The History Boy

I've met an amazing man. We spend pretty much all day every day together, and we laugh and laugh. He takes me out for dinner and we have long conversations about the meaning of life. I adore him. He adores me. The other night he stayed over. But he's just a friend. For the purposes of this blog I will call him The History Boy.

The History Boy is my perfect match. He's a history teacher (hence the name) at my school and we share a passion for historical literature. We have mutual nerd-gasms poking around the old city together, exclaiming at the architecture and discussing what it must have been like in it's belle-epoque hey day. He's smart, funny and considerate and makes me laugh. We have the exact sense of humour. Unfortunately, I just don't fancy him. Well, sometimes after a few glasses of wine I have the overwhelming urge to cuddle him, but I often feel this same emotion with my girlfriends.

There's a really big problem, however, with this chaste, quasi-marriage style relationship. We are inadvertently blocking each other when it comes to meeting members of the opposite sex. Take last Saturday. At the gym, I had gone for a swim and he had gone running. He met me at the Jacuzzi and as we got in, I noticed there was a very cute guy in there already. Tanned and dark with a gorgeous muscular body. Well, nice shoulders anyway. It would have been the perfect time to strike up a conversation – we were sitting exactly opposite each other – but the The History Boy's presence effectively made it impossible. To an outsider, we must have appeared, to all intents and purposes, like boyfriend and girlfriend. After a couple of non too gentle kicks from me, THB departed sheepishly, leaving me in the tub with the handsome dark stranger, who it turned out, was called Lucian, worked as a trainer at one of the local banks and was Romanian. We chatted for a good twenty minutes, but unfortunately I couldn't work out how to drop the information that THB was not my boyfriend into the conversation without seeming desperate. I doubt, however, that anything would have happened. I know this because I was wearing my black BHS swimsuit with the saggy arse where the elastic has gone and had trails of mascara smeared down my cheeks. I didn't realise about the mascara until afterwards.

The History Boy went to London for a couple of days last week. I missed him acutely, almost as one might miss a boyfriend or girlfriend. As we stood on the escalator in the Metro on the night he returned, he spontaneously put his arms around me and laid his cheek on top of my head.

“You and me,” he said contemplatively, “Could never go out with each other. We get on too well.”

And that's it. There's no tension, no sexual tension, come to think of it. The History Boy has seen me running around my house in a skirt and strapless bra, trying to work out what top to wear before a night out. He's seen me in my glasses and pyjamas with morning breath and a deathly grey pallor caused by one too many drinks the night before. He's heard me utter the most un-sexy sentence in the history of man: “ I'd leave it a couple of minutes before going in there if I were you,” as I emerge sheepishly from the bathroom. And he still wants to hang out with me.

Yesterday we had a long, lazy lunch at the Italian down the road and then browsed the English language bookshop, recommending books for each other. He came away with 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin', I came away with 'Disgrace' by JJ Coetzee. In the evening, we went to see 'One Day' and I stole all his nachos before laying my head on his shoulder and weeping throughout the last third of the film. Textbook girlfriend behaviour with a boy friend who is definitely not my boyfriend.

Sometimes I do feel a bit like I'm using him for cuddles when I'm lonely. Or when am feeling rubbish about Hot FB Guy who is, as ever, elusive, unreliable and still on my mind pretty much every minute of every day. But spending time with THB makes me happy. It means that so far, I haven't had the dreaded moment that I was worried about before coming here. You know, the moment when you're on your own and you feel that nobody loves you and that you made a HUGE mistake by moving overseas. When we do have those, THB and I are always together and one of us will manage to diffuse the melancholy with a well-timed fanny fart joke or something equally as high-brow. At these times of melancholy (usually when we're both tired and hungover) we remember the promise we made to each other walking home after a night out a few weeks ago. The promise is: if we get to fifty and still there's no sniff of a spouse for either of us, we will get married.

I could see myself growing old with The History Boy. In fact, I'm thinking that this might turn into one of the most enduring and rewarding relationships I've ever had...

It's just a pity that I don't fancy him.