They fuck me up, his mum and dad...
I'd been going out with my then boyfriend for nearly a year. Two days after both going out to Israel to start our gap year studies (about 200 metres away from each other) he calls me up and gives me the 'we need to talk' line.

My heart immediately sinks and my stomach starts to get the 'kicked in with hobnailed boots' feeling. We meet up.

He's nervous and on edge, and so am I. We get shit pizza that tastes of cardboard and then we talk. He starts saying that he thinks we should break up. I ask why. He gives me a reason that doesn't really makes sense. I tell him why it doesn't make sense. He agrees, and gives me another reason that doesn't make sense. I tell him that one doesn't really work either. He agrees, and it continues in this vein through several more reasons. I decide it's all getting a bit odd.

"Look, you keep giving me all these reasons, but none of them make any sense, they don't stand up to argument, and they don't sound like the real reasons for anything! You haven't actually told me WHY you want to break up. You haven't said anything about how you feel - if you don't think it's working, or if you don't love me, or..."

At this point he breaks down and in a sort of flood of guilt and released pressure he says that actually his parents had been nagging him for months to break up with me. Recently they'd upped the pressure and that the reasons he'd given were arguments they'd used for us breaking up, which was mainly why they were unconvincing and why he was unable to support them himself.

I was slightly shell-shocked.

"But...what do you want?"
"...I want to marry you."

It was at this point that we decided to tell his parents we'd broken up to get them off his back, but keep on going out regardless. Then realising that other people we knew also existed and would report conflicting stories to his parents, we pretended to all the English people that we'd broken up, and carried on in secret 'cloak and dagger style', abandoning the whole charade several months later and just forgetting to care about whether they knew or not.

The wedding's on the 1st of July.

Click 'I like This' if you think I should reject all attempts of his mother to try and be 'chummy' and 'my friend' and make out that she's really always on my side and just like us 'young people'.
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Sun 22 Apr 2007, 0:51, Reply)