Probe the Strobe
I CAME across a woman who’d been beaten by her boyfriend late the other night.
She was in the foyer of a top hotel, hysterical, her face blotched and bruised, begging the concierge to save her from the man in room 602.
The man she’d presumably once loved and possibly still does.
Turns out she had a restraining order against him, but had agreed to a night away to give him another chance, to see if he’d changed like he insisted he had; and when the cops were called to sort out this latest melee, she refused to press charges, insisting he didn’t mean to hurt her.
As distressed as she was, I looked at her and thought: this ain’t the end of the road, she’s going back for more.
Sad thing is, we’ve all done it.
Not gone back to someone who beats us, necessarily, but certainly back to someone who we’ve left for good reason, letting time or desperation blur memory and rationale.
The older we get, the harder it is to let go, fearing this could be our last shot.
We buy into the hype of love being thin on the ground and decide to make do, even in the face of mass misery all round.
Cosmo (the bible of all things womanly) calls them Strobe Relationships – on/off associations, where love isn’t enough to keep two together, but is too much to incite stepping away. And Strobes are hot right now – Kate Moss and Pete Doherty being the pin-ups.
Just when you think Kate’s had enough of Pete’s rehab and unhealthy complexion, they’re rebounding into locked embraces at Glastonbury and talking weddings and offspring.
Strobes are torn between knowing you need to work at a relationship to make it a success and being accustomed to moving on when it gets too hard, going in search of the next best thing.
A friend was almost as dire as Kate Moss: on/off for four long years, drawn-out periods of angst, anger and vitriolic text messages, interspersed with brief respites of warm glow and sweet sentiment.
In the truces, she managed to re-convince all her friends that her man was worth fighting for and just misunderstood. Then, just as we were beginning to come around, she’d be on the phone in tears, lamenting his latest angry tirade and declaring this time she was gone for good.
It was confusing. Who were we to say their love wasn’t worth fighting for? I told her: “It’s rare to find a connection like that”, while secretly hoping you can have that, and more, with ease.
In the end, it was decided for her. Her strobe got engaged, to someone he’d just met. Someone less complicated. And now my friend regrets the wasted years.
It’s hard to know when it’s time to pull the pin for good. No decisions should be made immediately post-break-up, when loneliness and vulnerability can lead us to imagine rosy realities that never existed.
It’s with deep shame that I admit I’ve pined for men I didn’t even like, fantasising about them turning up on my doorstep with peonies, begging for round two.
I know what I was doing: attempting to short-circuit the fear of being alone forever, prepared to settle for mediocrity.
Beware the ego, proving to yourself you can have them back, if you want. I’ve found every time (and there’ve been several) that waiting it out is the only way to see the wood for the trees.
Women’s magazines will tell you to calmly weigh up the pros and cons of the relationship before boomeranging, but – get real!
We’re driven by much more primal forces than that. Enter his phone number as “don’t answer” in your phone, so that’s what flashes up, should he call.
There’s no time to waste. Age does not make us immune to uncomplicated loving.