Don't Ignore 'The Crack'

You’d think that as you get older with maturity your relationships would get easier and you’d be attracted to those you’re more suitable too that are in the same ‘space’ as you, having learned more about yourself, grown wiser and gained a few painful experiences in life.

Contrary to this theory mine are doing the opposite.  My relationships seem more challenging, are getting shorter in length and the ending of them increasingly a drawn out process that probably consumes 75% of the length of time spent together. 

I used to wonder why lesbians stay together long past their relationship sale by date? Now I have come to realise that it is simply easier to live in a dead relationship where love and intimacy have gone, but at least you’re not rowing over who gets the cat in the divorce. 

In my 20s I was able to end my relationships just with the decision that ‘we no longer work’. A swift farewell and I never looked back. A decade older and endings exist in a constant penultimate state going on for months, occasionally years with lots of forgiveness, excuses, tears and counselling.  

You’d think it would be the other way around when in your teens or 20's time seems infinite and you’re less experienced, whilst once over 30, you realise that time is in fact finite, you’ve gained wisdom on matters of the heart plus you are getting older which means greyer, saggier, ultimately uglier and for some lesbians a concern their biological clock is ticking. 

Years ago I went to my first ever psychic, a little old lady in her 80s who lived above a shop. She looked like my Nan with the same taste in decorative crockery everywhere. She asked for an item she could hold and I gave her my silver neck chain I never took off.   

Amongst other things, she told me my relationship would end describing a crack in the wall that cannot be repaired. I had been with my girlfriend about two years and felt everything was fine. I came away upset, five quid lighter, and resolved that I was in control of my own life. What did she know anyway?! 

Over the course of the next two years the crack became visibly noticeable.  At first I tried to ignore it. Then I tried to hide it. Then I tried fixing it with my own DIY skills. Then I tried a professional who tells us after investigation ‘this cannot be saved’.  Still you hold on despite the ‘hole’ now as big and as scary as the ‘crack in the wall’ of Amy Ponds bedroom in Doctor Who. You’re scared for it has the same power to ‘consume people, erasing them from history’ (Series 5, episode 1). 

Eventually the crack has weakened the whole structure, everything collapses like a stack of playing cards and you’re left surrounded by rubble, the girlfriend gone to be eventually ‘consumed ‘and you wondering why you left it so long, why you didn’t sell up years ago when the crack first appeared and wasting all that pointless energy.  

I have been back to psychics since on the proviso that they don’t mention my relationship unless I’m single. That little old lady was spot on with her forecast and voiced before I was ready what I already knew but couldn't yet face up too. Her analogy represents so many lesbian relationships that drag on for years. If only we could learn to say goodbye when that crack first appears.