“I’ll marry you if you get a boob job”. Those were the immortal words my ex, the man I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, uttered when we were on our annual summer holiday.
Memories warp with the passage of time, and we have debated whether those were in fact the exact words he said, but as I told him, they’re the sort of words you wish you could misinterpret, not the sort you do. For me, they set in motion a tsunami of change, the wave of which I still feel like I’m riding today.
Thankfully those changes have gone largely in my favour, which means I should be grateful he said them. But I’d rather he’d have kept those thoughts to himself and I remained living in ignorant bliss of the reason why he’d never proposed marriage.
That’s life though – and this isn’t about him anyway, or the size of my chest. This is about the aftermath of those ridiculous words that led me to quit my highly paid, fly-you-around-the-world-business-class job, leave my gorgeous (if slightly breast-obsessed) boyfriend and his stunning house, to work for the NHS as an apprentice, embrace a life of singledom, and live in a static caravan with my cat.
For as long as I can remember, I had one ambition: to be paid to get on a plane. I couldn’t think of anything better than the escapism travel brought. When I made it happen for the first time and found myself swimming in a rooftop pool of a five-star hotel in Barcelona, I thought I was going to spontaneously combust.
