Cinnamon Twigs: The Life and Pseudocide of a Celebrity

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Pros and Cons of a Relationship

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Pros and Cons of a Relationship

When I was a child, my mother held me in her arms. I was crying. Don’t know why. But little Daniel needed his mother’s comforting cuddles, and that’s what he got. Warmth, the soft texture of her clothing on my cheek as I nestled into her. Until I snotted all over her jumper, which caused her to push me away and shout at me. Now I don’t know if this moment caused me deep issues and fears of emotional abandonment as an adult, or if I’m just chatting pretentious Freudian bollocks, but I developed an irrational fear of losing Lauren. As Graham Greene writes, ‘Always I was afraid of losing happiness’. Single people, who feel lonely every minute of their lives without a partner, are often under the impression that a relationship is the cure for everything, the elixir of love, or l’elisir d’amore, as the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti would call it, that makes birds sing and the leaves on the trees green. As soon as they find someone then life is dandy. Disney has taught us that matrimony means we all live happily ever after. The truth is there are pros and cons in every relationship, and if the cons outweigh the pros, as we often find occurs on the path to that final stone (to repeat the wanky metaphor I used earlier), then it’s time to get out and learn from our experiences. Fortunately, the pros outweighed the cons with Lauren. But one of the biggest obstacles we faced happened early in our relationship, and I was given a choice whether to forgive, pretend to forget, and have faith in her, or to end something that had so much potential.

     All the negatives in our relationship came from me at first. After I broke up with Lisa, I kept imagining her walking through Cardiff. Every girl changed into her, had her eyes, the same gait, the way their hair fell. When I was tired I’d often start thinking crazy shit. An active imagination and looking deeply into everything has benefited my career, but it caused havoc in those early stages. Every girl walking around town with her boyfriend turned into Lauren. Lauren cheating on me. Holding hands with someone else. Kissing another boy. Being fucked by a mysterious rival. I drove myself crazy, but realized these issues had the power to tear us apart. Jealousy and paranoia leads to violence and hatred. Hatred is, as Martin Luther King put it, an ‘unchecked cancer’ that ‘corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true’. I didn’t want my issues to turn our relationship, which was something so beautiful, into ugliness. Fear is intrinsically linked to anger and hate, as the noble philosopher Yoda tells us in Star Wars.

It also drove me mad when Lauren went out with her friends. One night she got so wasted she spewed in a club (the same one Michael had his nose broken in, funnily enough) on St Mary Street. Her friends rang me telling me she could barely walk or talk. I hated that. Anything could have happened. Any guy could have taken advantage of her. That’s a con in a relationship: caring so much about someone that you worry yourself sick about them sometimes. But I held her close the next morning, even though she’d turned into a white, hungover ghost in a stinking mood, and pretended everything was fine. It wasn’t long after that mishap that we came across our first major obstacle as a couple.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Mouth of Truth

Lauren and I had a conversation just before we became an official couple about our relationship experiences. She mentioned a guy she’d been seeing in Salisbury before she started at Cardiff. He’d claimed he didn’t want a relationship because, inevitably, he’d end up hurting her. He was also seeing someone else at the same time. The guy sounded like a prick, and it annoys me that I’m even granting him a mention here. But his relationship with Lauren, even though it happened long before I met her, impinged on us. I could tell from that early conversation she’d been affected by her time with this guy. Fred, his name was. She had a fear that I would screw her over, or she would screw me over. Being hurt had become synonymous with relationships in her eyes, all because of past experiences. She’d gotten upset during that talk, even cried. Said she was just tired and feeling emotional. I’d wiped the petals from her rosy cheeks and assured her there would be no more pricks in her life. But I couldn’t forget the moment she looked at me, all teary-eyed, and said, ‘I’ll be the one who ends up screwing you over.’ We dismissed everything that was said that night in bed together. But it ate away at me, burrowed into my mind. I knew one day she’d turn to me and say, ‘I said I’d screw you over.’ Just knew it. She’d told me on our first date that nobody had ever broken her heart, but I’d doubted that.