A Life More Ordinary

I’m not even sure where to start with this part of my story. How does the quote go? ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?’

Well, that depends on the circumstances around the loss, I think. Because frankly, some of the losses I’ve suffered I could have happily done without!

Given the nature of my upbringing, relationships were always going to be difficult to navigate. The mental and physical abuse that we went through as children scarred us deeply and as I’ve mentioned earlier, some of us also experienced sexual abuse, which has also impacted those relationships. I don’t intentionally make light of it, but…look, when you find out about sex in the way that I did, it will have leave scars. It hit hard and it never really left me. It was always there and I’m sure that I’ve blocked much of it from my memory. It was traumatic because as a child in a situation where love was not always present, it became very easy to become confused about what love actually was or how it was shown. When you aren’t learning about physical love via the pages of a book or a carefully worded if slightly awkward parental explanation, it can be difficult to understand how people express love and indeed what love looks like to others. Perhaps more importantly, what the other stuff looks like to others too. In that situation it’s easy to confuse sex and love and to be able to differentiate between what is just sex and what is an intimate act between two lovers.

Attending an all-boys school meant that relationships in my early teen years were hard to carve out. Poorly constructed teenage fantasies were bandied around the classrooms as fact, supplemented with florid descriptions that had been gleaned from whatever magazines were doing the rounds between friends and not-so-friends. I wasn’t necessarily in a hurry to experience sex as a teenager, given what I had been through in my early years, but even in my writing, those experiences bled through, sometimes graphically and at other times in a more subtle manner.

By the time the loss of my virginity arrived, or at least the version that I could comfortably accept as so, I was 14 and still very much the shy and retiring type. What little there is to tell would hardly fall under the genre of erotic fiction and I’d love to be able to dress it up as a wonderfully romantic experience or even an overt display of magnificent sexual prowess, but I’ve been honest up to this point and plan to continue in the same manner. I’ll spare you the detailed, if brief, review but it was an underwhelming experience (as I’m sure it was for Anne-Marie, the girl in question who I had known for about two hours before we commenced ‘nocturnal activities’ on a dark, September evening with Home Park just a few yards away). I hope you’ll forgive me for not managing to avoid the ‘he shoots, he scores’ pun!

After a second less-than enthusiastic encounter with the same girl, I think we both decided that brief, awkward fumbles in public places weren’t for us and we went our separate ways. I’m not entirely sure how I felt after the first time, likely a sense of relief that I had an experience that didn’t have to be hidden from everyone and something that could at least pass as a positive step on the road to ‘growing up’.

After moving to Horsham in 1990, I had a couple of brief flings, neither of which amounted to anything serious and neither furnished me with the love that I was seeking. I was very much a romantic at heart, convinced that there was the right person ‘out there’ for me and that once I met them my problems would magically disappear and together with the love of my life, we’d live happily ever after.

All of which takes me to a few months before I turned 18, to May,1991. Paul Gascoigne borked his knee in the FA Cup final, Roxette’s Joyride topped the charts and Helen Sharman became the first British astronaut in space. In slightly more localised news, I met a girl called Suzanne, who I would have my first serious relationship with.

Partly due to my naivety and insecurity, I found certain patterns from my earlier years repeating themselves. That makes it all sound rather dreadful, which it wasn’t, but I didn’t really know who I was, so trying to work other people out was suddenly a whole lot harder.

We’d been together maybe for a couple of months, enjoying the proverbial but not legally binding ‘honeymoon period’ when she first told me that she was attracted to someone else. Had I possessed a higher opinion of myself, I would likely have wished her luck in her new relationship and stepped away, but I was in love and having found that love, I didn’t want to relinquish it. Indeed, I was so desperate to be loved that I was prepared to accept being loved in such a manner, that it was ok for my girlfriend to find other people attractive and subsequently attempt to act on it. I remember being advised by her mother (who was a very domineering figure within her own family and had by all accounts played by the same rules) that I should allow her to play the field and ‘wait for her’, possibly the daftest fucking advice I’ve ever received, yet in my resigned state, a viewpoint that I instantly subscribed to if it meant that I could still be loved in some way.

During these tormented days, I would often be found working in the card shop, Athena, in Horsham, unwittingly mirroring my mother’s morose existence by (autism alert) playing numerous tearjerkers on the store CD player, much to the frustration of my colleagues I suspect. I would spend far too much time worrying about what Suzanne was getting up to and not enough time working and in all honesty, I must have been a right dour pain in the arse. My managers, Sue (who was supportive but professional) and Kellie (who was utterly lovely and indeed a lot lovelier than I realised at the time) tried to help me see reason and guide me in the right direction, but unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, I was resolutely stubborn. I wasn’t ready to give up on the love that I thought was mine. If only I’d had the foresight of the saxophone-wielding and raven-haired Curtis Stigers, whose song on his imaginatively titled album ‘Curtis Stigers’, told of a similar situation that led to his similar assumption and subsequent understanding as he crooned among the posters and the t-shirts with ‘I Guess it wasn’t Mine’.

After a couple of weeks of torture, she decided that her new target was either out of her league, not worth the hassle or not as subservient as I was. She returned to me and as ridiculous as it sounds, I was grateful. This would happen four times over the course of our relationship before we finally parted and each time I was expected to ‘wait for her’ until she had decided whether or not it was me that she actually loved.

As for her mother, she had issues of her own to deal with. One particular night, after Suzanne’s father had given us and my mother a lift home in the rain following a game of stoolball, saving us a 45-minute walk, her mum phoned us at home and shouted all manner of abuse at my mother for having ‘sat in her seat in the car’. I had a certain amount of sympathy for her long-suffering husband, who seemed a decent guy but carried with him that same, downtrodden air that I began to recognise in myself.

Like most relationships, it wasn’t all bad and there were times when I think that we were genuinely happy. There were also times when we were challenged by issues other than her possible infidelity, moments that inevitably left their mark on us. But as with so much of my life, I never really felt secure and was always waiting for the next problem to arise. Despite the advice of friends, who could clearly see what I was going through, I stayed longer than I should have which I know I can attribute to my low self-esteem. Some habits are really hard to break…

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.