Baby, Can I Hold You

Friendship Breakups

November 4, 2025

life

I remember reading somewhere that friendship breakups are so much harder than romantic breakups. And it’s so true. I still feel a little unsettled from the ending of a friendship that happened nearly 10 years ago. And I guess I’m going through it again.

Besides the huge loss of a friendship which is hard to handle just on its own, I think friendship breakups are harder because other people still in your life don’t understand it or support it in the same way as a romantic break up. There aren’t friends or family calling up after a friendship break to check in on how you’re doing or asking if you want to talk about it or watch shit telly and eat ice cream together. Friendship breakups feel lonelier, like not only do you have to go through it but you have to go through it alone.

I’ve written a bit about my best friend on this blog. She’s someone that I strongly connected with initially and just built on that connection over the last just over 10 years. We’ve been through a lot together. She held me together when I needed it, listened to me crying, laughed with me over the funny things, celebrated the wins with me.

And during that time I was there for her during breakups and a move to a different state, her marriage, the birth of her two children. I honestly thought we’d continue our friendship until we were old and grey.

But that’s not to be.

And I feel absolutely heartbroken over it. She’s fallen off the face of the world for over three months. And at first I thought it was that she was poorly, her kids were poorly, life stresses getting to be too much. But surely not for that long?

So I reached out to people in her life. Her husband, her ex boyfriend that she shares a cat with. I figured something must be wrong for her to just vanish from my life. And when one of them got back to me to say she’s fine, I spoke to her two days ago I thought … oh. It’s just me then.

And that feels like a rejection of me as a person. Of me as a friend. That kind of dismissal from me in her life makes me feel like I wasn’t important to her, that the friendship was never as strong as I thought it was.

It makes me question so many things about me, about her, about our friendship over the years. Was any of it real? Was it just me being generous with her, filling in those gaps how I wanted to see her or our relationship? I guess I’ll never know.

I wrote the above when I was still in the sadness portion of my grief. And it is grief. I’m grieving the loss of this friendship, there are still things that are happening right now and my first thought is to tell her about it. But I’m over the sadness part. Now I’m into the anger stage. And my therapist used to tell me that tapping into my anger is like tapping into the version of myself that knows I don’t deserve this pain or unfairness. My anger keeps me strong and with healthy boundaries.

And right now? My anger is saying fuck her. Fuck her and her choice to cut me out of her life. I’m a great fucking friend and it is her loss that I’m no longer part of it. I don’t want to spend anymore of my time second-guessing her decision or asking ‘what if?’ because that way lies madness. And I have no control over the thoughts and decisions of others.

All I can do from here is acknowledge the deep, deep pain I am in right now, look after myself a little more right now and throw my energy into the people and things that are worthy of my time, attention and love.

The people in my life are few but the ones I do keep around definitely mean a lot to me. I think this whole thing just goes to show that nothing is certain in life. And I’m grateful to those who do stick around.

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Anonymous Confessions vol. 7

November 3, 2025

relationships, sex

It absolutely thrills me to see your name pop up online. I like the way you think, the things you say. I feel like I’m the best version of myself with you and it makes me sad that there are things standing in the way of more.

I used to hold onto feelings a lot. So the above used to weigh on me quite heavily. I’d overthink it, maybe I’d think it tragic and romantic? I don’t know, it’s hard to remember past versions of myself.

Now though? Now I feel like I’m firmly walking away from a scarcity mindset. It didn’t work out? It wasn’t meant for me.

I know that I sent this anonymous confession out into the world but maybe it just needs to be set free. I need to let this one go. Let these words be the last time these bittersweet emotions are borne by me.

Let my future be one in which I get the same buzzy feeling about someone and it isn’t feel so much like insurmountable obstacles to make things work.

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Anonymous Confessions vol. 6

October 24, 2025

relationships

For whatever reason, my heart has decided to hook itself to you. Most days I’m okay with it. You’re funny and smart and sexy as hell. You make me feel safe. You do things to my body and it all feels so good that I swear sometimes that I’m in love with you. Some days I believe that. I just wish it were easier to tell you how I’m feeling, what I need from you. To understand your reluctance to open up to me.

This is a hard one. I’ve written so often on this blog about this man. I give him chance after chance. I even documented the build of a break up with him only to roll it back and be like, nah. I don’t mean that.

He’s the biggest blind spot I think I’ve ever had. I met him at a time when I was sort of spinning out of control after things ended with my ex and I needed a steady, safe person to settle my feelings on. I’ve often wondered if I’d met him at a different time in my life would I have developed the feelings I have for him? Or was it just the circumstances?

I can’t give a definitive answer. And I don’t think it would make a difference to try to rewrite history now. The damage to my heart has already been done. Because I do have feelings for him. I often have days, like I did when I originally wrote the confession above, where I think I’m in love with him.

And I’ve thought over the last few months, hoped really, that maybe he feels a little bit the same too. With absolutely no evidence of it. Just my hopeful nature.

And tonight he confirmed that is, in fact, not the case.

My heart is a little bit bruised tonight. I hope you’ll understand if I take next week off to rest, recover, relax. Take a little time to myself. And hopefully when I come back I’ll be feeling a little bit more myself.

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Hand Holding and Gentle Touches

October 23, 2025

sex

There are some people who are just incredibly lovely. And I was lucky enough to have sex with one of those people the other day.

I’d met him recently for a walking date and he is lovely but he doesn’t live particularly close to me. So when he said he’d be in my area over the weekend, did I want to meet up I said ‘yes’ straight away. We hadn’t even kissed when we met up for our walk so it was a bit of a leap that this meet up was going to be in his hotel room, but I’m here for this type of questionable behaviour.

I’d told him beforehand that I struggle with that transition from talking normally fully clothed into the naked sexy times so he was pre-warned for when I arrived and started babbling away. It was like I couldn’t stop. My mouth just kept opening and I was telling funny stories about my parcel of lingerie being delivered to the wrong address and maybe stories about my dog? I don’t remember.

But because he’s lovely he went with it. I don’t know how he knew but what he ended up doing was perfect. We were lying on the bed next to each other and instead of anything more forward he would nod and smile at my stories and at the same time start pulling me closer or gently touching me. I felt a little bit like a spooked horse that he needed to settle. But I’m glad he did it and all that touching helps calm me down anyway.

It’s a bit weird having sex with someone new, isn’t it?

I was familiar with his faces when he talks to me, his face when he’s smiling or laughing but I was not familiar with the really intense eye contact he gave me while we were at the actual event or his o face.

I had a fucking great time and a lot of that is down to who he is as a person. I could tell from all the eye contact that he was really interested in connecting with me on that level. He’d link his fingers or hands with mine like he wanted that physical connection all the time too. And afterwards, it was all this lovely cuddling and touching. And I couldn’t get enough of it. It’s one of my favourite things lying naked next to someone and just gently touching each other.

I hope to do that again and sometime soon. He asked if I wanted to see my favourite musical with him sometime soon. And it makes me smile to think about him.

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Reality vs. Fantasy

October 22, 2025

relationships

Do you ever have that problem where you are into the idea of something or someone and your brain runs away with itself? I think I’ve fallen foul of it quite often.

Sometimes, as I’ve written on this blog before, I’ve actively participated into fantasy thinking. Especially with others. Before I brought up divorce or separation with my ex husband I’d feel so unhappy and miserable that I liked a bit of imaginary release from reality. And at times with people I’d build pictures in my head about futures with these people online. Even at the time of doing it I knew it wasn’t real. But it made me happy for a time. And that had a place in my life then.

These days I thought that I was beyond playing fairy tale. But I caught myself in the act of it the other month. I was in Paris for a long weekend and at the same time my ex was on holiday and for a brief moment I thought … I wonder what it would be like if my ex and I went on holiday together?

And I played that game in my head for maybe two minutes. I allowed myself two minutes of that fantasy. Of seeing his beautiful face, of having the luxury of time together. I think we’d have a great time just the two of us, I don’t think it would matter where in the world we were. In my imagination I was thinking we’d approach any new place the way we approached visiting sex clubs for the first time. Maybe a bit of nerves, but some curiosity, some childlike excitement, together.

On the back of that fun note, I started thinking if other people in my life would share the same great thoughts if we went on holiday. I thought of my on/off person, what would it be like if he and I went somewhere on holiday together? And I knew the moment I thought the question that I had no answer for it. And that’s because we wouldn’t go on holiday together. There is no real world basis in it. I’d like us to be the type of people that would want to spend time together, do something intimate and exciting like travel together. But I know in my heart that it would never happen.

And it’s a sobering thought. That some people are reality and some people are fantasy.

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Call My Name by Lukas Graham

October 21, 2025

relationships

Every time I hear this song, I feel a little bit of shame.

I had this friend that I knew online. I knew he was really nice and we used to spend quite a bit of time online messaging back and forth about nothing terribly serious. Everything was very surface level, I didn’t know a thing about him.

Until the day he said he wasn’t logging into the place we had been messaging anymore, it didn’t bring him any value anymore. But he said he’d like to keep in contact with me and I said yes. So we moved to a different platform and we started actually getting to know each other.

And I was surprised. I hadn’t realised how much he cared about his family, how much effort he put into his career, the ambition that he had. When we were surface-level friends I thought he was sweet and funny. But seeing the depth in him I knew him to be determined and hard-working and incredibly loving to those he cared about. It wasn’t a massive circle of people but it was clear to see in how he spoke about those in his life how much they meant to him.

And it was all so appealing to me.

We were talking about music once and he told me that he’d had lots of thoughts about song and music recommendations for me that he’d never shared with me. Intrigued I asked like what?

At the top of my head, he said, I’d say Call My Name by Lukas Graham.

I wasn’t familiar with the song when he said that. But I did immediately go to listen to it. And I remember feeling so emotional listening to it that first time. I remember thinking how has this one person so clearly seen straight into my loneliness?

The song is about recognising the hard work of someone else but reminding them that they don’t have to do things themselves. Lean into me, I’m here for you. And I cried listening to it, thinking that that were words he’d heard and thought of me.

Briefly, we did a minor foray into something more romantic. But he was so intense in everything that I almost felt overwhelmed by the pressure he brought with him. I knew that if things remained in the shallow end of things, I’d be fine. But I also knew he’d never settle for that and at the time I didn’t know how to bring that up, how to deal with that. To deal with him.

So instead I didn’t. Bless him, a very toxic person came back into my life and I used the distraction of him as a reason to ghost this other lovely, gorgeous man. Instead of having an adult, mature conversation with him I just …stopped messaging him. I feel bad about it to this day. He didn’t deserve that. He deserved so much more than me. I’ve often thought about reaching out to find him to apologise. But too much time has passed and I know any apology I could give him would be more for my benefit than his, so I won’t.

He’ll never come across this blog so I won’t use his name. I’ve made a promise to myself to protect the anonymity of people I write about here. But if I could, I’d tell him that even though we weren’t in each other’s lives for long the short time he was in mine he made a big impact and I think about him still years later. I’d apologise for the truly shitty way that I treated him. He saw into my soul in that brief period of time and I definitely did not appreciate him enough.

So if you need a friend someone to hold your hand call my name and I won’t be far away

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Anonymous Confessions vol. 5

October 20, 2025

sex

You feel like an unanswered question. There was something there and then it got interrupted. And I don’t mind saying (anonymously) that I think about what it would be like to explore all those unspoken things, all those things we haven’t done together. That makes it sound like I’m daydreaming about us having deep philosophical conversations but don’t be mistaken. My mental image is one of naked bodies crashing against each other with mouths and tongues and fingers everywhere.

I’m not going to write too much about this one. We had a flirty relationship, we met up. We both wanted to have sex but my period and a lack of time and space posed problems. Drama followed us (him) around and it was something I couldn’t get past. We live too far apart for anything to really happen and I’m not feeling hugely generous from my side about travelling to see him so it feels fairly dead in the water.

But it’s an interesting thing to think about though, isn’t it? Unanswered questions.

And by that I guess I really mean where expectations started to build up that something sexual might happen and then for whatever reason life got in the way and it’s never happened.

This has been me several times. Not just with the man in the original comment. But with a man that lives in Manchester. We grew close online during lockdown and when lockdown lifted I travelled up to see him for what should have been a sexy weekend filled with plenty of sex and orgasms. But I got the train home on Sunday and the only orgasm I’d had that weekend is the one I gave myself before I fell asleep on his sofa.

After that weekend, things fizzled out between us relationship wise. But every now and again one or both of us would creep into the other’s messages and be like, ‘hey, how you doing?’ in that way people do when they want to bang someone. And I think it was clear that both of us wanted a good fucking from each other. To just get it out of our systems. To know what it would be like. To actually do the thing we’d both been daydreaming and fantasising about for ages.

He and I were on a rollercoaster. We’d ended our romantic and sexual relationship very definitively. But our friendship would take dives into the possibility of us meeting again but he’d invariably cancel. And I’d get frustrated and block him then have a change of heart and unblock him. It went on like this for ages. Actual months. Before I finally just blocked him for the last time.

Do I wonder what it would be like to have sex with him though? Yes, absolutely. But I’m definitely not wading back into that shit show. Not this time.

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Shame

October 17, 2025

dating, life

Is it just me or are many things in my life fuelled by shame?!

I met a lovely man recently, we had a lovely time. The date was a walk in a local park. Partway through we did find a bench and natter away without the addition of the physical activity. But before we got to the sitting and talking we did the walking and talking.

And do you know much I was filled with shame when he was like, should we go this way or that way? And I’d choose the option that was less uphill? We did end up going up some of the hills in the bloody park and do you know what happened? I ended up feeling out of breath as I walked uphill and continued to chat.

Christ alive, that’s embarrassing. So, in the end, I felt like change was needed. The next day, which happened to be the start of a new month I decided was the day I got back into running.

I used to run quite a lot. During lockdown, I used to have a 5 day schedule for running to keep it interesting. Wednesday was my sprints day where I’d run 1 minute sprints as quickly as I could then walk. Sprint and walk. Fridays, for a bit of excitement, I’d run for longer and do a 10k. What an exciting life lockdown was for awhile, don’t you think?

But those days have been long gone. Aside from this new surge in running, I hadn’t run since things ended with my ex. I honestly felt like I just couldn’t face it. Part of that was because at the time I’d had designs to join the same running club he was part of. I thought it’d be fun to do something together. And then I thought can I even do this on my own again and enjoy it in the same way?

And that feeling led me to me being so unfit that I couldn’t even walk up a mildly steep hill without wanting to pant at the top of it. How did I get to this point in my life?

I am enjoying running again though. I’m hoping to add in some strength training so I have more definition in my body too. But I’m definitely doing this for the most part because I love that I’m setting time aside for myself. I remember telling my therapist years ago that I loved our sessions because it was a defined time in my life, in my week where I am the priority. And when I put my running shoes on I get that same sort of feeling.

I’m also hopefully getting stronger and fitter and with a better ability to chat for ages. Because good lord, once you get me going, I could talk forever.

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We Walked, We Talked, We Laughed

October 16, 2025

dating

I went on a date the other day. It was on a day that I was in the office and he’d chosen a location to meet that was on my way home from work and I honestly loved that. I don’t mind going out of my way to meet someone but I love that he put thought into this.

I got there a few minutes earlier than him but when he pulled up to park his car next to me the first thing he asked was ‘was the parking okay?’ and again, it just felt really nice. I’d said that parking is something I stress about but even in the excitement and awkwardness of meeting someone new it was the first thing on his mind.

When he got out of his car, I noticed he was wearing colourful, stripy socks. I kind of knew at that point that we’d have a good time.

And we did. He’s lovely. We walked, we talked, we laughed.

It probably wasn’t like my usual date. I don’t mean the walking or talking. I mean more the content of the talking. He was very open about a lot of things. His family, his situation, he told me a lot of things about his unusual childhood, he showed me photos of his children.

I think it’s so easy in this day and age to be really closed off to other people, to be distrustful, to hold your cards a little closer to your chest especially about your kids’ names or whatever. I can’t tell if it’s the right thing to do to be reserved or if we should be more open. I know that I fall more into one side of the camp than the other so it did feel a little like being in unknown territory with him.

He did this thing and I didn’t know how I felt about it at the time. But in the days before we’d met he’d gone on a trip with his friends to do this cool thing. He had said that when we met up he’d show me photos of the cool thing but I thought it was one of those things that people said.

But no, I asked him about his trip and he pulled out his phone, opened his photos app, scrolled to the last image and handed me his phone. You can scroll through if you want, he said. And so I did.

He’d shared one or two of the photos with me already. One of him smiling on a beach that I loved. But the others were more candid. And included his friends. As I was scrolling through his phone I was really hit with this feeling like, how are there people like this? Just so open to share these parts of their lives with a near stranger like me?

Am I just really distrustful and cynical? I don’t want to be that person. But I fear I am. Or maybe it’s just that he could tell that I’m harmless? That I wouldn’t abuse the trust he’d given me by sharing the personal parts of his life with me? I hope that’s the case.

In any case, I had a lovely time.

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Being Kind to Myself

October 15, 2025

relationships

I had such a great conversation with my ex the other day. I don’t remember how it started but fairly soon into it I’d written an entire essay at him. He’s probably used to that by now. He used to ask me a fairly inoffensive ‘how are you?’ some days and instead of I’m okay/I’m fine I’d launch into a detailed account of every thought I’ve had over the last 9 hours including some existential crises and every single twist and turn to my thoughts helped towards my answer. And in doing so answering one simple question would end up taking 6 hours. He’s the only person I do this with. Or did. Did, I guess is probably more accurate.

Though it happened the other day and it was lovely.

I’d sent over my essay of all the different aspects of whatever it was we were talking about. And he did this thing that I fucking love. He pulled out one thing that I’d said and asked if we could go over this point first. Tell me about this, he said.

And my response was immediate – all the love and affection I still and will always feel towards him just swelled up inside me.

Oh I missed this, I told him. You questioning my word choice to find out if I’m being kind to myself.

I’ve never met anyone before or since who is so consistent about wanting me to be kind to myself. In my thoughts, in my actions, in what I say about myself.

Did I tell you that when I sent him the link to the blog he asked if I could amend my tagline to read ‘A woman in her 40s, newly single, trying to navigate sex, dating and relationships’ instead of what I had originally written which was ‘Just a woman in her 40s, newly single, trying to navigate sex, dating and relationships’ It’s one word but it changes the tone of my tagline in an important way. When he gave me that suggestion it made me smile in the same way as my conversation with him the other day.

He’s a very complimentary sort of person, and god, he gave me so much reassurance when we were together that I needed and my confidence in myself and my self esteem has skyrocketed from so many things but mostly because of how he is with me. I love the big things, the showy-ness that can happen in relationships. But it’s the little things that get to me.

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