Having a boyfriend? Embarrassing. Having a lover? CHIC.

Over the years, they’ve gone by many a name. Situationships, friends with benefits, fuck buddies, flings, sneaky links, “we’re just seeing where it goes”, whatever.

But none of the above quite fit to describe my not-my-boyfriend-but-we-are-intimate-but-we’re-not-committed-but-we-really-care-for-each-other men.

So I call them lovers.

First of all, lovers are not the same as any of those things. Secondly, I’m romantic. I refuse to call a man I’m involved with but not committed to my “fuck buddy”. Ew. Have some decorum.

And a situationship? Fucking mortifying, actually. Grow up.

Chanté Joseph already asked the question in Vogue: Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?

I vote yes.

But having a lover? CHIC.

And having international loversssss? TRÈS CHIC.

So allow me to put you all on to the art of having a lover.

I have this friend. She’s Parisian.

We meet for coffee, chain-smoke cigarettes and talk about books and work and, of course, the men in our lives.

I tell her I’m flying here to meet so-and-so from this country and she tells me she’s got a guy in this city that she met in that place.

She messaged me last night from Berlin, “I’ve got four lovers here.”

So chiccccccccccc.

One thing she said to me stuck:

Having a lover is high value, low pressure.

I personally like to keep my lovers international. I see them sparingly. We might talk often, but we see each other a few times a year. I’ll fly there, they’ll fly here. It keeps the whole thing suspended in romance.

Having lovers should expand your world, not shrink it. You know when you go away somewhere and feel like you’ve stepped into a slightly different version of yourself? Still you. Just a little more sunshiney. It’s like that.

A lover can be all-consuming without being defining. A lover isn’t less romantic than a boyfriend. A lover might actually require you to be more romantic. Because you’re being asked to believe that the romance itself is enough.

You can adore him. Fly across the world for him. Spend three days tangled up in bed with him. Know his childhood traumas and exactly how he likes his coffee and what the little crease between his eyebrows means. And then go home and continue being yourself.

You don’t have enough exposure to discover that he chews loudly or leaves wet towels on the floor. He exists almost entirely in flattering lighting.

We can do the things that boyfriends and girlfriends do without committing ourselves to the misery or the sweetness of the mundane.

We're playing house in a home built on a foundation of loose diamonds. Beautiful, shiny, some might even say rare, but altogether useless to try to build upon. But shiny all the same.

It started with a boy. Doesn’t it always?

He’s what I call The Original Golden Boy. The original sin. We met almost five years ago with what is still the most epic story I have in my arsenal of love stories.
It didn’t turn into a relationship, but we weren’t exactly friends either. We just hung around the outskirts of each other’s lives and never really let each other go. Despite us falling in and out of relationships with other people, he was always folded up in the back pocket of an old pair of jeans I’d eventually wear again.

After I met him and nothing happened, I went on collecting more of these almost men. It was always the same: sparks, we stay in each other’s orbit, nothing moves forwards or backwards. I mourn the loss of something that never happened, but somehow, they never leave.

I’ve experienced love at first sight with three men in my life. I’ve kept two of them. Because… well, if things never actually start, then they never have to end. And like most things in my life, I find the romance in that.

They’ve seen me through relationships. I’ve cried on the phone to them about my ex. About work. About life. Sometimes we just talk about art and projects and health and whatever else is going on. And every time I meet a new man, one of them asks, “Cool. So do you love him?”

Which is actually quite a violent question when it comes from somebody you once thought you loved. Because then I’m forced to compare the feeling.

Sometimes the answer has been yes. Sometimes, not yet. Sometimes, oh fuck.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a time when I fantasised, of course. The allure of the love story. The international mythology. But eventually the fantasy wore off, reality came into focus and what remained was something I didn’t realise could exist. There’s affection. Attraction. Friendship. History. Sometimes love. Once upon a time, I wanted more. But that girl always did until she didn’t.

I didn’t really have a name for them for a while. They were just… almosts.

I’ve always been a sucker for an almost. And this way I got to keep mine.

But an almost is defined by what didn’t happen. A lover is defined by what did.

I didn’t call them lovers back then because I think the person calling someone a lover has to have possession of themselves and the story. But I didn’t. The potential of the story had possession of me. But the lover is the love story. Intact, exactly for what it is.

You get to have the feeling. You get to have the story. It belongs to you regardless of what happens next. And maybe that’s what I’ve learned about romance.

Not every romance needs to audition to stay.

I think we’ve become far too concerned with where things are going. You meet someone you like and almost immediately the questions begin. What are we? Where is this going? Does he want a relationship? Is this serious?

But does it matter?

Sometimes I want to fly somewhere beautiful, have dinner, fuck all weekend, talk about our lives, kiss goodbye at the airport and think, God, that was lovely. To be completely consumed by the moment without letting the future of it consume me.

That doesn’t make the connection meaningless. It doesn’t mean I’ve been used. It doesn’t mean I’m waiting for him to choose me. And it doesn’t automatically make it a situationship.

A situationship is waiting for an answer. A lover doesn’t require the question.

And that’s all the airtime I’m giving situationships because they’re not chic enough to warrant any more.

I think the art of having a lover is knowing when to leave a gorgeous connection alone.

A Lover Girl can love things for what they are instead of constantly mourning what they aren’t. She can enjoy the romance without trying to contort it into a relationship.

And allowing it to be what it is can be fucking delicious.

I used to think there was one essential requirement for a lover: the impossibility of it.

Someone you love, or could have loved once, but you’re deeply incompatible. Someone you had already imagined a future with and then, mercifully, realised you shouldn’t have one and just accepted your fate.

There’s a certain freedom in knowing something can never happen. Once the possibility is removed, there’s nothing left to wait for. No future to obsess over. You can stop wondering where it’s going because you already know: nowhere. And weirdly, that’s when I finally learned how to enjoy where I already was.

But with some, you have all the annoying little components from which an actual relationship could theoretically be built. Which fucked up my entire theory. Because if incompatibility wasn’t the thing separating a lover from a relationship, then what was?

Well… the defining characteristic of a lover isn’t that you couldn’t have a relationship with them. It’s that you’re not requiring one. You don’t have to immediately take every romantic connection, hold it up to the light and ask: But what is this going to become?

Because not every blueprint needs to be built. Sometimes I can just draw a little heart in the corner of the page next to where I signed my name.

And being unattached to the outcome doesn’t mean being devoid of feeling. Quite the opposite. It is possible to adore someone, miss them, care about what happens to them. You can have extraordinary sex and terrible jokes and long conversations about their work and your art and the meaning of life. And then not immediately start planning Christmas together.

Maybe one day your lover becomes your forever. Maybe he doesn’t. But the magic exists in the present.

I spent my entire life believing the love story was always somewhere in the future. Having lovers taught me that sometimes you’re already inside it.

And for someone whose romantic life has historically involved turning approximately seven minutes of chemistry into a three-act epic of love, longing and eventual psychological ruin, I find this development rather splendid, darling.

The Duchess of Limerence appears to have discovered the present tense.

Alert the fucking palace.

Thoughts, prayers, and delectable pussy.
See you next time in the confessional.

Blithe x

P.S. I asked Ambre, yes, the Parisian friend, if she had anything to add.

Of course she did.

“For the eldest, avoidant, romantic daughter, a lover is the key to happiness.

My Berlin lovers taught me to let go and be free in every part of my life. My LA lover (location undisclosed) taught me I had more power than I thought, and that I could trust myself. My Manchester lover is just a constant reminder that I’m hot.

Situationships are a lack of information mixed with ego and fear of abandonment, a weird way of controlling the narrative, for better or worse. A lover? Très chic indeed. They remind you of your value. They let you explore, try, be more open, without the fear of it ending.

A situationship is about the other person. A lover is truly about yourself.”

And boyfriends? Still fucking embarrassing.

…And since I’m going balls to the wall now, I suggest doing the latter. It’s about to get good.

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