Crashed. Melinda Ferguson

for you in … and stop being so selfish. It’s not all about you.”

      With Boyfriend, when all else failed, sex prevailed. We’d been together for almost nine years and the sex had never waned. Not one single bit. There was none of that usual bedroom boredom and tedium, that sense of being castrated by mundanity that often sets in between couples when you get to know each other inside and out. It was probably the most significant, and possibly even the only reason, why we were still together. I had never experienced anything quite like that in any of my previous relationships. Wasn’t it supposed to be “familiarity breeds contempt”?

      The great sex might have had something to do with the fact that we’d never moved in together, had never shared a common space. He stayed in his house and I stayed in mine. That’s just the way he was. He had always been like that with girlfriends. Boundaries. Control. He was a “Treat them mean – keep them keen” kind of guy. After nine years of being together, I’d stopped thinking of it as weird. After nine years together, perhaps, I had lost the gift of discernment. Time can make a mockery of reason.

      Although some of my friends in long-term relationships were envious of my verdant sex life, they definitely thought our living arrangement was strange. “When are you two going to move in together?” had become something of a mantra. I’d even stopped seeing most of them simply to avoid the questions.

      But this was a first for me. This not-living-together thing.

      I had always moved in with a dude, played housey-housey almost immediately with the man I “dated” and shagged. Looking back, some men who should have been one-night stands turned into four-year relationships because of immediate cohabitation. I had even married one. Boy 2 – the other one, the one who had been my husband.

      But, unlike with Boyfriend, with all my live-ins, soon after the rose-tinted phase waned, we would slip into the creases in the couch. Watch television, slowly growing numb as the screen sucked all the passion and paused all the problems.

      Then, finally, when a break-up was absolutely unavoidable – which was invariably long overdue – there’d be a screeching fight over fridges and coffee cups and knives and forks … Dogs were especially hard when it came to the division of spoils. Never share an animal, I learned.

      So maybe Boyfriend was right about keeping eroticism alive by not sharing common space. But if I were really honest, as the years passed, in the Quest for Flesh, the emotional intimacy between us floundered below zero. It was all about priorities, he’d tell me. Keeping the erotic going required tactics of destabilisation.

      A while back he had suggested that I read Mating in Captivity, a book by Esther Perel. Perel wrote that the reason why couples stop shagging is because, in modern-day relationships, we are expected to be both best friend and erotic partner. According to Perel, the two simply don’t mix. Once couples move in together, get to know each other, become “best friends” and lose the edge, desirability and sexual sparks go south. Living together, she says, kills desire, the whole “familiarity breeds contempt” philosophy. Couples get hooked on security, knowing each other totally, expecting their partners to know them completely. They look to each other and expect that each one will make the other feel whole, that they own and belong to each other. There is no gap for discovery, no surprise and, as a result, all desire is lost.

      Perel goes on to question the real connection between love and desire. How do they conflict and not mix with each other? She comes up with an interesting conclusion. The verb that comes with love is to have and the verb that comes with desire it is to want. In other words, love is all about being close, knowing everything about the beloved, narrowing the stranger gap, obliterating the tension. Whereas when we are in a state of desire, we don’t want to know the end. We don’t have a sense of comfort or conclusion. With desire, we sense the adventure, the unknown; there’s an edge, a modicum of insecurity …

      So it was that, in a weird just-woken-up haze of automation, I made my way back to the bedroom and took out my black sexy stockings and fuck-me heels. In the bathroom, I slipped on my little black dress, looked at myself in the mirror. I think I liked what I saw, but I wasn’t even sure of that. I looked tired. My reflection blurred before my eyes. My body morphed in and out of shape. At the time, I was a size 8. But, with my Body Dysmorphic glasses on, that could easily balloon into a size 12. I had to work fucking hard to keep it that way. Thin. Not too long ago, I had actually been a size 12 and I had even been a size 14 at one point.

      “Sizeist,” the voice snarled.

      It was true. I was obsessed by size. My own body shape had been tormenting me since I was a child. Growing up with an overweight older sister had elicited dread and terror in me. Additionally, a hugely critical mother always kept an eye on our weight and watched the contents of the fridge like a beady-eyed Nazi mouse. I have never forgotten the year her idea of a birthday present to my sister came in the form of a Weight Watchers diet plan, wrapped up in an envelope and tied with a bow.

      By the age of 14 I was dieting insanely, shedding kilos like a moulting cat. Thin meant I was good, fat meant I was a failure. Dieting and deprivation became part of my everyday life, after waking up and before going to sleep, assessing whether I had been a “good” or a “bad” girl. But with serial dieting came starvation and a crazy desire to stuff my face. At least that’s how it was for me. Then, in order to stave off the inevitable weight gain and the insane sugar craving that comes from crash dieting, I began my long journey with Mistress Binge-and-Purge, otherwise known as Bulimia.

      Of all the substances to which I have been addicted – and there have been many: heroin, crack, alcohol, dagga, ecstasy and nicotine – food has probably been the most deviant and the hardest to handle; sugar specifically, but actually food in all shapes, textures and flavours.

      And if I was sizeist, Boyfriend was too – brutally so. It was thus quite logical that it would be on his watch that I’d lose the 15 kilos I’d accumulated over a period of about two years.

      The weight gain had started surreptitiously after I’d stopped smoking – just when I had met him. That was during a crazy, dark time in my life when, within three days of kicking the nicotine, I’d learned that my mother was dying of pancreatic cancer. At the time I most needed the crutch of a Camel, I tossed it aside. But in ditching the cigarettes, I reached for food and the kilos began to pile on.

      At first I hadn’t even noticed really, but slowly, like a devious fog creeping in, the jeans I’d previously slipped effortlessly into no longer fit that easily around the hips, struggling to close at the waist.

      So I began to avoid certain outfits. I told myself that a too-hot wash was the reason the skirt was now too tight. When I tried on clothes in a store and realised I needed a bigger size, I blamed the new sizing systems. I stopped looking in the mirror, afraid of what I’d see, which was hard for me, because from the time I was little I had been kind of obsessed with my reflection.

      When I asked Boyfriend whether I looked fat in an outfit, he would half grin and say: “What d’you think, Tubby?” Tubby! What kind of a fucking name was that? I kept my anger inside, of course – and reached for an extra helping of dessert instead.

      Then one day I went to a doctor for something quite arbitrary. As part of the routine check-up, I was told to get on the scale and I weighed a whopping 75 kilos. Since giving up the cigarettes, I had put on 17 kilogrammes of flab. For someone my height, that was insane. How had that happened without me even noticing? I wept all the way home. Now each time I looked in the mirror a pale, puffy Bridget Jones stood before me, all plump and distended around my hips, ass and boobs. I hated what I saw. My outsides told me what an abject failure I was.

      I now attacked my body mercilessly, willing and beating it into submission according to my grand plan. My gym membership, which had been on the verge of expiry, was suddenly reactivated. Cardio, in the form of spinning, became my daily ritual. I tried to cut out sugar and began to eat almost entirely vegetarian, which was easy because Boyfriend was a great veggie cook.

      The scale became my daily companion. Every morning my worth greeted me by way of my weight in numbers. And slowly, over the next few months,