan over the forthcoming months shows me when I’m free to go, but something doesn’t seem right. I scroll back to the current date and realise something I had no idea about …
I’m late. I should’ve had my period days ago. I mean, it’s not that I want it, it’s the last thing I need on my plate right now, but even so … if it’s late, it must be for a reason, right? And there’s only one reason I can think of …