The first man I ever got obsessed with came to my show last night

It took me about twenty-five minutes and a phone call to one of my best friends to settle on this title. Connor wasn't my first crush, nor was he the guy who took my virginity. He wasn’t my first boyfriend, or even a boyfriend at all. Connor was the first man I ever got obsessed with.

We met at an office Christmas party in 2015, at a company aptly named The Chase. I was nineteen and he was twenty-five.

As I watched him sneak out of the PowerPoint portion of the company nativity for a smoke, he struck me as the most grown-up grown up I’d ever seen.

Stubbly, six-foot-something, all forearms and cheekbones. Man hands that were undeniably wasted on graphic design; Connor was universally handsome. In short, had he been a foreign film, you wouldn’t bother with the subtitles.

I’d never smoked before, but hours later I would find myself holding a Vogue cigarette between two fingers, drawing the smoke into my mouth and counting down until an acceptable length of time had passed to expel it.

Later that night, hidden behind the CEO-hijacked DJ booth, as I let his open-bar whiskey and authentic smoker’s breath fill my mouth, I discovered there were some vices I took to with far more conviction.

There are so many ways to describe who Connor was back then, and I’m almost certain I’ve exhausted most of them in diary pages from that time. But my girlfriends, with the brutal clarity only girlfriends possess, affectionately referred to him as “the surfer with no bed frame.”

Countless hours were spent imagining how he’d arrived at such an unscaffolded sleeping situation. We eventually settled on the theory that he’d practised his missionary-to-standing move (surely that’s the official surf term?) on his bed so many times that, one night, a double-height double-duvet wave finally took the frame out beneath him.

The thought that another woman might have been in his bed to cause such structural damage was too much to bear, so Surfbed stuck.

A situationship before the term existed, our time together was built on a foundation of ‘u free tomorrow night?’ texts, corner shop bottles of wine, and surfing documentary YouTube videos I’d patiently sit through until the inevitable, highly-anticipated, hand-on-thigh move.

It wasn’t until the cab ride home from that Christmas party that I first felt what I would grow to recognise as the seed of obsession about to bloom.

That’s weird, I thought. I feel a hole where something wasn’t before. How could I miss something I didn’t have? And that was it. A lifetime of absence awaits.

Decoding messages. Planning outfits. Checking followers and following. Floating just beneath the surface of a wave until the last possible millisecond of air is absorbed into my wanting blood. Thrashing and gasping for release.“You really had me then, I thought you weren’t coming back”, I curse at the flickering ellipses on my iPhone 6. Resuscitated once more by a text, a like, an emoji. Crumbs. A cycle of want and withdrawal. Of almost and never. Of so close, but so f*cking far. All of which Surfbed was completely oblivious to, as he arrived to find me composed in a nice little bikini, shore-side, reading a book about a thing he mentioned once.

(We never went to the beach together, obviously, that would’ve been far too daytime — but you get the picture).

Surfbed was my gateway drug to a decade-long sprint of obsessive, compulsive dating. He was my first taste of a man who wanted me just enough to take me out on a Saturday night, but not nearly enough for Sunday lunch.

And it wasn’t his fault, not really. We were both young, and inexperienced in what it is to orbit someone. It’s almost laughable to imagine we didn’t have language for boundaries, desires, or intentions in 2015, but we really didn’t. Orna Guralnik was nowhere to be seen. And even if she had been, I would’ve left every communicative word at his front porch for an evening of surfing videos and hot sex just inches from his bedroom floor.

Two years of “I wish I had time for breakfast, but—” later, and one of us got a partner. I can’t remember which way around it was, but it doesn’t really matter. All it took was one ‘hey, actually I’ve met someone’ wave break in the pattern, and the situationship set sail.

He’s been a good sport in recent years.

Between being an occasional sounding board for various bits of design work, and the only man to respond to my tattoo performance Temporary (in which I had the mothers’ names of every man I’ve slept with tattooed on my body, keep up) Surfbed has become an anomaly in the usual pattern of erasure that I experience after intimacy.

It hasn’t always been this way.

We didn’t talk for many years. He founded his own company, met the woman of his dreams, and got married. And I had thirteen boyfriends and started stand-up comedy. At some point, one followed the other on Instagram, and we’ve existed as tiny little icons to each other ever since.

When I invited him to my show last week, I didn’t think he’d say yes. When I saw his face laughing in the crowd, as I stood centre stage at my fifth sold-out Bill Murray show*, I didn’t realise just how significant it might feel.

*Let a girl flex for once god dammit, it’s 2026.

“Dear lord—”

I’m on my knees with Frank Skinner, Bill Bailey, and Eddie Izzard looking down at me from the Bill Murray dressing room walls.

“Dear lord— I know I only pray when I need something, but you only answer when there’s an audience, so we’re quits.”

I’m not a religious person by any means, but the thought of a greying Surfbed finding a seat to watch me for an hour — a decade since I last saw him crumpled in sheets as I left without a sound — would quite honestly see me converting to any religion that would have me.

Mid-prayer, I’m called to the stage to perform the hour-long show I’ve been working on since the cab home from the Christmas party in 2015.

My show is about obsession, of course. I don’t want to ruin it for you, because obviously all 8,104 of you will be coming to see me perform at Edinburgh Fringe next month, but if I had to summarise it in one line, it’d be this: It’s about drifting from the shore whilst waving at the man who pushed you in.

As I weave through the lines I’ve said enough times for them to feel almost outside of me, another show begins running beneath: a private, uncommissioned director’s commentary made of him. Is it insane that I invited him to see this? Does this make me a sadist or a narcissist? Does this spotlight make me look nineteen? Does he remember that book I got him? And then the kicker: I wonder if he realises any of this is about him?

As I approach the end, the part of the show where he is actually mentioned, my mouth begins to dry. The show is visual, built around a set of slides in a very particular order, which means there is an element of no turning back. I can’t suddenly decide to be a different woman halfway through. I can’t skip the slide. I can’t pretend I haven’t built an entire hour-long trapdoor and then invited him to stand directly beneath it.

And he takes it well. Or at least, from where I’m standing, he appears to. He laughs. He doesn’t leave. He looks happy. I even overhear a few people congratulating him on the way out for his guest appearance, as if he had a choice in the matter. As if any of us did.

The lord listened and the show went well.

I hadn’t thought about the afterwards. In my head, the end of the show had been the end of the scene: lights down, applause, emotional resolution, me being reverse-Mr.Beaned up into the rafters. Instead, there’s the brutal administrative reality of packing away. Of saying goodbye. Of him still being there. This must be what it’s like after a threesome, I think, as I coil microphone leads and try to work out who is supposed to leave first.

And because life has absolutely no respect for narrative structure— me, one of my best friends, Connor, and one of his, head off to a nearby pub to watch the England match.

On my third Aperol Spritz I find myself explaining, in great detail, the routine of my day to him.

“Well, I wake. The sun is beaming into the flat I reside in alone. It’s somewhere between nine and eleven AM,”. I’m enjoying painting a picture of the woman I’d always hoped I’d become, so I’d get to tell him about her one day.

“Matcha latte with blueberry syrup, a couple of hours of writing, then I might go and lie in the park and think about how lucky I am”. I laugh into the bottom of my drink at the stupid sh*t I’m saying. I don’t mention I’m still doing freelance work to pay the bills. I neglect to let him know how lonely I’ve found decentering men. I leave out the part about how, despite my best efforts, I still get obsessed with people like him.

As we exchange stories from the past decade over the soundtrack of England chants, I take a moment to properly absorb him. He seems calmer now. Sweeter. More whole than the person I knew before.

I ask if he remembers the book I gave him, and he gestures to his other ear.

“Huh? You have to use this one,” he says, turning his head. “I’m deaf in the other.”

“Oh my god, how did that happen?” I ask, briefly worrying that all my over-the-top nineteen-year-old orgasms had left him with some form of permanent acoustic damage. Either that, or it was surf-ear. Surely.

“It’s always been like that,” he says. “...since I was born.”

I knew this man’s shoe size. His favourite B-side Arctic Monkeys track. His brother’s holiday photos from Turkey 2018. The side of the bed he sleeps on. The noise he makes when he cums. How the f*ck did I miss this?

And then it hits me.

The space he never made for me to become whole was a space I had denied him too.

For all the hours I had spent thinking about him, decoding and mythologising, rearranging whole sections of myself around the idea of him, I knew almost nothing of his actual life. About his actual ear. And what I did know, I had mostly made up.

In my fantasy, not only did he have two fully-working ears, but both were tuned perfectly to the exact frequency of my text tone.

As I pretend to watch the football, I imagine how much he’d missed me saying. And I realise once more: I wasn’t saying anything. I was just giggling, and smiling, and occasionally asking why surf boards don’t have wing mirrors. There was nothing for Connor to miss.

“I do remember the book,” he smiles. “I think I still have it, somewhere.”

‘I think I still have it’ and ‘somewhere’ are the most beautiful way I’ve ever heard the conditions for obsession described. Possession and indifference. I kept it, but not close. I care and I do not care. Unintentional, of course, but beautiful nonetheless. Bravo.

Nineteen-year-old me simultaneously performs a somersault and takes an arrow clean through the heart. God almighty, it’s nice to no longer be her (most of the time).

The Little Book of Puns by Alison Westwood. A passing comment he’d once made about his fondness for wordplay had sent me scouring the internet for hours on end. I laughed as I confessed to pretending I’d found it in a charity shop, when really I had purpose-ordered it online. The perfect crime of passion: casual spontaneity. He looked a bit like he knew.

Divulging all of these old humiliations has a way of returning them to scale. Things that would have felt gargantuan to share back then are funny details in a much larger picture now.

Beyond that, there is something cathartic about standing in front of someone and saying, “I really, really cared once, and almost none of it was real.” And then discovering that I do care a little now— not obsessively, but actually. And that, somehow, is completely real.

As I watch Connor juggle the next round of drinks over to our table, I wonder how many more of the men I’ve dated that I might, one day, get to be happy for. How many of us, once removed from the theatre of wanting and being wanted, might come to stand kindly on the other side of it. Clapping from the reserved seat. Not together, exactly, but no longer against each other either.

The best part of seeing him in the audience of my show wasn’t that he was laughing. Or that he’d aged like a Big Mac (sorry Connor’s wife, but from all the lovely things he said about you, I’m sure you’d be the first to agree). It was that I felt I’d gained the thing my early-adult self could never. To be met, by a man, as a person.

And by the way, Harriet, all you had to do was not reply to one of his texts. Just once. That’s all you had to do and you never did it. And it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s so easy to say and so unbelievably difficult to do when you like someone. But not replying to a text gets you an answer that can be strung out over multiple years of comically-one-sided casual sex (that’s not a sex position by the way— rather a curse). They either follow up, acknowledging the shape of your absence, potentially self-admitting it means something. Or they don’t. Confirming that the whole thing only existed because you kept dragging it back to life with your bare hands and excellent blowjobs*.

*Again, it’s 2026, let me have that.

As with obsession, and as with my show about obsession (if I’ve done my job correctly) you eventually come to realise it has almost nothing to do with the object of desire. At most, they’re a mirror: someone you appoint to confirm the worst things you already suspect about yourself — that you’re unlovable, disposable, undeserving of ordinary tenderness. At the very least, they’re something to think about on an Avanti Westcoast home.

It was never really Connor. Or Andy, or Jack, or Dan, or Jesse, or Will, or any of them really— but rather the uncertainty they created. The chance to prove, once again, that I’m not worthy of Sunday lunches, only Saturday night drinks.

Something I’ve learned about myself both recently and over the last decade and a half is I am absolutely, unequivocally incapable of casual sex. I thought I had to be good at it for a long time. In the same way I assumed I’d grow into liking nightclubs, or smoking, or balsamic vinegar. Things adults are meant to embrace to distance themselves from the child who wants the crusts cut off.

And as I held the smoke of the Vogue cigarette in my mouth, counting down until an acceptable length of time had passed to expel it, I looked at Connor and realised something. For the first time in my life, being met as a person feels better than being desired as an object.

All of which is only possible, now, because there’s someone for him to know.

Nice to meet you, Connor.

Harriet x