Anxious bedfellow
You seem pretty terrified for a girl so in love.
I was the most in-love I’d ever been when I started shedding my skin.
The scaly eczema that coated my forearms and hands predated my boyfriend, who I’d met over a year prior, via an app date I swore would be my last. Fed up of swiping, I’d already postponed it once and was toying with the thought of cancelling altogether. But I didn’t. Hours later, we were being shooed out of the trendy east London pub I’d picked because it was five minutes from my flat, and I was tipsily telling him I wasn’t going to kiss him goodbye because I liked him too much. “Send me your seven favourite memes if you actually want to see me again,” I instructed.
To my jaded surprise, the memes arrived as ordered the next morning and somehow didn’t stop, a steady flow that became ever more referential of our shared world and in-jokes, impenetrable to any outsider who might have happened upon our text chains. They were interspersed with everything else that made up the language of our love: functional messages about meeting spots; updates about our respective days; moans about friends and enemies; and — with increasing frequency — jarring cycles of rupture and repair.
These were sparked in all manner of trivial ways. One fight began with me jigging up and down to keep warm at the pub. Another started with a joke about his shoes. By 18 months in, they felt an almost daily occurrence. We seemed incapable of maintaining control and proportion of the fires we’d set. Each minor point of conflict ballooned into a grinding existential argument. They would smoulder into the next day and sometimes beyond too, until a truce had to be reached. The other option would be to break the doom loop altogether, one way or another, and neither of us had the ability to do that. Not yet.
This dynamic wasn’t exactly unfamiliar. Naturally — as I was a participant in them — my two prior relationships had featured poor conflict comms. But this was a different level. I reasoned this was because we’d met when I was 24, and he was my first fully realised adult love. From the beginning, he made me feel — to quote Olivia Rodrigo’s newest single, ‘stupid song’ — like a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake. One minute I was ascending to euphoric heights never before experienced, the next I was hollowed out, flat and listless.
It was around this time that my skin literally started peeling off. This was a new development; my eczema had never behaved like this before. Nor had it ventured to the places it now appeared, like my shoulder blades and neck. In bed with my boyfriend at night, I would rub at the affected sites, pilled skin flakes collecting into disgusting little piles on the sheet beneath us.
I’d forgotten this curious dermatological episode until the past weekend. Stuck on a delayed train, the Lake District sliding by outside, I decided to pass the time with Olivia Rodrigo’s third album. The title says it all: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.
