What happens when you wake up one morning, happy, unsuspecting and all is well in your world but by the time the sun goes down you might as well be on another planet?
When you are 30 something and looking middle age face to face the last thing you need is someone else calling the shots, especially when they are doing it by tugging your heartstrings.
If anyone says anything, if there is just one snide suggestion of anything to do with karma, I’ll scream.
And any comment about me being a fraud I will resort to litigation.
It will be lawyers at 20 paces and I know mine is better than yours.
I do.
So I might as well get it over with and explain how I know he’s better than yours.
It’s because he is my fiancé.
Yes, that makes me his fiancée.
But for now keep your gossiping big mouths closed. I haven’t had the chance to mention this to my mother.
In fact, if there is any reason for this totally unexpected merger to go ahead it will be my mother.
Because she will not be able to contain herself.
She will go into paroxysms of rapture.
She will bring it up every chance she gets for the rest of her life.
I can just hear it now: ‘'Ooh, Ms La-di-dah is human after all. She really is just like the rest of us''.
Well mother, you couldn’t be more wrong.
An engagement does not a wedding make. And it won’t be making one anytime soon as far as I am concerned.
This whole thing has left me feeling as if I have terminal vertigo. It has happened so fast, so unexpectedly and so un-me I feel like everything is spinning out of control.
I have noticed this guy for some time, we have crossed paths (I might have even made sure we did on the odd occasion) but he didn’t just seem aloof, he seemed downright arrogant.
“The perfect man for you dearie,” I can hear mother carping.
But girls I cannot find even the most remote line of logic which took me from a suddenly steamy moment in the lift to inviting him back to my place.
From first kiss to bliss, then to him taking my face in his hands and asking me if I would marry him could just about have been clocked with an egg timer (I’ll explain how we ended up in the lift another time).
Just as there are bits in between I’ll never discuss (and you can keep your more puerile suggestions to yourself at the same time).
But the big bit, about me saying ‘I do’ was just so wrong in so many ways.
I ask the questions, not answer them. I always have.
And he’s a lawyer.
I have my own place, I have a dog and I have many, many credit cards.
He has seen none of them.
Even worse, I have been an engaged woman for barely 72 hours and already I am in a relationship built on a lie.
Which, I will admit, has never been an issue for me in the past.
But it is gnawing at me now.
It is a bizarre feeling; I have never had a moment’s self-doubt that I know what I want and how to get it. I will do it my way (God, now I’m breaking out in old people’s songs).
Do I want him?
In the most base of ways absolutely — I want, I really want.
But do I need him?
I just don’t know. And this is where the emotional wheels are falling off. He’s finally had to go to work this morning and he’s been gone for the six longest hours of my life.
I didn’t even make it to my office. I phoned in for my first sick day in five years.
Sick? Surely I’m not lovesick?
People can’t really be lovesick, can they?
He’s only been gone six hours and 11 minutes now; if that is making me sick already what am I going to be like tomorrow because (did I remember to mention this?) his head office is in another state.
He won’t be back for three days.
And he’s only been gone six hours and 14 minutes.
Now I am going hot and clammy.
You’ll excuse me, I am going to have to try and get some sleep; you see I haven’t had much for the past day or three.
Oh, crap. I’ve just remembered I arranged to meet mother for lunch, she’s picking me up at the office (so I don’t have to invite her to my place, or get trapped at hers).
They think I’m sick, she thinks I’m there.
It’s only been six hours and 22 minutes and my whole carefully coutured world is coming apart at its very expensive seams.
Six hours and 24 minutes.
Is my watch broken, or just my heart taken?
Could I be more pathetic if I tried?