It may be easy to introduce your partner to your friends if you’re dating someone with infinite swagger. But my partner is often quite shy. When I introduce him to my friends, he’s nervous and unsure – will they like him? Will they see in him what I do? Will the start of the evening – all shuffled feet and polite chitchat and coughing and staring at phones – eventually meld into one big conversation, when he gets swallowed into the group until no one can remember that he only met them four hours ago?

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A random selection of ridiculous reasons why boys aren’t allowed to break up with me. FYI.

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My partner told me recently that ‘confidence is sexy’, and I nearly fell off my chair. Confidence, is sexy, you say? Wow, I wish someone had told me twenty years ago, because if I’d known I’d definitely have magicked up some confidence rather than deliberately chosen to be awkward and ashamed of the way I am…

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I shave my legs every couple of weeks. My armpits more frequently – maybe once or twice each week. I pluck my eyebrows when I spot a stray hair, and get them threaded when I can brave the salon. Then occasionally I cover my neck, chest and stomach in hair removal cream, lie on the bathroom floor like a melting snowman, and wait for the hair to burn off. I have PCOS, and Sisyphus has nothing on me.

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I hanker for a lot of things from my dating days and my youth. But one of the things I don’t miss is the awkward feeling, early on in a hook up, that the men I wanted to fuck were playing music at me. A fairly common scenario involved me sitting on my hands and trying not to lean in for a kiss too soon, while a hot guy commandeered the stereo, picked an album and told me: “you’re going to love this, I know it.” Few of my dates ever let me pick the music.

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