With my first boyfriend...
I should have seen the warning signs before we even started going out, but being 16 and naive and very very smitten I was prepared to ignore the fact that he had gone out with three of my friends, including my best friend within three months, and had dumped them all (with disastrous consequences). No, it was a year on, he was probably different now (hah!)

This guy was half Turkish, half English, and a Trotskyist. Being Jewish, I obviously couldn't tell my mum I was going out with a half Muslim sworn atheist hater of capitalist society, so I had to keep the whole thing secret. He looked a bit like Che Guevara - but only because he deliberately tried to, beard, beret and all!

His ambition at the time was to go to South America and become the Communist dictator of one of the countries there, where he would have absolute power and an enormous mansion. Yes, in short he was a delusional nutter.

After 7 weeks we were talking online at about 1 in the morning, and being the neurotic little thing I was I asked him if he loved me. "Well, uh, I've been meaning to talk to you about that."

There then followed a three hour break up converstaion in which he detailed how he didn't think it was working, and how he was madly in love with a girl who'd been in his class since year 8, but had only ever been his friend, whereas he had fallen in love with her at first sight. She would come to see him when he was a dictator in South America, come to the mansion and lock eyes with him, in that second realising that she was passionately in love with him when she would run into his arms.

It was well and truly over, but I ended up trailing after him for the next few months anyway 'being friends'(ie hoping somehow we'd get back toegther). Looking back, I don't understand why I didn't realise he lived in cloud cuckoo land.

Interestingly enough, he spent his gap year working as an accountant at a factory, spent all the money on a three month holiday to America, and while there met a girl on a roof at a party. They got married so that she could come over to the UK - and this guy had never been able to keep a relationship going for more than three months!

Me and my best friend tried to get in contact with him to see how it's going, but to no avail. I wonder how they're doing...
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Wed 27 Jul 2005, 16:06, Reply)