“My name is Nadia, and I’m co-dependent.”
That was how I introduced myself to a room full of strangers in a community hall after work one evening.
I’d spent the day stealing away to the restroom to let out deep, heaving sobs between meetings because I wasn’t coping with being apart from a new partner.
It had been eight months since my marriage fell apart, and a long list of men had followed, bridging the void from my husband’s absence with text messages, dinners, flirtation and sex.
I didn’t know how to let my bed be empty, how to collapse into it alone at night and listen to the thoughts fizzing in the back of my brain. And so I used. Not weed, or coke, or tequila. I got high on men.
I was never without at least six different guys on call at the same time. I needed the rush ― the zing of my phone lighting up with a sticky fistful of sugary words, or a still somewhat foreign hand lingering on my thigh. The thrill of holding a man’s power for those few seconds when his body would inevitably heave on top of mine was the ultimate trip.
However, despite its outward allure, maintaining a black book full of eligible suitors is a surprisingly exhausting process.
Yes, there are plenty of flowers, fancy dinners and the odd shirt tearing from a muscular body like a scene from a Danielle Steel novel. But there are also embarrassing name gaffes (you can never recover from moaning “Harry!” in bed with Sam), relentless Brazilian waxes (to this day, my vulva hasn’t fully recovered from everything I’ve done to it), and lots of near misses (two dates almost bumped into each other leaving the bar I’d cockily scheduled them back-to-back in).