The Dating Detox Read Free Page B

With a misspelling. Or typo, to give him the benefit of the doubt.
    Sure, it was no great love affair—Rugger Robbie never really made me laugh and frequently responded to things I said with ‘you’re bonkers’. (I’m so not, but since he had no imagination, I blew his fucking mind.) But I’d grown quite fond of him, so it hurt. That’s the thing about being dumped. Even if you don’t care about him that much, it still hurts. Because if you don’t care much about the dude and you’re still dating him, he must not care about you far, far more to actually go to the trouble of dumping you.
    I did have boyfriends at university, since you ask, but they hardly count. It was so much easier then. You’d see them in lectures or at parties and get a crush, and know them via their friends so you could weed out freaks, and flirt for ages and then finally snog, and once you snogged three times, boom! You were going out. Then you’d both agree it was over and move on to someone else. It was easy. Not anymore.
    Oh fuck me, again. I can’t believe it’s happened again.
    As I walk up towards Victoria station, Grazia tucked underneath my arm, I decide to call Bloomie. She gets to work by 7 am every day, because she has a high-flying job. In a bank. (Note: despite high-flying job in aforementioned arsehole industry, Bloomie is not an arsehole.)
    ‘Mushi mushi?’
    ‘You know, Bloomerang, you’re not Japanese.’
    ‘You better now, Sassafras, my little drama queen?’
    ‘Dude, I give up. If you pick someone interesting, they’re a bastardo and they’ll dump you. If you pick someone kind, they’ll be boring and, apparently, they’ll still dump you. What. The. Fuck.’
    ‘So you are better, darling?’
    ‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just fucking over…this…shit.’
    Sometimes when I’m upset I get dramatic. It makes me laugh. And that kind of makes me feel better. Even when I’m lost in Break-Up Memory Lane.
    ‘Sass, darling,’ Bloomie whispers. I don’t think talking on the phone is really approved of in her office. ‘I thought we agreed last night that it was better you stopped toying with Posh Mark? You would have thrown him back into the sea sooner or later.’
    Bloomie is one of my best friends, and manages to say ‘dahling’ at least four or five times a minute. It’s not pretentious from her, for some reason. She grew up in Chicago, as her dad’s American, but her parents moved to London when she was about 16, so her accent is a bit of a mongrel between East Coast USA and posh London. She’s been exactly the same since the first time we met, on the first day of university.
    Bloomie is also a total alpha: always leading the way, immensely more self-assured, together and tougher than I am, and sometimes—and she knows this too—rather spiky. But she’s utterly lovely and funny, of course. Why else would I be friends with her? And since I’m the kind of person who’s quite happy standing on the sidelines smoking fags and making quips rather than leading the pack, we fit together very well. Together with Kate, who I’ll tell you more about later, we’ve seen each other through about 19 boyfriends, 16 holidays together, probably over 250 coffee-and-fags-and-shopping Saturday afternoons, and truly countless hangovers, yet we still don’t run out of things to talk about.
    ‘I must be doing something wrong. I’ve been dumped six times in a row, Bloomie!’
    ‘Darling…it’s just really, really, really, really fucking bad luck.’
    Suddenly the reality of both statements hits me. I really have been dumped six times in a row. And it can’t just be bad luck. I must be an absolute loser and no one will ever love me again. (Why would Bloomie say I am a drama queen? I mean really.) So I start to cry, ish. Mostly I snuffle into the phone. Bloomie makes soothing noises for a while, and then she clears her throat and says abruptly:
    ‘Darling, seriously, I have to work. Let’s have a drink tonight. We can