And whilst films would have you believe these weekends are all champagne towers and staff and well, clean surfaces… the reality may be slightly more nuanced.

So here is my boots-on-the-ground, between-the-lines guide to surviving - and ideally thriving - during a weekend at your mate’s ancestral home, written from someone who grew up within such draughty corridors, crumbling turrets and overgrown gardens as a rather unconventional backdrop to childhood.

CASH IS KING

The countryside is not yet cashless, and it may be unlikely you’ll leave the property, so I recommend before you leave an area that has accessible ATMs, get out some cash out as there will probably be a housekeeper, gamekeeper, or stable staff you may need to tip.

MAPS

If driving, the closer you get, the further away the data coverage will get. Phone service may drop off at any point, so look on Waze before you leave - you don’t want to be driving down unknown needle-thin, blind-bended country roads in the pitch black. Mind you, if you’re lucky, there may be brown road signs directing you to your destination.

‘GIFTS’

You should already know this: as a guest, whether it be Balmoral or Butlins, never arrive empty handed.

“Anything sparkling, not water” - or prosecco. No-secco. Otherwise all booze is welcomed. A homemade sloe gin or naturally infused vodka for the coming field sporting seasons is always a good call.

Following that scent, bath salts and bath oils are also good as they’re regularly used as healing aliments after a long cold days shooting or ache prevention after an unplanned dismount.

Some kind of jarred, cooked boozy fruit, any local-to-you produce, something for dogs or horses - or if you want to bestow your favourite poncey hand wash, leave behind the pump bottle and redirect to a good old-fashioned sturdy bar of soap.

KEEPING WARM

Those stone walls did a good job of keeping out the French but also at keeping the cold air and damp in. It’s likely be warmer outside in February than it is in August inside.

There’s usually one room with a working fire and a few plug in heaters dotted around wafting a slightly pungent smell. There is of course a lovely toasty Aga in the kitchen, but if not being cooked on, it will most likely be overpopulated by spaniels and terriers. Meaning everybody will pile into said one room, although you might be warmed up by the steaming whisky breath of the father’s letchy old school friend, who you’ve been cunningly seated next to at supper as the unknowing newby…

“Can we put the central heating on” is near enough blasphemy, but smuggling in one or two hot water bottles and many socks is advisable for bedtime.

There will likely not be a plump down White Company duvet, instead there will be a Medieval eiderdown (used as a birthing matt by many generations of dogs). To accompany this will be a rough linen sheet with a very itchy blanket over the top that you will avoid touching at all costs.

The pro of wanting to avoid any skin contact with said blanket (it’s giving nits) is that you huddle yourself into a ball, generating a little bundle of warmth like a hibernating woodland creature - just don’t move from said huddle unless you want to be immediately transported to the arctic tundra e.g. the rest of the bed.

Just pray you don’t need the loo in the night.

THE KITCHEN

The heart of the house, for many reasons - particularly the previously mentioned Aga. It’s a social hub, likely now the main entrance of the house instead of the pillared 10 feet double doors you pulled up to because it is “more functional” (they lost the keys a millennium ago).

I have found that, unless engaging in a planned group activity, you can never find anybody and don’t bother trying, you will just get lost. So, as the kitchen is the place you are most likely to bump into anyone, make a mental map of the route from your bedroom to the kitchen.

“Go left past the bust with a cowboy hat and feather boa on it, all the way down the back wooden stairs that has no working light till you hit stone floor, turn right before the boot room, immediately right again at the portrait of a terrifying ancestor whose furrowed brow and violent eyes follow your every move and then it’s just through the doors at the end of the corridor haunted by the ghost of the Wailing Grey Lady”.

Fridges are also best avoided.

Mould on top of jams, condiments from 1994, milk that went off in May, the smell in general, a small bit of extremely hard and unidentifiable cheese sat loose front and centre, open half-drunk cans.

Or you may even be greeted by some very expressional game that has been transported from the icy graveyard haunted by the ghosts of field sports past (the outdoor chest freezer) to be thawed for supper - which you’ll pray won’t be defrosted in time for your stay.

DRESS CODE

Unless told in advance, you shouldn’t have to worry too much about dusting off your your tails or delving into the family treasury for great granny’s tiara.

You’ll likely dress for breakfast. No PJs at the breakfast table, you’re not four-years-old. Your breakfast outfit will also usually be what you wear for the rest of the day until supper when you will dress again.

There’s likely to be some sort of swimming situation so do bring your togs, but actually using them is unlikely and moreover, unadvised. (Personally I think it should be illegal to swim in any body of water that lies above the Anglo-Scottish Border unless naked.)

Do not panic buy anything.

It’s the number one FFFP (Field Fashion Faux Pas) to buy anything new, it’s a chin’s sixth sense and it will never go unnoticed. At least two moth holes are always good. Anyway, there will certainly be a sprawling boot room, the countryman’s equivalent to Harrods, filled with waterproofed, waxed and warm items of clothing for any outdoor activities that may be sprung upon you.

ACTIVITIES

Unless it’s the reason for your visit, it’s unlikely you’ll be made to shoot anything or ride a fire-breathing horse. There’s bound to be a lots of opportunities for walks and tennis and all kinds of outdoor adventures but don’t feel you suddenly have to become a gung-ho-hearty-hooray, kitted out in head to toe in rubber and tweed. In fact, creativity can thrive in the country. Do play the piano, draw, read, write and an afternoon nap is always welcome - and probably a relief for your hosts.

Games are inevitable and come in abundance. This might be covering yourself in soot from a burnt cork trying to speak gibberish correctly, or good old-fashioned ‘I’ll be in the cupboard under the stairs;)…’ sardines.

The hat game is also ideal matchmaking - a great test of chemistry - as long as you are paired with the older brother’s hot, kilted and sporraned Laird friend. But it can be a terrible test of your patience when you’re paired with the cousin who thought an overdraft was a rowing term and has the constant expression of somebody who’s drunk too much trying to read the kebab menu.

ANIMALS

Just as the sun rises over the folly and sets over the lake, it is certain there will be very badly behaved animals. Said animals are considered family and are ranked above most children.

You’re taken to meet the beloved, saintly childhood pony that proceeds to chomp down hard on your finger rather than your apple offering with the bite force 10x the strength of a pit bull? Act like nothing happened. Kick on. You still have nine other fingers.

The barley one-year-old Spaniel with energy levels that exceed the Duracell Bunny broke into your room, ransacked and marked their territory on your luggage? Keep schtum. “No worries at all! In fact I actually really needed some new crotchless knickers!”

If there is a dog fast asleep and sprawled across a sofa, taking up the last of the seating options, whatever you do - DO NOT kick it off. It is considered a crime punishable by death. The threadbare ancient carpet on the freezing rock solid floor looked so welcoming anyway, besides now I’m closer to the Monopoly board, never mind my agonising raw saddle sores. Now, who wants to be the Boot?!

The ever-endearing, enthusiastic wagging tail of a labrador becomes a weapon of mass destruction to any glassware foolishly put at tail-swinging height, causing everybody to do a Mexican wave of champagne glasses every time Biffy does the rounds coming over to say hello.

BLOWING FOR HOME

It’s standard that at least one person has drunkly disgraced themselves at some point over the weekend but whether it was you are not, it’s much easier to get away with drunken debauchery than bad manners.

So, offer to strip your bed. As previously mentioned, if there are keepers - whether it be of game, horses or houses - leave them a tip. And a handwritten thank you note to your hosts will never go unappreciated.

I know somebody that keeps a pre-written “thank you” AND “sorry” letters in their car when attending at such weekend aways…

FINAL THOUGHTS

At some point on the journey home, somewhere between the third and fourth service stations, the disbelief of how far from London you actually kicks in. Amplified by your three-day hangover, the mysterious bruises you don’t remember acquiring - possibly connected to a burly vision of a rugger bugger violently spinning you round during the Reel of the 51st Division - and removing half a bale of hay from your overnight bag, you’ll realise you’ve actually had a spectacular time.

You’ll miss the chaos of it all. The freezing bathrooms with the water pressure of a hose a horse is standing on. The endless search for people who seemed to disappear into hidden parts of the house like characters in Cluedo. The vague scent of wet tweed, firewood and port that will now cling to your vintage velvet ball gown until death.

So arrive prepared, pack thermals, don’t steal a Labrador’s seat and for the love of God, NO tweed is better than NEW tweed.

If I’m being candid about my love life, I’ve been single for two years.

And thank GOD. I’ve had a ball. My years single have definitely not been lived in a pathetic, Victorian-waif-looking-out-of-a-rainy-window, Bridget Jones eating cake alone on her birthday kind of way. Far from it! I’ve had a bloody riot. But I’m in the market for something a bit more serious.

And of course, with no lack of romance.

There’s been a collection of almosts, maybes, situationships, strong starts, weak endings, dates that you are not so much “on a date” but more serving as a human canvas for someone else’s word collage and enough phone notifications, or lack thereof, to make me consider throwing my phone into the sea.

What’s different now is that my life already feels full. I have the BESTEST friends, an electric social life, a wonderful family, and a full life that feels increasingly like my own. The foundation is solid. Which means I’m not dating from a place of lack, but from a place of curiosity. I’m not searching for someone to rescue me from loneliness or give my life meaning - I have plenty of both. I’m simply open to finding a connection that adds to what’s already fabulous.

I do not want to be somebody’s girlfriend, I want to be Peggy with a boyfriend.

And as mentioned there have been romances, flirtations, and men who briefly convinced me things could turn into something interesting, but I’ve realised what I’m craving is that initial connection, one that I recognise from my two serious relationships.

The kind that feels instant.

The kind where there’s no room for questioning.

No analysing response times.

No consulting the girls like it’s a panel of Supreme Court judges.

I can’t be arsed to pick apart grammar from a three-word text after 12 hours.

Just certainty.

I have rampant ADHD.

Which means my brain can occasionally treat a handsome man who’s liked/swiped up on a few Instagram stories and asked me about my weekend, as if he’s just returned from war and proposed marriage.

The ADHD brain loves novelty. It loves excitement. It loves possibility. It’s wired to live for a dopamine rush. The whole thing becomes less about what’s actually happening and more about what could happen. And that’s where disappointment quietly enters the room.

But I’ve spent a lot of time working on this. Not because I want to care less about finding love. Quite the opposite. I care deeply about finding a real connection, but I realised something uncomfortable:

Most of my disappointment wasn’t coming from reality. It was coming from expectation.

I had expected the guy I’d gone on two dates with to text me after seeing my particularly excellent (targeted) Instagram story. I had expected someone I’d been speaking to every day to continue speaking to me every day. I had expected consistency from people who had never actually promised me consistency.

Buddhists talk about the “wanting mind” - the part of us that’s always reaching for the next thing, the future thing, the imagined thing. And how so much suffering comes from the gap between what is and what we hoped would be.

Dating, I’ve discovered, is essentially a masterclass in that gap. Because we’re rarely disappointed by what someone actually did. We’re disappointed because they didn’t do what we imagined they would do. And so I’ve adopted a new philosophy.

Take the best and leave the rest. That’s it.

Enjoy the snog at the end of a good date. Leave the fantasy wedding.

Enjoy the lovely deep conversation. Leave the expectation that it means something permanent.

Take the chemistry. Leave the assumption that chemistry guarantees compatibility.

Take the compliment. Leave the need for it to become commitment.

It’s surprisingly freeing. Because lowering expectations doesn’t mean becoming cynical. It doesn’t mean caring less. And it definitely doesn’t mean lowering or negotiating your standards. Those are completely different things.

Standards are about what you require from a partner. Expectations are often about what you assume will happen next. I will never negotiate my standards. I know what kind of relationship I want. I know how I deserve to be treated. I know my boundaries.

And I know that shrinking myself to fit into someone else’s narrative has never once ended well. But putting pressure on every interaction? Trying to force every spark into an eternal flame? Expecting every promising romance to become a relationship?

That’s just a very efficient way to manufacture disappointment.

The irony is that the less attached I’ve become to outcomes, the more enjoyable dating has become. Because now I’m actually present for it. I’m not sitting across from someone wondering whether they’re my future husband.

I’m wondering whether I’m enjoying my drink and if I’m even enjoying their company (or just enjoying talking about myself). Whether they’re making me laugh (vital). Whether I even like them. Not whether they like me.

And perhaps that’s what dating is supposed to be. Not a relentless search for certainty. But a series of experiences that reveal what’s right by allowing what’s wrong to naturally fall away. You become the master of your own reality.

You stop handing the keys of your emotional wellbeing to people you’ve known for twelve business days. You enjoy what’s in front of you instead of mourning futures that never existed.

And perhaps the most comforting truth of all: You cannot say the wrong thing to the right person.

The right person won’t disappear because you double-texted. They won’t lose interest because you showed enthusiasm. They won’t be scared off by your personality. The right person will simply recognise you. And until then?

Take the best. Leave the rest.

If it’s possible that there is any kind of person (freak of nature) who claims they “don’t get crushes”, I don’t trust them.

Because what do you mean you can happily and successfully waltz through the world without assigning at LEAST one emotionally ambiguous romantic projection onto a complete stranger at any given time?

I hate to admit it, but I think having a crush is an essential part of life and to our divine female internal ecosystem. Sorry! I don’t make the rules when it comes to Mother Nature.

The work crush. The gym crush. The barista crush. The man you saw once on a train crush. The Instagram crush you haven’t met but you feel like you know them because you’ve developed a lore-rich backstory for them.

The possibilities are not just endless - they are essential. We need them. And we are, in fact, under-optimising crushes.

I have to have a crush in every area of my life. It’s become infrastructure.

Without one, life starts to feel administratively bleak. Your screen time climbs into criminal territory. Personal hygiene can even get put on a back burner - those poor hair follicles are fighting for their life drowning in sticky chemicals on day three of the slick back. Everyone knows that’s not “a hair mask”, just admit it’s grease babe… it’s grease.

You max out on the phrase “I’m just focusing on myself right now,” when really you’ve just forgotten what it feels like to have that tiny electric current running through your body because you and a man in a grey 3/4 zip (who you definitely have nothing in common with) happens to go to the same coffee shop as you and now has started crack a smile at you, slightly out of awkward politeness.

Two things can be true at the same time, but admit it, self focusing goes out the window when a new crush enters the chat.

The beauty of a crush is that it costs absolutely nothing and yet improves your quality of life exponentially. For example; when I had a work crush, I naturally became a better version of myself, entirely by accident.

I would wake up earlier. I would pick an outfit that I felt good in. I would do a cute hairdo. I stopped arriving at work looking like I’d escaped captivity.

I had a reason to romanticise my everyday existence, it was forcing me to perform as “someone I would want to be perceived as.” And the crushee barely even needed to participate. That’s the magic of it.

That is the real function of a utalising a crush: soft behavioural upgrading.

I think I could survive apocalyptic conditions if I had a crush there. I would thrive in a dystopia if there was just one emotionally unavailable man over 6ft with reasonably good forearms nearby for me to project onto while rationing our Spam.

A good friend texted me recently;

“I have a new work crush.”

“Whooo?!”

“Literally just some weirdo.”

And that’s the other truth: your crush is rarely actually impressive. In fact, the more you find out, the more you realise you were operating off mystery, circumstance, and one nice interaction where they displayed a partly chivalrous act or posted a picture of them being sweet with their niece (probably performative for their own personal crush purposes…)

So that brings me onto the most vital rule of all:

A crush is just a lack of information.

Once that information arrives, the fantasy can quickly collapse.

“I actually slept with a work crush once and when he turned up I honestly thought it was my Uber Eats driver.” a friend tells me.

Exactly. The danger zone. Reality is always going to be a downgrade from delusion. And yet - we must continue.

Because having a crush is also one of the cheapest ways to feel alive. It’s free entertainment. It’s narrative-building. It’s main character syndrome with no commitment fee.

Also, statistically speaking, you are probably someone’s crush right now. Somewhere, someone has assigned you in their mind in soft-focus lighting and a personality you may or may not be able to deliver.

So no, I am not advocating for delusion. I am advocating for optimisation.

Keep on crushing. Rotate as needed. Do not over-invest. Do not investigate too deeply. Treat it like seasoning, not sustenance.

Because maybe that’s the real circle of life. Having a crush makes you become your own crush. So above all, remember: The crush is not the goal.

You are.

I was due to attend the North Cotswolds Hunt Ball on Saturday 7th December 2024, but Storm Darragh got the better of even the least fair-weather riders after the roof was blown off the marquee. But in the spirit of the hunt balls yet to come, I thought the least I could do is provide some advice for surviving them - some of which I wish I had known and taken myself.

If you’ve never attended a hunt ball, let me roughly set the scene. Imagine the ball from War and Peace meets The Court of Caligula, only with far more Jäger Bombs, far less decorum, and enough taffeta and velvet to carpet Blenheim Palace.

It’s a pinnacle event of country life, from the gossip to the glamour to the giddy dancing topped off with the possibility of a scandal. It’s a social safari where the foxes are on two legs and the hounds are in pearls. To navigate this evening of mischief and merriment, here’s your guide to surviving it with your dignity mostly intact (or at least hidden under a tablecloth until carriages).

DO: Go hunting on the morning of, but DON’T leave the field early to get ready.

You should never cut a day’s hunting short to get home and get ready for the hunt ball. You want to be last seen looking like a Jackson Pollock but with mud, matted hat hair sagging into a ghastly dinner lady-esk hair net, your figure completely obscured by your thick Melton hunt coat, and face bare of all makeup with red, wind-whipped cheeks.

Haven’t you always dreamed of being admired as the girl who can turn up looking like a supermodel after a full day in the field? The one who spends the night fending men off, many of whom do not recognise her for the girl they loudly referred to as “plain” at that morning’s meet.

DON’T: Snog the hunt staff.

They’re not even allowed to snog each other! So hold hard, however handsome the new Heathcliff adjacent Whip is.

Otherwise, hunt balls are prime matchmaking territory. The scent of perfume has been laid and the field has been transported into the marquee and onto the dance floor.

It’s a uniquely concentrated gathering of likeminded people. Flutter your eyelashes at the Earl’s son, the dashing vet, the polo player with a razor blade for a jawline, or even the mysteriously aloof gamekeeper. A well-placed compliment about his new young horse or his sheer fearlessness crossing country might just be the ticket to a post-ball hack - or something more.

DO: Pace yourself.

By all means, enjoy the port at the meet, then the cocktails at pre-drinks, then the Champagne on arrival, then the wine with dinner, then the six Jäger bombs your new best friend at the bar has brought for you, then the flat beer someone left on the side once the bar had called last orders. But you don’t want to miss out on any fun of the night because you've passed out wearing a mysterious dinner jacket and no shoes. Again.

DON’T: Bid on the auction

You don't really want the SUV Safari Day just because someone you fancy at the next table is bidding for it. Verbally wrestling the vicar’s wife for a Fortnum and Mason Hamper is also unbecoming. Let her have it - she probably made the trifle you've just scoffed down. The auction is there to raise money for the hunt, not for you to show off. Keep your hand firmly on your glass, not in the air.

DO: Eat, eat, eat.

Stuff as many sausage rolls in your gob and pockets at the meet as you can. The food at the hunt ball is usually unidentifiable, sometimes leading you to wonder if it’s flesh from the kennels.

You will be drinking all day and all night and you don’t want to end the evening trying to fish your grandmother’s stole out of the loo.

DON’T: Be the crier.

Do you want to be remembered as the belle of the ball or the blotchy-faced banshee sobbing in the loos because your situationship is reeling with someone else? Avoid mascara streaks and dramatic exits. Don’t let your tears rival the champagne fountain. If you can hold it together over a 5 foot hedge with a ditch each side of it and going as deep as the Thames, then you can hold it together on the dance floor.

DO: Dress to kill

There is no doubt that it’ll be Baltic outside, then a sauna inside, especially once the dancing commences. But less is NOT always more. You don’t need to wear a habit, but you don’t want someone’s eyes to pop out of their sockets in shock, especially if he remembers your Christening.

Try and leave something to the imagination - keep the high thigh slits lowered and lowered necklines heightened.

Nevertheless, at most hunt balls, anything goes – just try not to let that include your clothing after a certain point in the proceedings. Somebody is bound to indecently expose themselves, if possible avoid it being you. If you’re going to disappear into the shrubbery, do it discreetly and ensure your stilettos make it back with you. The morning-after grapevine can be very unforgiving.

Above all, remember:

A hunt ball isn’t just an event; it’s a battlefield of wit, charm, and alcohol consumption. Whether you leave with a hamper, a husband, or merely an exceptional hangover, follow this guide of Do’s and Don’ts to ensure your night is one to remember (or at least one that isn’t too memorable for everyone else).

With all this being said, it is a rite of passage for everybody to slightly disgrace themselves at some point at a hunt ball. I may give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.

Viva La Hunt Ball!

I was a sickly child. My mother said I had bones like chalk, ready to splinter in a strong wind.

As the carriage rattled over pot holes and through murky puddles, I thought of my splintering bones and winced in phantom pain.

The doctor, when he would come, would say nothing at all - only pressed two fingers to my wrist and frowned as though he’d caught something unspeakable running through my pulse.

I grew up indoors, pale as the linen sheets I would lay and sweat and shiver between, there I learned to listen: to the small workings of the house, to the rain travelling down the glass, to the hush that follows when someone you love closes a door behind them.

It was perhaps this listening that made the house I was moving too, feel so loud when I arrived. This place - Garrowby Hall - sat completely alone among the moors, a black looming mass against the endless wind-broken land. The winds were strong up here, splinteringly so.

My husband, whom I had met only twice and closely chaperoned by my burly, hawk-eyed matron before our wedding, was a warm and kind man, his aura gleamed. He seemed so at home in its shadows. It was his family home for centuries before although he spent most of his working life in London.

He told me he believed the constant new air of the thrashing winds of the Moors would be good for my lungs and I would learn to love the house’s silence. But there was no silence to me; it had weight and was thick with texture and breath.

This house was a sea, vast and it will pull you in with its silent current. Within it’s waves, a siren dwelled whose song lured you to its depths. It constantly moved and breathed, manufacturing something that could’ve looked like breathing.

I awoke that first night to the sound of footsteps above our bedroom. A steady tread, slow and deliberate, as though someone were pacing out the measure of the house. My husband slept beside me, unmoving. When I asked him in the morning over breakfast if there were servants quarters in the upper rooms, he only smiled - thinly, as though I’d spoken of something embarrassing - and said that part of the house had been shut off for years.

For weeks the footsteps came, always at the same time and the same unhurried rhythm, I began to wait for them each night.

My husband would leave to work in London for weeks at a time and I, the wife, would stay and keep sweet. I wouldn’t speak to anyone for those durations of time. The servants were mere flickers of shadows in the corner of rooms and doorways, I almost felt laughed at, cheated out of a game, as I did as a child. So I did as I always did best, I listened. I would lie awake, counting the seconds between each step.

When sleep did come, it came in flashes - dreams of corridors that folded back upon themselves, of doors that opened to nothing but my own reflection. I woke each morning more tired than the morning before.

Eventually, I could no longer bear it. My tiredness and loneliness reeling with one another. The moon was swollen and high, pouring its light through the long windows in strips like spilt milk. I took a candle from the table and stepped out into the corridor. The thin air whisked over my sharp cheekbones, as though the house had exhaled a relieved breath at my appearance.

The hallways were unfamiliar in the moonlight. The house was so cold, I rarely left my darning chair by the fire. What by day seemed grand, now looked hollowed. The portraits of my husbands ancestors along the walls were pale and watchful, judging my every step. My candle guttered as I climbed the staircase, the flame wavering at each sigh of wind that desperately slipped through the cracks in the stone and ancient windowpanes.

At the top, the corridor stretched ahead, a long throat of darkness. I followed the sound I thought I’d heard, something like a heel turning on old boards, and turned left, then right.

But when I turned back, the way I’d come down was gone. The corridor behind me had completely changed: a window had appeared where there had been a door, a rug now stained and threadbare. The air smelled of damp fabric and so sweet of rot it pierced and stung my nostrils. I tried retracing my steps, but each turn brought me to somewhere I didn’t recognise, staircases that spiralled down into places that couldn’t possibly exist within the house I’d seen and known from the inside and out.

For several nights I did this. Each time I thought I’d mapped a part of it, the house undid itself again, folding differently night and night again. I began to feel it shifting even whilst I stood still.

On my husband’s return, he said I was unwell, that maybe the air was too sharp for a constitution like mine. He did not hear the footsteps. He did not see the candlelight move before I did.

I had not slept until his return, nor had I eaten a sufficient meal. He filled the house with a warmth my bones needed, I savoured his presence as I knew it was fleeting. For the days he was at home, my husband grew watchful. He said I had grown too pale and frail and that I must eat, that the house was not to blame for my sleeplessness.

“You must let life back in”, he told me, his palms warm against my cheeks as he lovingly cupped my face in his large hands and brushed my hair out of my eyes.

“We’ll have company. It will do you such good”.

And so there were preparations. Servants I had not seen before appeared, beaming at me and greeting me with such regality, carrying crates of expensive wines and silverware with wild beasts being hunted engraved on them, cutlery with carved antler handles my husband explained with theatricality his ancestors had bravely and daringly hunted. Fires were lit in every hearth; the air filled with the smell of roasting meat and sweet preserves. I wandered through the rooms as though it was a dream. Everywhere, filled with light and movement and echoes of laughter spilling from one room into another.

As the guests arrived in masses, hooves thundered as their carriages crunched over the gravel, I stood beside my husband at the door and manoeuvred my mouth into what would come across as a smile to our giddy guests but to me felt like the quivering jowls of a snarling hound, sprawled ridged across my sharp teeth.

Ladies in rich velvets and taffetas, men with red faces and bright teeth. They kissed my hands and called me pretty. The rooms swelled with sound and bodies: music, conversation and the clinking of glasses.

Yet even as I stood among them, I felt so apart - as though there was a thin veil of lace between myself and the rest of the world. I could see their mouths moving, but the words reached me only faintly, already fading as the next word left their lips.

At dinner, the table gleamed. A white long river of cloth, stretched between us. Platters of meat, pink and tender, were laid bedside pyramids of fruit so lush they seemed to glow from within. Servants came round and piled up our plates with the luscious goods, I remember the glint of cherries, the slick sheen of pomegranates, the soft steam rising from joints of meat. Candles burned in their silver holders, flames quivered as people let out roars of laughter.

My husband broke my gaze as he raised his glass to me. “To your health, my love”, he said, as the room of people echoed it back to him.

I blushed and smiled, as I went to sip my wine, though as I swallowed my throat had closed. The wine replaced by cold, gritty and earthy, sludge that tried to crawl its way down my gullet. I looked down at my plate. From the corner of my eyes, I realised the warm candlelight had shifted into stale darkness - the white of the tablecloth no longer gleaming white but yellowed, torn and wet in patches.

The smell suddenly ripped through my nostrils; a rank sweetness beneath the fine perfume of the foreign wines, now sour and corked. I blinked and saw the meat was not cooked at all but raw, still bleeding and curdling slowly like the last dying movements of a wounded creature. The fruit, once full and rich, were now caving in on themselves, their skins blackened and split, within, I saw the pale squirm of swollen maggots turning.

A sound caught in my throat. I looked up, ready to speak, but the words fell away. The seats around the table were empty. No guests. No laughter. Only the echoing room, and the sound of something dripping from the edge of the table onto the floor.

A shriek etched and dragged its way up my dry throat, but the sound came back to me muffled, as though through walls of water, causing me to choke and splutter and claw at my own throat.

I awoke suddenly in my bed. The room was dim, the sheets tangled and damp with sweat. I reached my hand out beside me, but the other half of my bed was cold and empty. The air was heavy and still, and from above came the sound I had come to know so well.

Slow. Measured. Pacing the length of the ceiling.

I launched myself out of bed with all the energy I could muster, crashing against the furniture to make my way out of the door and up the stairs, through the corridors I had paced night after night.

I found myself almost abruptly at a dark emerald green door, as thought I had only just awoken. I was sure I had never come across it before despite my persistent rituals. I let my hand slide over the rounded and engraved doorknob and turned it. The heavy door creaked as I lent into it to open it, the room was completely engulfed in darkness, not even a sliver of moonlight from a cracked curtain to reveal a bed or a floorboard or an eaves.

I slide my hand onto the wall inside the room and let my body follow after it, keeping my back and heels close to the wall and skirting. Arm still extended, sliding my way carefully across the room, any moment expecting to bump into a chest of drawers or chair. I felt each corner of the room as I made my way round it, the walls felt comforting and almost soft, breathing with me as I breathed, I counted 2 corners and suspected I was surely almost at the closed curtains.

I reached out further, my fingers brushing against what I took for heavy velvet curtains, damp and cool beneath my hand. But as I tugged it, the fabric moved, pulling away from me, not like cloth but like breath. My eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness, a shape uncoiled itself in front of me, slow and terrible, and I saw the pale shimmer of a woman’s face, eyes wide and clouded and blind with light that wasn’t there. Her mouth creaked opened inhumanly wide and soundlessly before the sound came - starting as a low gravelly croak, rising gutturally as the figure began to shake into a death rattling shriek that tore through the darkness and set the air shivering. She leapt upon me then, slamming my weak body onto the solid wood floor, immediately bruising my boney spine, her wet and dirty hair getting sucked into my mouth as I shrieked and she took her sharp jagged nails and pressed them against my eyelids as though to prise them open, to make me see. It felt like a warning, she wanted me to see.

The room suddenly filled with the thundering hum of wings; thousands of moths bursting from all corners of the room, as I kicked and shook I realised they had been clinging onto each inch of the rooms walls and ceiling and windows, I had rubbed my way across their hairy humming bodies as I made my way round the room. Their soft bodies battering against my skin, their dust coating lips and tongue. I choked and spluttered, reaching my hands out gasping for air and then - I was awake again. In bed. The room dimly lit and grey with the dawn. My body wet with a cold sweat, trembling under the duvet like a flightless wounded bird.

And from above, faint but steady, the melodic familiar sound of the footsteps, beginning once more.

As I painfully propped myself up in bed, I blinked into the realisation that it was morning. Though my brain was still coming round into reality, I managed to piece together that I’d never heard the footsteps when it was daylight.

I needed to get out.

The slow and deliberate padding of the footsteps trickled down through the ceiling, through the bones of the house, and into me. Something in me snapped, like a thread pulled too tight.

I carefully rose, my body so weak, bruised and aching. Wincing under the pain of my own weight. I heard my mothers sharp tongue spitting into my ear about my chalk like bones, I pictured them splintering as I moved. My nightgown clung to my skin with the sweat of sleep, or fear, or both. I told myself I would leave. I would find the road, the village, I would find the sound of other voices and I’d get away from this house.

The handle of the bedroom door was cold under my hand. As I stepped out into the corridor, my spine stung with the realisation of a noticeable change of pace. This Chinese water torture of footsteps I had endured for months, this death march melody that was stuck on a loop in my brain, I could tell they had quickened, just slightly, but with a rhythm that matched my own. I took another step, then another, gaining my own speed, faster the echo from above came.

The boards creaked and whispered under the weight of two sets of feet, my own and something else’s.

I swallowed my fear and started to run. The hall seemed endless, turning in on themselves. The stale air clinging to my face, thick and suffocating, filled with the scent of rusted iron. My ears pricked as I noticed, the footsteps were no longer above me but behind, following, keeping in perfect time. I turned down corners and corridors that shouldn’t have existed, caught only flashes of the world outside that I so longed for, the moorland, pale and endless. My lungs burned.

Then a glint caught my eye - a mirror, cracked and dappled with age. I glanced at it only for a moment, but that was enough. My reflection was wrong. My eyes looked wide, bloodshot and from beneath my lashes ran two thin, raw and jagged blood-encrusted lines of red. My eyelids - cut. The memory of those nails pressing down into my eyelids returned in a flash of white pain. It hadn’t been a dream.

In realisation I lost my footing and I staggered backward, clutching the wall, and felt a sharpness bite into me. I whipped around, causing it to tear from my side to my front. A rusted nail jutting from the oak panel, plunged deep into my side. I pushed myself away from the wall, the nail staying with it, I pressed my palm against it and sobbed silently as my tears filled my eyes, stinging the previous lacerations on my eyes.

The footsteps were getting closer now, rushing after me heavily and clumsily. I picked up my pace again, limping and bounding, I whipped my head around as I ran, and there she was.

Her mouth hung open, in a soundless scream, hair matted and filthy and clinging all over her face and inside her mouth, eyes blank and burning. I conjured everything within me to run as fast as I could, shaking so hard, my jaw chattering so uncontrollably I couldn’t keep myself from biting down again and again onto my tongue.

I stumbled through the final hall and burst through the front door. The cold air hit me like I was jumping into a freezing lake. The moor stretched before me, endless and unforgiving, wind clawing at my hair. I turned back to the house but I was not met with the grand abode my husband had brought me back to, that I had been inhabiting.

No grand stone or shining windows - only ruin. The roof collapsed, ivy dragged down the fortress and strangling the structure like a great sea serpent. The windows empty, broken and black. The air stank of rot and stagnant time.

And then I saw her. Standing only a few paces away, limping forward in the same rhythm I knew only too well. The woman. Pale, trembling, blood staining the front of her gown.

My gown. My blood. Her hand pressed to the same wound on her stomach as on my own. She looked at me, and I at her, as she paced forward until there was no space between us.

I stared straight into my own hollow eyes, at my own cracked, parted blooded and blue lips, quivering as though to speak but only a low raw groan could escape.

The wind moved through me, cold and thin such as a last dying breath. The house loomed behind, it’s windows like hollow eye sockets, it’s doors a yawning hung jaw. The world began to pale and peel away at its edges, the colours of the moors draining with it, and I with it too. For a moment I heard my husband calling my name from deep within the house, I took her hand and we trudged our blooded feet back towards the house in that familiar pace.

In unison, we stepped beyond the threshold and as my foot landed upon the familar stone floor, I was awoke as the carriage rattled and jolted over pot holes and through murky puddles and I looked out onto the driveway of Garrowby Hall.

Bodies do not fit in this here earth. They swell and they rise. Peace is never found, and God cannot hear you here.

There’s a particular brand of Monday morning optimism that feels less like self-improvement and more like damage control. It begins, as many modern rituals do, with a promise whispered to oneself somewhere between dehydration and denial: “This week will be different, I’m locking in”. This week there will be green juice. This week there will be infrared pilates. This week there will be the version of you who washes their hair instead of doing a slick back bun for the third day in a row.

By Tuesday, you’re researching supplements you need to take a mortgage out to buy with ferocity. By Wednesday you’ve spent $42 on a drink called a “gut reset elixir.” By Thursday, you feel - if not miraculously healed - then at least morally superior to the version of yourself who, just days ago, TC’d (tactically chundered) and then went straight back out to do another shot of tequila, whooping, and swinging your arm around your head like a cowboy.

And yet, come Friday, there it is again: the slow gravitational pull back towards dim lighting, loud music, and the comforting chaos of not having to be your best self.

So the question lingers, somewhere between your third iced matcha and your fourth cancelled plan: are you actually on a wellness journey, or are you just trying to outrun last weekend?

Because there is a difference. A subtle one, perhaps, but an important one.

Having recently moved to Sydney, I’ve found myself in a city that treats 5am like it’s midday. Run clubs are the social scene. There’s an intimidating discipline to it - the shoreline already swarming with runners resembling Greek statues before the sun has even properly decided to show up, the unspoken understanding that wellness here begins at an hour I previously associated with poor decisions, not personal growth.

For example; the first time I attempted a 5am workout, I received a message from my friend back in England saying “why are you awake? Are you leaving the afters?”

So what is a wellness journey? I believe it’s supposed to be about consistent care for yourself. It is meant to feel like tending, gently and consistently, to the parts of yourself that need softness, structure, or stillness. It is not meant to feel like punishment. It’s a slow build to a better version of yourself. It is not meant to be reactive. And it is certainly not meant to be a moral counterweight to the perceived sins of a fun night out.

But increasingly, it feels like that’s exactly what it has become.

We live in an age of extremes and performative behaviour for social media, focusing on how we are perceived to be living over how we are actually feeling. We oscillate between indulgence and restriction, chaos and control, overstimulation and overcorrection. We binge, and then we cleanse. We stay out too late, and then we wake up too early. We romanticise both versions of ourselves, without ever quite reconciling the two.

It’s a cycle that may feel productive, but it’s also exhausting.

Because if your version of “wellness” only appears in response to excess, then it isn’t really wellness at all. It’s recovery. It’s negotiation. It’s an internal bargaining system where you promise to be “good” in exchange for having been “bad.”

And people, for all their complexities, are not meant to be managed like that.

The truth is, you are allowed to go out and have fun without needing to compensate for it like you’ve committed a crime. You are allowed to enjoy a slow morning without needing it to serve as redemption. You are allowed, perhaps most radically of all, to exist, even thrive, somewhere in the middle.

Not every weekend needs to be chaos. Not every weekday needs to be correction.

So the next time you find yourself knee-deep in a self-scolding hard reset generational lock in, ask yourself, gently and honestly: is this about care, or is this about compensation?

And if it’s the latter, maybe the most radical act of wellness is not the green juice, or the spin class, or the perfectly curated morning routine.

Maybe it’s simply letting last weekend be what it was, and allowing this week to exist without trying to make up for it.

There is something deliciously subversive about the way JFK Jr. rocked a hat. Never in a try-hard, costume-y way. Never in a “look at ME I’m wearing my HAT!” way, but with the kind of nonchalance that you can’t fabricate. A Yankees baseball cap backwards, a newsboy cap, or something a bit rumpled yet always entirely perfect - it rarely matched, and that’s precisely the point.

Along with most, I’ve been obsessively watching Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette, and now that we’re all teetering on the edge of the final episode - I’ve found myself wanting to pin down a few of the styling details that have quietly stayed with me.

Everyone, understandably, is obsessed with Carolyn’s refined, minimal elegance - although, in my opinion, it was just the ’90s. She wasn’t curating an aesthetic, she was simply wearing what felt good on her, for her life - she was a boss, she loved a ciggie, she was just authentically herself, existing. She was not a “pilates, matcha, clean girlie,” Emily. But while she’s been the obvious focal point, I keep circling back to him. To his hats, specifically.

It felt less like styling and more like instinct, as though he dressed the way you might make a drink after a long week - casually and without overthinking the proportions. The hat wasn’t a centrepiece, it was punctuation. A comma, perhaps, in an otherwise perfectly fluid sentence.

With his way of dressing, there’s a suggestion that he’s not performing for the room but simply existing within it, entirely at ease with being looked at yet entirely uninterested in controlling how he was seen.

I think that’s what makes it so compelling now, in an age where every outfit is quietly (or rather, loudly) begging to be documented. We agonise over coherence, over palettes, over “core”, over whether what we’re wearing fits into an aesthetic. He, on the other hand, seemed to understand that true style lives in the unexpected detail.

The hat was never begging for approval. It didn’t need to be flattering or even particularly sensible. It just needed to feel right in that exact moment, on that exact day, on that exact head.

And perhaps that’s why it reads as so impossibly cool, because it resists imitation. You can buy the same cap, angle it the same way, pair it with something equally expensive and well-cut, but without that quiet irreverence, it falls flat and seems performative.

Because what he was really wearing wasn’t the hat at all - it was a kind of charming disregard. A refusal to over-curate. The confidence to let something be slightly off, slightly undone, and to trust that this is precisely what would pull everything together.

Where the rest of us are busy editing ourselves down, he was adding the final flourish. Coco Chanel famously advised us to remove one thing before leaving the house; JFK Jr., it seems, quietly disagreed.

He’d shrug on a beautifully cut jacket and before he hopped on his bike, almost as an afterthought - he’d top it all off with a hat that shouldn’t work, but absolutely did. But it wasn’t about the hat, of course. It was about the confidence to finish an outfit by undoing it, just a little, his hats were statements of his elusive charm.

I think the real lesson tucked beneath the brim of it all is that true authentic style, at its best, isn’t about perfection or even intention. It’s about knowing when to stop refining and start living in what you’ve chosen. To trust your eye, even when it leads you somewhere slightly improbable. Especially then.

There is a particular flavour of romantic confusion that feels rather exhilarating when you’re in it. Role-playing as if you’re the protagonist of a very nuanced indie romance film, instead of a woman staring at her phone wondering why a man who “adores you” hasn’t replied in nine hours.

But here is the uncomfortable truth I have arrived at and it lands with a dull thud rather than a cinematic crescendo:

If you’re confused romantically, then the answer you’re looking for lies right there in the confusion.

Because confusion is not chemistry. Confusion is not depth. Confusion is not “he’s just scared of his feelings.”

Confusion is confirmation and, more specifically, it’s information you usually already know - you’re just hoping it will change.

The Valentine’s Day Gathering of Single Folk (a ritual, really)

This year, instead of leaning into the commercial ‘poor me poor me pour me another drink’ vibe for Valentine’s Day, I had three friends over.

We were, collectively, three single women and one single straight man - which meant the emotional atmosphere sat somewhere between rebirth and mild psychological debris.

Add to that - what I had been obsessed with that week - the final shedding of the Year of the Wood Snake, combined with the incoming lunar new year energy, and suddenly the evening took on the tone of a ceremonial emotional purge rather than a casual drinks.

I decided we should go around the group and share our “Valentine’s / Fire Horse / Shedding Week / New Lunar Year resolutions”, specifically: what we are taking into this new chapter and what we are leaving behind

It was equal parts therapy session and coven meeting.

There were vows about boundaries, self-worth, creative and career focus, not quadruple texting exes after boozing, and deleting dating apps during hormonal fluctuations. All the classics were covered.

When it came to my turn, I shared a philosophy that has profoundly altered how I approach dating - something I learned from my fabulous, gorgeous best friend, Lyuana.

Meeting Lyuana - One Of Those Moments When You Instantly Recognise Your People

I met Lyuana in the back of a very small, very cramped and stuffy vintage shop in West London early last year.

We quite literally walked straight up to each other and started laughing - no introduction, no polite small talk, just immediate recognition. Our friendship hasn’t been dissimilar since; affectionate, energetic, and filled with love, light and laughter. 

She is a one-of-a-kind, LA born and raised girl who, in my opinion, is made up purely of starlight. The kind of woman who delivers profound wisdom in her Valley Girl accent while wearing something fabulous she had to climb into the back of a strange man’s van on Portobello to find (true story…).

And the philosophy she gave me comes with a great story.

The New York Taxi Oracle

This story takes place where many great stories do: in the back of a New York yellow cab.

Lyuana was on her way to LaGuardia Airport, frantically on the phone to her mother, the conversation being about her current romantic situation. She was explaining that she wasn’t quite sure where she stood with a man. The ambiguity. The mixed signals. The usual. 

When, in true New Yorker style, her cab driver rudely interrupted and cut her off mid-sentence. And in the most gloriously decisive tone imaginable, he said:

“Hunny, if it’s not a FUCK YEH! it’s a FUCK NO!”

That was it. No follow-up. No TED Talk. Just clarity.

The Radical Idea that the Love of Your Life Will Want to Date You! 

The brilliance of this philosophy is its simplicity. We do actually all know when someone is excited about us from these signs.

• How easily they make plans

• The consistency of communication

• The absence of emotional fog

• The sense that they are moving towards you and with you

The love of your life is not going to behave like you are an optional extracurricular.

The love of your life is actually going to want to date you.

Which sounds obvious until you realise how often we accept less for the thrill of the chase. 

Why We Ignore the Obvious

The reason we tolerate confusion is rarely about the other person. It’s usually about hope and the thrill of the chase. Hope that potential will become reality. Hope that patience will be rewarded. Hope that if we just love correctly enough, we’ll unlock certainty.

But adult love does not require decoding - and when it does, we create stories to fill the gap and narratives that protect us from the simpler explanation: they are unsure.

And if someone is unsure about you, that is already your answer.

My Resolution: Only Mutual Enthusiasm

So when I shared my resolution with my friends that night, it was this: “I am leaving behind men who are uncertain about me. Men who like me ‘but…’. Men who create confusion. Men who require interpretation.”

And I am taking into this new lunar year: Only dating men who choose me. Clearly. Enthusiastically. Consistently.

Because of it’s not a FUCK YEH! it’s a FUCK NO!

I was lucky enough to attend the Sydney premiere of Wuthering Heights, and I left the cinema choking on my own tears, missing the grey English countryside (that only a Brit could love…) and quietly unsettled as somebody who has spent the last eighteen months healing themselves from a relationship that felt very much like the one on on-screen.

Watching Emerald Fennell’s vision unfold was intoxicating, but somewhere between the sweeping visuals of those haunting moors and those aching glances, I felt a familiar knot in my stomach.

It’s a story we’ve been taught to idolise, one of literature’s great romances, yet leaving the State Theatre, I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily toxic dynamics can be mistaken for epic love and how many of us have lived through relationships that once felt just as cinematic.

There’s something about taking a classic love story and holding it up to the light that makes it shine differently depending on who’s looking.

When you take the concept of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and strip it back to its barest bones, you see two lovers, bound together by obsession and circumstance and realise that any story about two lovers can be endlessly, and sometimes dangerously, open to interpretation.

Forbidden love? Soulmates? Star-crossed lovers? Or – two hurt people who bring out the very worst in each other?

Which brings us to Emerald Fennell and her adaptation. A film that feels less like a retelling and more like someone opening their teenage diary and letting us all have a read – which makes sense, because Fennell has said she made this film in the vision of how she first read the book as a young teenager.

When you see it through that soft-focus, hyper-romantic lens of adolescence it becomes very easy to just fall in love with her interpretation of this classic novel and drop the scrutiny.

When anyone reads a book, they create a completely original visualisation in their head. The characters, the rooms, the costume, the glances across candlelit tables and they all belong to us privately, which is why film adaptations can feel almost invasive someone else has dared to build the world you once created alone in your bedroom.

Someone else couldn’t possibly know the personal relationship you had with these characters. You were sat at these banquets. You fell down these rabbit holes. You sailed on those pirate ships and battled those fire-breathing dragons.

In this version, that personal imagining is the point.

Thrushcross Grange doesn’t feel architecturally consistent because memory isn’t. One room melts into another. Each room never the same as the last time. Scenes feel more like fragments of a dream than carefully mapped places. It’s like the way you remember places from your childhood; emotionally accurate, physically unreliable.

Even the casting feels like a teenage girl’s internal fantasy made visible. Margot Robbie as Cathy isn’t about historical accuracy – we know Catherine Earnshaw is famously brunette – it’s about an ideal. How Fennell – a blonde –imagined herself when she first read the book, as the heroine, the centre of every scene, the girl everyone orbits.

Which, if we’re honest, is exactly how most of us read novels at fourteen. We don’t just observe the main character, we are her.

So when you let go and view this film through the lens of teenage romantic fantasy, it’s intoxicating – but when you view it through the lens of healed adulthood, it’s alarming.

At the core of this story is a dynamic that has always been framed as passionate but is, in reality, deeply corrosive. From the very beginning, Heathcliff is introduced to Cathy not as an equal but as a possession, a distraction. A toy. A comfort object. She immediately refers to him openly as “her pet.” Something to soothe her loneliness in a household defined by neglect, misbehaviour and emotional instability and lack of maternity.

Cathy has never experienced real love or attention from a father figure or mother. Instead of providing it, her father essentially hands her a substitute; a boy she can mould, command and lean on emotionally without ever truly seeing him or confronting herself.

And Heathcliff, who has never experienced any love at all, has no framework for anything else. No sense of what healthy attachment looks like. So he accepts this arrangement as intimacy. As home. As love.

But home, for him, is conditional. He might spend the day by Cathy’s side, but at night he sleeps in the barn with the other animals. The message is constant and clear; “you are close, but never equal. Wanted, but not valued. Loved, but only on my terms. Do as I say, not as I do”.

This imbalance isn’t a phase, it’s the foundation. Their entire relationship is built on corrosive control and learned behaviour. Cathy only knows how to love through domination and condition because that’s all she’s been shown. Heathcliff only knows how to receive love through submission because he’s never been offered anything else.

From childhood onward, the language between them reflects this. Cathy calls him her pet. He repeatedly likens himself to a dog. At one point he literally declares unquestioningly and loyally; “I can follow you like a dog to the end of the world”.

He fully internalises and embodies the role she gives him.

Because people don’t magically learn healthy love when they’ve never seen it. They only know to reverse the roles. In Fennell’s film, this becomes literal. When the power shifts, but the structure remains.

There’s also something painfully familiar in how Cathy seems to want Heathcliff most when she doesn’t have him. When he’s absent, distant, or unreachable. When he’s standing right in front of her, devoted and available, he immediately becomes dispensable.

That push-pull, the craving only activated by absence, is something I recognise not from literature but from my own life. I’ve been in relationships that felt cinematic at the time. The kind of love you narrate to yourself as if there’s a soundtrack swelling in the background.

Needless to say, those past lovers and I are now blocked on all platforms.

Because what feels like a movie when you’re inside it often looks very different once the credits roll. The grand gestures and declarations start to look like emotional instability. The longing and yearning starts to look like insecurity. The “I can’t live without you” starts to sound less like devotion and more like warning sirens.

Choosing to stay in relationships like this often comes down to a lack of self-love and a lack of personal identity outside the other person – Heathcliff’s condition exactly. He’s has been told repeatedly by Cathy, by her father, by society, that he’s not good enough. That he’s lucky to be tolerated. That he should be grateful for scraps of affection.

So he keeps offering himself up, again and again, giving all of himself away, only to have his devotion thrown back in his face. And when he does receive even the smallest crumb of attention from Cathy, he interprets it as love.

Because if you’ve been starved long enough, even a crumb feels like a feast –a scenario that I’m sure is familiar to many women.

This is what makes Fennell’s adaptation so fascinating and why it’s so important not to take it literally as a romance. It perfectly captures how toxic passion can masquerade as an epic love. How intensity can be mistaken for depth. How emotional volatility can be framed as fate.

It’s beautiful. It’s dramatic. It’s hypnotic. And it’s a perfect example of what not to look for in a sustainable nourishing relationship.

Real love is not a constant state of yearning and deprivation. It isn’t a power struggle dressed up as destiny, or the kind of connection that leaves you emotionally exhausted but aesthetically pleased.

The kind of love we should be aspiring to probably wouldn’t make a very interesting film. No wily, windy moors. No torturing monologues. No grand, destructive gestures.

Just two people who don’t need to lose themselves to find each other.

The practice: how to actually flip the narrative

It’s embarrassingly simple. Which is why it works.

Step 1: Notice the first story your brain tells.

Usually it’s negative. That’s normal. Human brains are wired for protection. Feel the emotions, sit in them and acknowledge them but stop that negative thought in its tracks.

Step 2: Ask yourself, “What’s another way to see this?”

Not a wildly unrealistic one. Just a kinder, more empowering interpretation. The best possible outcome of the situation.

Step 3: Choose the narrative that moves you forward.

The one that makes you feel slightly lighter, more hopeful, or more open. The one that makes you say “Oh yeh! Everything is great?!”

That’s literally it.

Do it in your head. Do it in your notes app. Do it out loud in the shower but do it to every negative thought. Consistency matters more than intensity.

The quiet manifestation effect

Something slightly magical happens when you do this regularly.

You start making decisions from self-worth instead of fear.

You start expecting good things - so you notice and accept them.

You start behaving like someone whose life is unfolding for them, not against them.

And then, slowly, your external life begins to match that internal expectation.

After my relationship ended and I kept flipping the narrative, I noticed:

• I chose better friends and better people flooded into my life, and I have and keep finding the best friends I’ve have ever had along with my previous longterm friendships majorly strengthening. I had the best year of my life.

• I stopped chasing people who felt unsure about me, my worth is no longer a group decision.

• I started saying yes to things that excited me instead of things that validated me.

• I built a life that felt like one I’d once only daydreamed about and one that I felt totally fulfilled in.

Not because I “manifested” in the aesthetic Pinterest way.

But because I changed the story I was living within.

Effortless positivity (that’s actually built on effort)

An effortlessly positive life usually comes from very intentional mental habits.

Flipping the narrative doesn’t mean you’re never sad or hurt or disappointed. I still have days where everything feels heavy and inconvenient and slightly unfair.

But now, I don’t live there.

I feel the feeling and sit in it, slow everything down.

Then I flip the narrative.

Then I keep moving.

There hasn’t been a day I haven’t woken up after feeling heavy and haven’t felt anything but lighter after taking my time to flip the narrative.

If your peace depends on everything going right, it’s not peace it’s control and it’s a constant cycle and set up for failure.

And sometimes, happiness isn’t about changing everything externally.

Sometimes it’s about flipping the narrative internally, until one day you look around and realise you’re living inside a story you actually like.

Flip. The. Narrative.

There was a time when my internal monologue was overcritical, extremely chaotic and absolutely convinced the worst possible interpretation of every situation was the correct one.

Needless to say I had a complete lack of control over self love.

He didn’t text back? Obviously I’d said something wrong. He’s got the ick. I’m not good enough.

Didn’t get the job? More proof I wasn’t good enough. I’m never going to be successful. I’m going to be on Jeremy Kyle.

Relationship ended? Evidence I was unlovable. I’m going to be eaten by cats. Grey Gardens. Fetch me my headscarf.

You know the drill.

Then, somewhere between a devastating romantic heartbreak and multiple platonic heartbreaks alongside it, I managed to rearrange my self-worth and the slow rebuilding of a life that actually felt like mine and what I deserved, I accidentally coined a phrase that changed everything:

Flip the narrative.

It sounds simple - almost annoyingly so. But it became the most powerful practice I’ve ever used. Not because it magically erased hard situations that life will always inevitably throw your way, but because it gently rewired how I experienced them and how I reacted to them. It begun a refreshing wave of complete self regulation.

And when you change the way you experience your life, you change your life.

What “flipping the narrative” actually means

Flipping the narrative is the practice of taking the first, usually negative, interpretation your brain offers you when a difficult situation arises and deliberately choosing a more expansive, overly positive one.

Not toxic positivity.

Not pretending everything is perfect and never ever goes wrong.

Not spiritually bypassing your way out of real feelings.

Just consciously choosing a version of the story that supports you rather than sabotages you.

For example:

• “He broke up with me” → “One step closer to the right person.”, “rejection is redirection”

• “I didn’t get invited” → “My people are elsewhere and I’m making space to find them.”, “There is a seat at tables you haven’t even seen yet”. “My self worth is not a group decision”

• “I messed that up” → “I’m learning faster than ever.”

• “I feel lost” → “I’m in the middle of a reset and at least I know where I am”

It’s not delusion. It’s direction.

Because your brain is always narrating your life anyway, you might as well give it better material to work with. If you’re going to overthink, overthink the positives.

The breakup that broke me and then built me

Before I figured out this practice, I was in a relationship that completely dismantled my confidence and who I was, piece by piece. The kind where you start out secure and leave feeling like a completely blurry version of yourself.

I questioned everything: how I looked, what I said, whether I was “too much” whilst somehow not enough at the same time. I thought I was a bad, unlikeable person. By the end, my inner voice sounded like someone who didn’t even like me.

When it ended, my first narrative was predictable:

Of course it failed. Of course I wasn’t enough. Of course I’ll always pick wrong. I can’t do anything right. Why didn’t he pick me.

And then, one day, probably out of emotional exhaustion more than wisdom, I tried something different.

What if this wasn’t rejection - but redirection?

What if this wasn’t proof I was unlovable - but proof I deserved better?

What if this ending was actually making room for the life I kept saying I wanted?

That was the first flip.

Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just quieter. Kinder. More hopeful.

But from that moment, everything began to change.

Why this works (even if it feels fake at first)

Here’s what I’ve learned: your brain believes the stories you repeat most often.

If you constantly narrate your life as unlucky, rejected, behind, or failing then your brain starts scanning for evidence to support that. It becomes your reality filter.

Flipping the narrative doesn’t ignore reality.

It expands it.

As soon as you catch yourself digging yourself into a negative hole whether small or large issue, flip the narrative.

It trains your mind to look for possibility instead of just proof of fear and doubt. And over time, that subtle shift changes your decisions, your energy, the people who come into your life and what you’re open to receiving.

This is survival turned into a superpower.

In my next post I will give you a foolproof guide on how to do it, (it’s incredibly easy).