One of the best things about storytelling is seeing the emotions you’ve provoked in others.
The chattery backlash I’ve had since writing Holidate and the posts that followed has been insane – comments, private messages and face-to-face interrogations. I’ve felt like Mel Gibson in What Women Want.
Which leads me nicely on to my next point….what do women want?
They want to hear about the romance with every single detail. They want to know what he said, what I said and how we said it. They want to know the lighting, the music, the clothes we wore, the food we ate, the way he looked at me and the way I looked back at him. They want to hear how he said I’m going to kiss you now and how the butterflies swirled around my stomach. They want to walk onto the film set and feel what it’s like to be Her.
But most of all, actually, they want to know….
What’s Next?
How did you leave things? Will you see him again? Is that it? Do you miss him? Can you see it turning into a relationship? Do you think you’d move to London to be with him? Do I need to buy a hat?
Woh woh woh woh woh
I love the excitement, I love the intrigue, I love the hope..and I could regale them with these stories for hours on end without getting bored. But the honest answer to all of those questions is I just don’t know.
I honestly haven’t even thought about it.
And I don’t want to. I don’t want to burst my Croatian bubble with an in-depth hypothetical analysis of what could be. Anything like that would take away from what it was. And what it was, was absolutely perfect from the second we said hello to the second we said goodbye.
We’d agreed to a Holidate with zero intentions and just a bit of hope that we wouldn’t be repulsed by each other. What we got was the opposite of repulsion and pretty brilliant five days adventuring a beauty-full island in the sun.
I was planning to omit the whole experience from my blog, but he encouraged me to write about it. And I’m glad he did, because typing up my tales was like reliving it all over again. It may have sounded overly Mills & Boonified at times, but actually that’s how I see the world, and the best thing was that I didn’t have to embellish one tiny detail.
Que Sera, Sera
Everything that happens is a lesson of some sort and this was a particularly good one for me.
I used to have this laissez-faire attitude to life and I loved it. No plans, no worries, no dramas just be happy and see what happens..
After a bit of an roller-coaster relationship spanning four years, I entered the online dating world last year with caution. A handful of dates and the odd attempt at a fling but that was about it. Even though I genuinely didn’t want any of them to turn into anything serious, I think at the back of my head I was looking for them to even out the dent I had in my own self-esteem.
I was using the interest of others to make me feel good about myself, despite knowing I’m the only person on this planet who is capable of doing that.
The meditation and crippling exercise in Croatia, the focus on self-compassion and the time I’ve given myself to digest my thoughts have been a total cure. So now I’m back to being old me, in the ways that I want to be, and I just want to love the Holidate for what it was, not what it might be.
The real trick in life is to want nothing and succeed in getting it.