Dating diaries: obsession with a side of chlamydia

If you're my mum, an ex, or a future employer, don't read. Thanks.

Dating in your early twenties is fraught with difficulties, such as fending off your match-making mother, pretending to be happy when your friends get engaged, and debating on whether to buy a new vibrator with your 30% off Bellesa code. However, an unfortunate problem that keeps cropping up is Chlamydia (side note; does anyone know if digital footprints actually stop people from getting jobs? If the answer is yes, this is a fictional story/happened to someone else.)

So here’s my little tale of woe that doubles as a form of contraception, in case you were thinking of having sex anytime soon.

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A few months ago, I matched with a guy on Hinge who was the perfect balance between cheeky chappy and gorgeous sex god. We spoke frequently in an obsessive, over-intimate kind of way, as if we’d known each other years. Good morning and good night texts, saying ‘I miss you’ when we went to work. It did a real number on my anxious-attachment, I’ll tell you that. Constant jokes of marriage and soulmates were batted back and forth and I just lapped it all up- after all, who wouldn’t be in love with me immediately? I’m great!

Finally, after a month of lusting over each other like a pair of horny 15 year olds on Snapchat, we finally met up. Even though it was our first time meeting, I felt I already knew everything about him. We skipped the formal first date and I invited him straight to my house for a 3 day sleepover (looking back, I can see where I went wrong.) My housemates were all away so me and this perfect stranger played house for a weekend. I cooked, he washed up, I took him to the nice spots in Manchester and we shared Airpods and listened to Oasis. We cuddled post-coitally and talked about our childhood trauma. It was everything I wanted.

Two hours into his three hour drive home, he called me.

‘I’m sorry to call so soon after leaving but I just had to speak to you.’

My heart swelled a little and I felt a smug little smile, tugging at my lips.

‘It’s fine, I’m glad you-’

‘I’ve got Chlamydia.’

The smile instantly dropped and I felt like someone had just put a ticking time bomb somewhere in my body. My vagina perhaps. I had never had Chlamydia before and I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I didn’t have that much sex, in fact, I’d been unintentionally celibate for nearly two months before this! I realised, I had become so familiar with this stranger that I hadn’t even considered protection. My brain had got confused and saw him as my boyfriend and my, now irritated, vagina was here to remind me he was very much not.

I never saw him again. Not because of the Chlamydia. I was actually so head over heels that I was unphased by him giving me a literal disease and I continued to try and see him for weeks until it was clear he was uninterested. So there he went into the graveyard of potential boyfriends. I finished my course of antibiotics, deleted Hinge and renamed my girlfriends group chat ‘clap club’.

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A month or so before him, I was dating a guy I had matched with on Tinder. He was smart, funny, and 6’1, and we enjoyed a couple months together before I ended it, feeling we were not compatible. Before I tell this story, I feel the need to justify my decision by telling you he was flaky, cancelled plans constantly, and made several dodgy jokes that put a sour taste in my mouth. So I dumped him and he didn’t seem to put up any sort of fight. Even still, I felt awful and guilty- I had never dumped anyone before and he had been so nice at the beginning. But over the next couple weeks, my guilt faded and I moved on with my life.

Unfortunately, I could not say the same for him. In the months after I ended it, he blocked and unblocked me around 15 times, sending follow requests and passive aggressive messages, followed by compliments and sexual innuendos. I would ignore it, he would block me, the cycle continued. This obsession he had with me made me feel confused, guilty and frustrated and it came to a head when one morning he sent me two songs, with scathing lyrics about a woman who made people fall in love with her then left them. One of them actually had the lyric ‘you don’t have authority over me anymore’.

I didn’t know what to do about the situation. He told me over and over how he needed to see me and he needed closure. How even after months of having no contact, he still had feelings for me. I felt bad but didn’t know what to do for the best. I feared that if I agreed to meet up with him, I would only make things worse but I didn’t want to deny him closure. I felt extremely conflicted and so turned to one of my girlfriends for advice.

We debated my options for a while; be mean to him until he goes away, agree to meet up with him but turn up looking really ugly etc. After exhausting every avenue of conversation, I drifted from the issue at hand and began to just complain in a more general sense about men and my dating life. As I was regurgitating the same depressing spiel about not having a boyfriend, my friend interrupted my sad little train of thoughts. The timing was comic and the implications felt cosmic. Were the gods laughing at us somewhere?

‘Grace, I think I’ve got Chlamydia.’