I SLEPT IN HIS BED JUST SO SHE COULDN’T GET IN IT
‘JEALOUSY is a disease.’ So wrote noted essayist and It girl Paris Hilton — and I agree with her. Sexual jealousy is such a canker on my love life, I don’t know if I’ll ever cure it. I meet a man and he sweeps me off my feet. I gratefully sigh: ‘Thank you, God, old Scarlett’s finally met her Rhett’, only for him to turn around and say ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ while I’m still asking ‘Where shall we go? What shall we do?’ six to twelve months later.
Exhibit A was the man I call Mr Maldives, because he whisked me off on holiday there just ten days after we met. The sex was so unbelievable, I couldn’t understand why he wanted to spend all the time on his phone.
Then, sneaking a look over his shoulder one morning, I saw he was communicating with someone called ‘Blondemoney’.
‘You’ve got a perfectly good blonde with no money right next to you,’ I seethed.
He insisted it was a financial services company. A likely story, I thought, in a frenzy of suppressed envy. But I let it go. I didn’t want to ruin our time in paradise with my jealousy, although fear ate away at me, tainting the relationship anyway.
It’s only now, more than a year since he ghosted me, that I’ve bothered to check his claim and so discovered that Blondemoney is, in fact, a financial services company.
We’ve all met someone who is so insecure and consumed by their partner that they see anyone in the vicinity as a serious threat. So I try hard to keep my simmering doubts to myself, so it doesn’t hurt anyone but me. But the men I meet all seem to love the chase and loathe the prize. I fear I’ll be replaced because I always am.
It’s hard to be your best self in the circumstances, so instead I act out in fiction — my book Bad Romance is about psychotically jealous heroines destroying their exes’ weddings and so forth.
The worst thing I’ve done in real life was become so unstable that when a boyfriend’s ex turned up to his house party, I got blind drunk, crawled under the duvet in midparty and passed out, defiantly claiming the whole bed. Waking up alone with the worst hangover, I crept out at dawn past the sofa they were curled up on downstairs. The only way to pull the plug on my sexual jealousy seems to be to stop having sex altogether.