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Here's some salt for your wounds: Mentally stable young people who have children early tend to enjoy immense personal growth (whether they want it or not), and are going to be more energetic and active parents, than those who wait for a good time. You didn't just lose your counterfactual children, you lost a better counterfactual you.
Well that's the rub isn't it? We weren't stable, even if we were young.
We could have made kids work, at least if our own relationship woes didn't sink us. We'd just made it out of med school, and gotten new jobs, but we both were working hard to get professional accreditations in order. Getting into the UK, then entering training, so many milestones seemed unmet.
It's not like we couldn't absolutely afford it, I'm sure with the help of family it wouldn't have been too bad. Maybe.
At any rate, I do want kids, and soon, as opposed to "at some point in the future". Now the hard part of finding someone to have them with.
Why not with her?
It's a long story. One I could have penned ages ago, but was in too much pain to do so. The breakup was shortly before I found out that matched into psych, and that particular excitement kept me busy for a good few months.
We just weren't compatible in many ways. While it might be rude to label exes with mental disorders, I am actually a psychiatry trainee, so it does mean something when I do it (and I'm happy to pin several diagnoses on myself). I strongly suspect that she has borderline personality disorder (gets it from her mom).
In fact, I actually went through the diagnostic checklist using her as the example.
BPD women are popular for a reason, men much wiser than me have fallen prey before.
Pros:
She was kind in the way of people who cannot bear the existence of preventable suffering in a five-mile radius. Dogs followed her around like she was Saint Francis, except Saint Francis probably wouldn’t have had the cops show up to return the “rescued” dogs to their original owners. She did the illegal thing for benevolent reasons, which is a not-unusual intersection in that Venn diagram, and her worst fault with animals was that she loved them so much she forgot discipline exists, which is how you get a nippy little mutt and also me doing my best to be civil to the nippy little mutt.
Intelligent. She studied at a much better med school. Unfortunately, she didn't study when it came to our exams. I was grinding away like mad, but she wanted to tour London, take it easy. We worked at the same hospital, we'd applied together (even HR thought it was very sweet). I had a brutal job in Oncology, but one that paid well. She took ER shifts that were more grueling and somehow paid less, then used the workload as the reason she wasn’t studying, which - look, I told her so many times. I did the annoying, unromantic thing where you say, “There is a path from here to there that requires pressure now for autonomy later.” My repeated warnings that her preparation was insufficient to secure a specialty position were met with dismissal. The outcome is a matter of record: I am now in the UK, and she is not.
Hot. Great in bed. Even after our breakup, let's just say I wasn't too great at turning her down when she called me over. My ex employer wouldn't be happy to hear what we did in the doctor's room.
She was funny. People underrate how hard it is to find a woman who genuinely laughs at your jokes without that blank “gendered social expectation” delay. Most women are fine, often delightful, but humor variance skews male; sorry, I don’t make the distributions. With her, the jokes landed, and I felt like someone had finally tuned the radio to the right frequency.
Now the downsides, which ended up outweighing all the good:
She was very hot-tempered. She loved getting into arguments and then breaking down in tears. I'm a very stoic person, and I hate raising my voice. If we argued, I'd withdraw and give myself time to cool before coming back to make amends. She found this worse than me just fighting back. And boy did we argue. I think in my prior relationship, which lasted 5 years, we argued less over the course of half a decade than I did with her in a few weeks. It was ludicrous, it drove me nuts.
She had little tact. On our third date, I had to stop her from picking a fight with a bouncer three times her size, which is a good way to get banned from a club and a better way to get (me) punched. With parents and friends, imagine me as permanent damage-control. People like her shock the air; sometimes this is charming, often this is a thing you apologize for over dessert.
She was awful with money. Spent it like water, was always in debt. When we'd come to the UK, we always fought because I wanted to be frugal, and she wanted to spend money she didn't have. She failed that try and went again, borrowing a significant amount of money from me. I gave it gladly, but she continued to live well above her means, and took months after we broke up to finish paying me back.
Her politics were god-awful, typical bleeding heart lib stuff. To her credit, she did tolerate my heterodox and witchy opinions. I still want to go the States and hate the fact it's not an option. She had every right to try, but said she'd die before moving there.
Unironically watched the Crown and Bridgerton. I'm being unfair here, but I must mention that she'd always get very miffed if I categorically refused to watch along. To her credit, she did make we watch Euphoria, and Fleabag, which I actually enjoyed. I would have been content to have the two of us sit in amicable silence while doing our own things, but she wouldn't have it.
She flip-flopped on the idea of kids. I've always been confident that I wanted them, when I'm settled. She'd go from arguing with me over baby names to strong protestations that she'd never have any. She was almost three years older than me, which means fucking around and ignoring the biological clock wasn't the best idea.
My family and friends really didn't like her, though they tolerated her for my sake. They thought she was a gold-digger (not true, at least in my opinion) since I come from a wealthier background. They could see that she was driving me insane, and I can't argue, since I literally went blind for a bit because of the stress.
The highs were stratospheric. The lows scraped magma off the basalt. I'm not built for this, my heart can't take it.
After we split, I had flings, most of them absolutely insane women, some with people I might have stuck with if I’d stayed in India. In Scotland, I had a stable, but extremely boring year-long relationship. I ended it. “Stable but boring” is a phrase you say apologetically, but it names a real tradeoff: if you have a history of chasing fire, you will tell yourself that room temperature is death. I don’t want the fire anymore. I want the happy middle: someone who is fond, easy to return to, a person I am slightly more myself around. Whirlwinds make great anecdotes and bad homes.
I had a manic pixie dream girl; the dream had too much nightmare in it. Some lives feel like literature. Literature is bad for your eyes. Ask me how I know, or don't, because I just laid my still bitter heart bare before you.
(In exchange, please tell me something useful about places to visit in London today. I was eyeing the Camden Fringe, but not sure if it's worth the hassle)
Why not visit some lesser known historic sites like St. Bartholomew’s Church and St. Etheldreda’s Church? They’re both close to St. Paul’s and get overshadowed by it (I assume you have already visited that, otherwise what tf are you doing on here asking for places to go). There are also some Roman ruins nearby. Just west of that there’s the St Mary Le Strand church, so they can all easily be visited together for a church-oriented outing.
If you get bored of all the religious sites and are interested in music at all there’s the George Handel House and Jimi Hendrix House, these musicians’ Georgian townhouses are adjoining. I’m a big armchair traveller; I could post a list of places to visit in and around London if you wanted (after I get off work). Let me know if you wanna take me up on that.
Please, feel free! I've received some very bad news while on vacation, and having more places to visit would take my mind off things. Thank you.
Alright, this took a while, sorry about that. Note I have excluded all popular tourist sites like St Paul's, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, etc. Also note this list is not exhaustive, I might add more later.
Churches: There are too many historical churches in London so here is a list of those you may find relevant. The entire stretch from St Bartholomew's Church to Southwark Cathedral in this list is rather nice, but all of these churches are packed close together and are rather easy to visit. Really many of them are worth visiting and possess their own draw. St Bartholomew's Church is London's oldest parish church, Temple Church is a unique round church built by the Knights Templar as their English headquarters, All Hallows by the Tower has a crypt with an exposed section of Roman pavement, Fitzrovia Chapel boasts beautiful mosaics, etc. I would recommend you do some research and figure out which ones you want to see.
Magnificent Seven Cemeteries: Yes, I put cemeteries on here. These are sprawling Gothic cemeteries, established in the early 19th century to prevent overcrowding in small parish churchyards. These cemeteries were built by companies that attempted to tempt customers with beautiful architectural features, things that make them worth visiting today. There are many important graves in these necropolises - Highgate Cemetery for example is the resting place of Michael Faraday and Karl Marx alike.
Heritage houses: Some of these require tours and may or may not be closed. Check before visiting, I can't say I remember the schedules (I know Spencer House is only open to the public on Sundays, though during the week it is possible to enter via a prebooked tour). Again, lots of stuff here: Handel Hendrix House is the back to back residence of George Handel and Jimi Hendrix, Leighton House was the high-class home of a painter who had the interior lavishly decorated with intricate Orientalist aesthetics drawing from North Africa, the Middle East and Sicily, Sutton House is one of the last surviving Tudor houses in London, and so on.
Historic alleyways/neighbourhoods:
Misc:
This is a lot, so I'll also add a link to a map with all the sites pinned for your convenience in a bit.
Thank you again. I hope you'll forgive me if I end up not going to more than one church or cemetery from the list haha.
I really can't ask you to go to the effort of finding pins on maps, I'm sure I can manage that myself once I've decided on a target.
Fair enough. I'm a bit of a fanatic when it comes to obscure historical sites and will often seek them out and hit many of them up in one day. I mean you probably know that since you've read a travelogue of mine.
If you're going to just one of the cemeteries I would probably say Highgate is the main event (though I've heard to get the most out of it you need to book a tour; they bring you into the catacombs).
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