I hate to tell you, Emily, but that Paris romance won’t get any better

“I’ll forgive you, but my best friend won’t.”

That’s what I thought each time I backslid into the same unsatisfying situationship. I’d fall back into bed with this person, but I’d only be half there. The rest of me was busy scripting what I’d tell my best friend, brainstorming ways to avoid the look on her face that said her patience was thinning.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

I’d tell her it would be different this time. When that didn’t convince her, I’d try appealing to her romantic side. I would say that it was cosmic and undeniable because two people getting drawn back to one another again and again had to mean something.

Time would later tell that the “something” it meant was that I was an idiot.

Truthfully, I didn’t even really like him. He was good-looking and everything, but his intermittent interest in me saw me drooling like Pavlov’s golden Lab each time I heard the chime of a new text; he wasn’t funny or very nice, he wouldn’t meet my friends, and he used to send me home without so much as a post-coital cuddle. The six-month stretch between our first date and the day I was done for good was one of the lowest periods of my life. I saw the red flags, I heard the tornado warning. So why was the bad habit of this bad boyfriend so difficult to break?

My therapist would tell me it’s a trauma response. We seek the familiar, and for me, that seemed to mean inconsistent affection and the dangling carrot of someone’s approval.

My best friend – who cannot believe we’re still talking about this – would say it’s some kind of sunk-cost fallacy. The longer the agony dragged on, the more desperate I became to prove it was worth something.

But when I’m several seasons deep into a frothy Netflix series and the bait and switch of two characters’ happily ever after starts to feel a little too familiar, a third theory emerges.

Ross and Rachel in Friends. Ryan and Marissa in The OC. Carrie and Mr Big in Sex and the City. Meredith and Derek in Grey’s Anatomy. Hannah and her own reflection in Girls. And damn it, Emily and Gabriel, too, no matter how much chemistry they had in season one of Emily in Paris. After that initial spark and the thrilling will-they-or-won’t-they tug of war, all these characters ever did was make one another miserable. There’s little worth emulating there. I want to shout at my television: “Just leave! Get a pet or buy a vibrator and spare us all another season of this hell!!!”

Yeah, yeah. Television isn’t real life, and real life rarely makes good television. When you’re lost in an anxious fog, though, when you can’t quite tell the difference between love and limerence, it’s really easy to catch yourself thinking that if it can work out for Chuck and Blair in Gossip Girl, it might work out for you and whatshisname.

I’ve been single for a while now, shell-hardened, romanticism dwindling, and it’s difficult to see this play out with characters much closer to home. I finally appreciate how painful it was for my best friend to bite her tongue as I made the same mistake a hundred times, forgiving everything and learning nothing.

I want to shout at my television: “Just leave! Get a pet or buy a vibrator and spare us all another season of this hell!!!”

Over the years, I’ve watched as my friends have fallen in and out of bad relationships, and I’ve waited impatiently for them to figure out that real love doesn’t make you gnaw your fingernails off and cry to Phoebe Bridgers in the bath.

I can’t say anything. Some things can only be learned through experience, and truthfully, the interiority of someone else’s relationship is none of my business. I found that out the hard way when I told someone – gently, I hope – that their relationship didn’t sound very healthy, and that they didn’t seem very happy. They wiped their tears on their sleeve, nodded, and then didn’t speak to me for a year.

So now I just watch. I listen, I empathise, I ask questions instead of shouting opinions, and I trust my friends to make the right decisions for themselves. Should they fall, I’m around to catch them, not a “told you so” in sight. Should they defy the odds and live up to the trope, I buy a blender and I show up to the wedding.

I’m happy for them – no, really, I am – but there’s one thing I just can’t do. Even as years pass and their little families grow, as I call a private truce and make nice memories with their partners, as their happiness proves my cynicism wrong again and again, I still can never quite bring myself to forgive anyone who made my best friend cry.

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