you need a partner, not a project

According to, well, me, dating works on a day rate. For every 24 hours together, your return should match the effort that you put in. Sometimes you have to do overtime (meeting the in-laws), sometimes there’s a bonus (dinner on them). But when you have to risk two Tin-juries – finger-ache and unprotected sexts – just trying to locate a partner, it’s important that you get your fair share of the profits.

A few years ago, I dated a wannabe music producer who was in a perpetual state of disorder. He wrote off cars, ran late for appointments and was incapable of making plans (thank goodness that his bladder gave him firm directions on when to go to the bathroom). One weekend, he invited me away to watch him play a gig. I’m not psychically gifted, but there were early signs that the romance factor was going to be zero. The venue: a graffitied basement with mouldy kebabs on the floor. The getting-naked venue: a dodgy hotel room with the proportions of a plane toilet. (It was almost as if this guy had put no thought into it at all.) On the final evening, after a day’s activities that I’d planned, eating dinner in the restaurant that I’d booked, he said, “This weekend has been so good for me.

Now we just need to go over the whole marketing strategy for my album.” At which point I realised I wasn’t really his girlfriend – I was his project coordinator. I was putting in the hours, but he had switched the currency of my day rate from affection to actioning to-do lists. His life was like fl at-pack furniture but without any instructions; the components were there, but the guide to putting it together wasn’t. I was his Google.

I realised that being someone else’s search engine stops you fi nding what you’re looking for. Months of a friend’s relationship were spent alone on her boyfriend’s sofa while he baked circuit boards in the oven, hoping to crack some kind of motherboard(om) code. Another girlfriend had to provide nearhourly encouragement for an insecure artist whose speciality was creating sculptures of beheaded women. She escaped alive, but without a drop of support for her career and interests. My point? A relationship shouldn’t feel like an extension of your day job. Nor should it feel like a two-person yoga pose that only one party is putting their core into.

Career was one of the fi rst things I asked my now-boyfriend the night we met. “I’m actually between jobs,” he replied. Before I could mentally eye-roll, he continued, “I quit my last job three months ago, went to something new, realised that it wasn’t for me and have just negotiated my old role back.” So whenever friends ask what fi rst attracted me to him, I answer looks, of course, but also the fact that he had his sh*t together. Because something good happens when you start dating someone whose sh*t is together. They text, they plan and they prioritise. And more often than not, all three of those things involve you.

The tasks you face along the way are collaborative: he coached me how to negotiate a pay rise when I felt undersold. Ironically, as he prepares for a promotion, we’ve discussed his marketing strategy. Having a partner involves two unique elements working together, whereas a project is called a DIY – Do It Yourself – because it’s a one-person job. You can spend weeks, months and years holding someone’s tool-kit, but if they don’t know what they want to make, you’re only going to get left with an arm ache.