Just putting it out there: it is very cool and fun to date me. I promise. No, it’s not a total nightmare of reading posts about yourself and wondering whether you’ll get a good write-up, or listening to me bang on about butt plug brands until you’re entirely turned off butt plugs forever. It’s really cool and fun, and I am not in any way a total shambles.

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Most of what I write is true. But ‘Truth’ itself is much more slippery. Truth with a capital T can never come from the mouth of a single person, and it never comes in the form of a story, because the act of telling a story involves shaping and curating truth: picking which bits stay in and which bits get cut. What makes a story, when it comes to non-fiction, isn’t Truth but perspective.

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The problem with suddenly becoming single is that it throws up a bunch of dating problems that I very much hoped I would never have to deal with. I appreciate that absolutely none of these are serious – they are all things I’ll happily overcome, about which my whining is intended to be no more than a brief and amusing distraction as you trip down whichever path your Wednesday happens to be taking. My current mantra, as life gets harder, is ‘I like doing difficult things.’ Doing difficult things is incredibly empowering, and having the freedom to do those things excites me. Nevertheless, as I start to explore the ways I will throw myself into the exciting hard stuff, I can’t help but bump up against dating problems that I genuinely do not want to tackle. Here is a brief (and likely non-exhaustive list) of things I can’t be arsed with.

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Beginning. Short sentence designed to make you ponder something odd or sexy or enraging or cute. Longer sentence which explains why that thing you were pondering is actually a little bit more complicated than you might have previously thought. Teasing line aimed at making you want to read further: why am I doing this?

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I’ve had a lot of internet fights in my time. I cut my teeth on an incredibly racist and misogynist forum back in the days before Twitter, then I joined Twitter, then I started to blog. Fight after fight after fight – I’ve kicked off at so many people! People who were causing harm, and others who were trying to tell me that I was causing harm. Sometimes I’ve argued well, sometimes badly. Sometimes I am right, often wrong. Some things I’ve said have been justified, others terrible. You get the idea. At no point during any of these fights did I ever intend to cause harm. But that doesn’t mean no harm was ever caused.

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