Do you want a relationship, or a baby?
Hannah Booth
As I sat down with my therapist that day, making small talk as we felt our way into the session, there was nothing to suggest anything extraordinary was going to happen. But that’s the thing with therapy: things emerge when you least expect them.
We had been dancing around the same subject for a few weeks: I was 38, single, and my clock was ticking. That, we’d worked out, was the root of my current unhappiness. She had been quietly probing, testing my reactions, gently laying out options, scattering seeds of possibility. My mind had been buzzing with it, on and off, in the days between our weekly meets.
But, that day, there was a directness to her I’d not felt before. An impatience with my lack of urgency about my life, the time I had, the thing I wasn’t confronting head-on. She was worrying about my lack of worrying, and it grew as the session went on. And then she asked the question: “What’s more important to you right now – a relationship or a baby?”
Like a gut punch, it kicked me out of my stupor. She was challenging me to flip the usual order of things – partner first, family second – because my circumstances demanded it. My desire for a child was so strong, but I hadn’t acknowledged it to myself, let alone spoken it out loud, because, without a partner, how was it possible? Her simple question made me voice my desire for the first time. And once that was out in the open, it made me consider the possibility of having a child on my own. In an instant, it became concrete, rather than abstract.
That day fired a starting pistol: I began to investigate donor insemination and, four months later, I was pregnant. I know how lucky I was.
I occasionally wonder if I’d have got to that point of my own volition. I like to hope so. But I think it’s harder for us to ask ourselves these big questions; it often takes a kind friend, a therapist, even a stranger. Today, my reverse-engineered life, with a 10-year-old daughter, is as joyful and infuriating as the next person’s. I just took a slightly different route getting here.
Do you actually like it?
Jamie Demetriou, actor and co‑creator and star of Stath Lets Flats
In the summer before my second year of university, I had gone to the Edinburgh festival fringe as part of a student comedy group. In September, I returned to my drama degree triumphant. My head was swollen with positive caveats taken from middling reviews, and a misplaced sense of confidence based on the nights where friends had been in the audience and laughed really loud.
To my gross delight, one of our first modules that year was to be Comedy theory and practice. Hold my banana peel! I envisioned my tutor begging me to dial down my skills so as not to make him look inferior. Sunglasses were advised; I was about to shine. Bright.
Cut to a few weeks into the course. I was at a morning screening of some short comedy films we’d been asked to write and produce. People weren’t ready for my offering. The biggest laugh I got was for a sight gag – a shot of me seemingly pleasuring myself was revealed to be no more than me furiously shaking a felt-tip to get the ink to the tip. Haha?
In the post-screening discussion, my tutor Alex referenced this moment and asked what the class thought of it. A dead-eyed chuckle filled the room as my peers mentally relived my dizzying brilliance (I assumed). They loved it, how could they not have?
My tutor then asked me: “Did you like it?”
Like it?! Of course I liked it! I wrote it! It killed. Everyone laughed. Why was he asking me that?
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Why did you like it?” He asked.
A seemingly simple question. But I couldn’t respond, because my answer was … “Because it worked.” I didn’t like it. Not because it was slightly crass, but because it was probably just a structure I’d seen before and regurgitated, safe in the knowledge it would go down well. I felt flat.
I had been asked to face up to the annoying fact that making something of worth has nothing to do with what you can get away with, and everything to do with the painful task of connecting with your own sensibility. That connection is where true happiness lives for me. It seemed insane to think my brain could produce something that wasn’t an extension of my own taste. But when guided by an urge to second-guess what other people want, it absolutely could and can.
Fifteen years later, I still find myself getting creatively lost and falling down the cracks between my love of an idea and my fear of bad feedback. But when I can access “Do you actually like it?”, it still acts as a simple but substantial rope to pull me up.
Do I want to have sex again?
Eleanor Thomas
My boyfriend and I broke up recently, because we weren’t having sex. One year into our relationship, he developed a habit of walking pointedly out of the room whenever I tried to take my clothes off – sometimes when I wasn’t angling for sex at all, just innocently putting on my pyjamas. I’ve read a lot of articles about resentful men, and the women who feign sleep in bed next to them, but in my case it was the other way round. I would lie in bed pretending to read, but really I would be watching him. I could sense when he was going to put down his phone, and turn off the light. I could feel the weight of my own expectation hanging in the air between us, and it embarrassed me. I remember my mother suggesting that we have a child, because that way I would “go off sex, too”, and so claw back some power. It is a mark of my desperation that I considered this plan for months and could only identify one real hitch: how was I meant to get pregnant?
I spent two years hoping that our sexlessness was just a passing phase – that if I distracted myself with a baby, or found the perfect therapist, or just got better at disguising how much I wanted him, I could trick my boyfriend into wanting me again. Eventually, my friend suggested that the situation was very unlikely to change, and I should ask myself a question: would I be happy to have sex only once or twice a year for the rest of my life?
For me, the answer to that question was no, so I gave my boyfriend a series of ultimatums, and then we broke up. But even when close friends ask why we are no longer together, I find it difficult to tell the truth. In many ways we had a good relationship. We were very affectionate with each other, and he made me laugh. Often, he would look over at me and mouth, “I love you”, and I could feel he meant it, but in a kind of painful, strangled way.
I feel naive, and a bit ashamed, saying that I gave up on a life with someone I really loved for the sake of sex. Because, even in the best relationships, desire fades. You have about two years of great sex, and then settle for the occasional date night. So I tell people that it wasn’t really sex that broke us, it was all the deep and meaningful emotional things that our sexlessness represented – my boyfriend’s inability to be vulnerable, or to really commit. But that’s only partly true. I like sex because it makes me feel close to the person I am having sex with, but I also like it for shallower, more selfish reasons. I broke up my relationship because I missed the physical act of sex, even when it’s devoid of connection. I missed feeling attractive, and getting compliments, and the thrill of looking into a stranger’s eyes and knowing I am wanted. That part is more difficult to admit.
Now I’m single, and a lot of my friends are having children – whereas I’m agonising over my Hinge profile and mentally undressing random commuters on the bus. I’ve had sex since the breakup, and some of it has felt sad, and awkward. I’ve also had good sex, but even that has felt a bit lonely, and risky – yet it also made me feel free. My life had a set pattern, and I’ve broken out of it. I no longer have anyone to watch TV with, or cook for, and, while I miss the safety of that sometimes, my boyfriend and I watched a lot of TV and cooked a lot of food over the last three years, and it wasn’t enough. I choose sex.
Eleanor Thomas is a pseudonym
Will you still worry about this in six months?
Rebecca Liu
Some of my most cherished life lessons were delivered by a much-maligned and mocked source: the teen-girl magazine. I loved them for their glamour, their fun and – yes – their wisdom. Boring trips to the supermarket became epic quests, as I would bid farewell to my mum in the grocery aisles and race over to the magazine stands to get a new issue of titles such as Dolly and Girlfriend, the publications of choice for girls in Australia and New Zealand, where I grew up. My friends and I would bring ours to school, where we would pore over the pages, completing quizzes such as “Who’s your famous boyfriend?” (Orlando Bloom or Chad Michael Murray?). In both magazines, more salacious sections on sex would be “protected” by a paper seal you could rip off, which was no match for an enterprising teen.
But it wasn’t all gossip, boys and suspect sex tips. At their best, these magazines offered real guides to life, playing the role of a wiser and cooler older sister. There’s one line I read long ago that I’ve carried with me since. The article was about how to deal with anxiety (mental health made its way into these pages years before it was embraced by the mainstream). It said: “Ask yourself: will I still worry about this in six months?” The line came like a revelation.
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Worry had been a constant companion for me since I was very young. Before bedtime, I would run around the house and check all the windows were closed, fearing a break-in. Once, after reading reports of crime in a local newspaper at seven, I struggled to leave the house. My relationship to danger lacked a sense of proportion. This was the first time I was prompted to give it one.
Decades later, I still endeavour to ask myself that question whenever something unsettles me. It’s incredibly revealing how often the answer is “no”, even if in the heat of the moment I’m in the throes of heart-rattling nauseous panic. It’s by no means a panacea against all anxiety, but it remains a useful tool to take myself out of my own head. Meanwhile, the fate of Dolly magazine followed a familiar story: in 2016, it ceased print operations. The outpouring of tributes at the time suggests that I was not the only one who treasured my magazines, which were unfailingly funny, flawed and very dear companions to the difficult task of growing up.
What would you do if you won the lottery?
Charlotte Northedge
Fifteen years ago, I was working as a commissioning editor on a women’s magazine and feeling stalled in my life. I’d been doing the same job for too long, living in a one-bedroom flat in London with my boyfriend while friends around us got married, got pregnant and moved to the suburbs. One day in January I edited an article about finding new challenges – it was a magazine about psychology, so there were a lot of those. But one line really stood out. What would you do if you won the lottery?
It was a deceptively simple question, intended to force readers to step out of their daily routine and think about what they would do if money was no object. How would you fill your time?
I’d do a master’s degree, I found myself thinking on the way home. I’d go back to studying: spend my days in the library, reading and thinking and writing again. I had written short stories in my teens, and started a novel in my 20s, putting it to one side when I got my first job. I didn’t have the headspace to even think about writing fiction at that point, but perhaps studying again might reawaken my creativity?
The question followed me around for weeks. I thought about it on the bus to and from work, talked about it with friends and my boyfriend. They pointed out a crucial fact: I didn’t actually need to win the lottery to apply for a master’s; I could do it part-time, in the evenings, while I carried on working. The cost of the course, while not insignificant, would be an investment in my future. My days in the library would have to be Saturdays or Sundays. But I wouldn’t be able to afford to do anything else, in any case.
In the end, prompted by that one question, I applied to study a master’s in contemporary literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Instead of watching TV in the evenings, or nursing a hangover at the weekends, I studied and wrote essays. And, once I’d finished the MA, I used those rediscovered hours, and my refreshed perspective, to return to the novel I’d started all those years before – writing in the evenings alongside my day job, a wedding, two children and the inevitable move for more space.
The House Guest was eventually published in 2021, and a film of my second novel, The People Before, was screened last year. Sitting in a cinema, watching actors deliver lines I’d written in my bedroom, was an outcome I’d never even allowed myself to consider on those formative bus journeys. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have arrived at that destination if it hadn’t been for my imaginary lottery win.
If I got to live longer, how would I want to spend my time?
Tim Jonze
It was around 2005, and I’d flown to San Francisco to interview a band for the NME. I can’t remember which band – at the time I was doing so many trips they’d begun to blur into one another, a giddy fug of jet lag and alcohol.
Sleep was scarce to nonexistent on these things. And yet, there I was, rolling into my hotel room around 2am and setting the alarm for … 5am. Why? So I could go on a pre-dawn wander of the city and still get back for the 10am taxi to the airport.
I marched to Union Square, raced through Chinatown, took the steep, twisting turns up Lombard Street and began a long, lonely trek to the Golden Gate Bridge, arriving around 7.30am. Well, that looks nice, I thought, before turning on my heels to dash back.
This encapsulates the way I lived through my 20s: a restless, ravenous urge to gorge myself on as much of the world as possible. I was obsessive about experiencing as much as I could – but was I experiencing it, or just ticking it off?
The question that changed my approach was one I asked myself in 2018, fresh from having been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer: if I got to live longer, how would I want to spend my time?
The answer came quickly and clearly: I wanted to be with the people I loved most, as often as possible. Everything else – work, travel – faded into insignificance. In fact, all that scurrying around the world almost seemed a little pointless. Who was I doing it for? What had it achieved? After a diagnosis like mine you often hear of people writing a bucket list. I had more of an anti-bucket list: a list of things I no longer wanted to do because I’d rather sit on the sofa with my kids and watch Bluey.
I don’t look back on those years with regret. Nobody is on their deathbed wishing they’d had a lie-in rather than seen the Golden Gate Bridge. I appreciate the manic energy that helped me seize these amazing opportunities – and know it’s still in me on occasion. But, seven years on, and with my health mercifully stable, I’ve accepted that it’s not possible to see and do everything. Sometimes it’s better to just sit around with your family and actually take things in.
Do you really like this man?
Tanya Gold
I got to almost 40 without living with a man. I was avoidant: that is a poised word for scared, and I depend on poised words. I had a bad relationship with my father – I choose my words carefully, for legal reasons and from shame – and grew up with the powerful, though unacknowledged, idea that I was, among other things, incurably unlovable. I didn’t know I felt that way, so I couldn’t also know that it is not normal to feel this way. I thought all women were like me: unworthy and afraid. I thought all women subsisted on casual sexual encounters and drank to blackout, or, if they didn’t, they should. Anything else was alien, and weird: almost pitiable.
After I stopped drinking, and self-murder was closed to me, I subsisted on emotionally unavailable men, because they are an infinite resource and ask nothing of you. I still thought pain was love, but I was sober and older, and my loneliness was growing.
I wanted a child, and the things other people have. I met a man I’d known since university, and his tenderness – his stillness and kindness – pierced something in me. We had a love affair that baffled me less for its intensity than its constancy: why, I wondered, did he stay? If he stayed, did it mean I had to leave? Soon, we were engaged but, still, I complained about him: about his ordinary habits and needs. I had never had to consider anyone else before: you don’t when you date the emotionally unavailable quasi-fictional. Then, at dinner one night, a clever friend asked me: do you really like this man?
It was a challenge to my subconscious, which had spent the previous two decades trying to thwart all attempts at love. Did I? Could I? I was on my customary trajectory – out the door! – and the question made me pause. Did I like him? Was I allowed to like someone, or was I possessed by ghosts I could not see that would carry me out the door against my will?
I thought about her question, and I knew I did like him. I liked his kindness, and his looks. I liked his peculiar mind and his shyness. I liked his cooking. I liked that he said he loved me, and I believed him. And, since I did like him, I could stay, and I did: we married, and have a child, and continue to negotiate my tendency to live in an invented reality, since I remain cautious of actual reality. Her question illuminated, rather than changed, something. But I could never have asked it for myself.
