A Love Story
falling this deeply wasn't what i expected
How to Build a Life is a newsletter for people bang in the thick of life’s mess and mayhem, who are still trying to find the magic. It’s written by me, Laura Jane Williams, author of 12 (!) books - with two more on the way in 2025. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, decorate my house like a tart’s boudoir, and lift very heavy weights. Those four things are my entire personality.
My latest rom-com is Enemies to Lovers, and I am the author of teen series Taylor Blake is a Legend.
You don’t know when you first started noticing boys, but you do know the first time you felt like a boy actually wanted to get to know you - spend time with you, and find out what you thought about this and that and, crucially, what made you laugh - it felt embarrassing to the point of crippling. He was the first person to ever be so blatant about wanting to see you, all of you, underneath your beautiful. Were you born needing to grow roots in love before you could admit to flowering pangs of lust, or did this boy set the blueprint of friendship first? You’d been at his school for a month before he followed you out of the front entrance one day at 3.15 and said hey, do you want to talk on the phone sometime? Then you realised, oh. All the times he helped you find your way around, when he made space for you in class and said he liked your hair today, that was leading to this. Nobody had ever rung for you on the phone before, on the landline!! It was nice. He called a lot. You called him too. You could probably recite his number off by heart even now, if you really tried.
You were known to belong to one another before you realised it yourself, which took not weeks, not months, but years. Years it took to feel safe enough to fall. You’d get lunch together in free periods, drive out somewhere in your silver VW Polo, never stop talking, and then you hooked up and didn’t stop hooking up until what, five years later? Six, or seven?
It killed you when he ended it. You’d travelled the world together: Thailand and India, France and Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia - you were still young, smartphones didn’t exist. You’d call home long distance and say yes, he’s looking after me. We’re having fun! The only argument you remember having is on a flight when you mentioned you’d never take his surname, in the theoretical, weren’t sure if you wanted kids, couldn’t imagine it. He was affronted. It came up because his parents and their friends had bets on you two getting married. That’s how serious Young Love was. Until it wasn’t.
He moved to one city and you moved to another and you saw a photo of him with a girl who used to be your best friend and it was then the penny dropped. Ah, he loves her now. It made sense: she was prettier, more delicate, spoke French. She took his surname. Their children have it too. You still can’t bring yourself to be happy for them.
You travel the world without him, safer in being a rolling stone. You don’t like yourself very much, but most people can’t tell: you’re confident, you laugh, you do things others could only dream of, even if the feeling of not being enough, not being loveable, permeates most decisions you make. You sleep with men, any man, to prove to yourself you can, and fall in something like love twice more, three if you narrow your eyes and look at it from a distance.