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of a man who was clearly intent on impressing me. It was very pleasant.
    Greg was charming. It was clear he could hold a conversation, and he managed to put me completely at ease. He told me he had been married, but that the marriage hadn’t worked out and he was now estranged from his ex-wife. He gave the distinct impression that the situation had been beyond his control. He also told me he had a son but was estranged from him too. I felt sorry for him.
    I was always so nervous whenever I went on a first date with someone. I had a bad habit of drinking more than I should, to ease the nerves. And so, midway through the drive back home to Richmond, I was gripped by an overwhelming desire to go to the toilet. We finally found a place to pull over so that I could whip inside and use the facilities. But I got caught short, returning sheepishly to the car. I spent the remainder of the trip back to Richmond with this man I barely knew – a man I worked with, no less – panicking about how I was going to exit the car without him seeing I had wet myself.
    Upon arriving home, I somehow stage-managed it so that he would enter the house in front of me. As I left him in theliving room, chatting to my flatmate, I snuck into the bathroom. That would have been the end of it were it not for the fact that I needed to change my trousers quite urgently – and between the bathroom and my bedroom rather inconveniently lay the living room. So, in a scene reminiscent of the worst sitcom, I crept out of the bathroom, around to the back of the house and back up the side of the house, where I got down on my hands and knees and crawled under the living room window to access my bedroom – then sauntered into the living room as if nothing had happened. I was mortified, but Greg didn’t say a word.
    A week later he asked me to go for a coffee with him. We sat down over flat whites and started chatting about nothing in particular until, at a certain point, he said, ‘So, how long have you been incontinent?’ That was the thing about Greg. He could be charming and funny. And in the next breath, he could be rude or inappropriate.
    For instance, he arrived on our first date with a bunch of flowers and made certain I knew he was really keen on me. But then he would go for days or even a week without contacting me. After the emotionally draining experience of Jake, and after feeling so suffocated by that relationship, I think I quite liked the fact that Greg was occasionally aloof: that he appeared to be the master of his own domain and slave to none.
    What was less appealing was his habit of saying things in social situations that were either provocative or wildly inappropriate. I remember one instance where we were having drinks with a friend of mine and, out of nowhere, in the middle of our conversation he pointed to my friend’s legs and said, ‘How long have you had those veins on your legs?’
    I invited him to my thirtieth birthday party to introduce him to all my friends. And at first, they were all excited for me, impressedat the handsome specimen I had landed. But as the night wore on, almost to a person my friends took me aside and told me Greg was a dickhead who needed to be dumped immediately. Apparently, after making such a good first impression, he had proceeded to deeply offend every person in the party, making remarks that were either deliberately provocative or just plain rude.
    In retrospect, it should have been grounds for dumping him. But I didn’t, not least because we were never technically going out with one another. We would see each other sporadically, but I was never really sure where I stood with Greg – and I was even less sure when I learned that, while he was seeing me, he had also made passes at other women at our office.
    As I write these things, I see them in black and white, and I see how dreadful they look when they are committed to paper but, at the time, in the