Chapter 4: The dad

The Dating Chronicles: Adelaide edition

It was a warm Wednesday in January of 2023, and my friend Marie had invited me to see Marc Ribillet with her, who I had never heard of, but she had a spare ticket. Never one to shy away from a free night out and the opportunity to spend an evening with my fated friend (I met her through the mixologist), I enthusiastically jumped at the evening. But not before forgetting what day and time the event was.

Me: Just wondering what time the gig is this week xx

Me: it is this week isn’t it xx

Marie: It’s this wednesdeee. It’s from 7 but I don’t think Marc will play until like 9, which is past our bed times, I will nap in preparation

Me: My goodness, we are aging, what time do you wanna go in?

Marie: Ummm, maybe from 8? I’m flexible, although we are meeting the dad for a drink before

Me: The dad?

Marie: Yes. We were hugging and I was telling you about the dad. He is an old friend from work and he’s great. He moved jobs so we agreed to have a drink together beforehand. He’s a Gemini 41 year old man who is very witty in personality and good taste in music

Me: Ohh I think I remember the 41 year old part haha

When we arrived, we purchased our overpriced drinks and beelined for the smoker’s area to meet him, but I soon bumped into one too many familiar faces and after briefly greeting the dad, I slunk back into the crowd, leaving Marie to her own devices. When the air smelled like the gig was soon to start, we made our way through the crowd to find our sweet spot (which actually doesn’t exist for two five feet tall women in a mosh pit) and watched through gaps between moving heads as Marc made his way on stage.
Ten minutes into the show, we were again greeted by a familiar face – it was the dad, explaining that he’d lost his friend, and would we mind if he stayed with us. “Of course not!” we chimed to him in unison as we ceased straining our necks and instead decided to just dance to the music we could hear.

When the gig was over halfway through, our bodies had been naturally interchanging positions of who was stood next to who, until I felt him slide into the position of standing closely behind me. I was trying to decipher if it was an intentional move on his part, so I took a small step back to bridge some of the distance between us when he slid his arm around my waist. Ah ha, I smirked to myself, before exchanging a look with Marie that said, who would’ve thought!? and, Is it ok if I hook up with your old colleague? Successfully reading my facial expressions, she laughed before giving me the silent green light. I turned my body toward his and looked up at him, noticing how handsome he was both up close and from a distance, and then he kissed me. We continued this dance, of my body turning back towards the stage momentarily before turning again to face him, to kiss him. I didn’t care for the strangers around me, or what they would think, I felt an immediate attraction towards him that was only intensified by knowing his age. It was that assumption of age and maturity growing parallel with one another, and I wondered briefly if I was kissing a man who was just that – a man.

When the gig ended, I wondered about the dad’s movements. Would he ask what I was doing post-gig, would he coyly tag along for the short walk back to my house, or had we simply exchanged a fleeting attraction turned shared moment of intimacy. I didn’t know him outside of what Marie had shared with me and was in no position to make any further assumptions. But to my surprise, he cheerfully joined us as we made our way back to my house, where Marie gathered her belongings at the speed of light and disappeared in an instant. The moment the front door closed, we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other; like moths to a flame, or two people charged with electric sexual chemistry. We fumbled our way up the stairs, clinging to each other lustfully before growing so impatient we tore each other’s clothes off in the upstairs bathroom. It was late enough that my roommates were in bed, but not late enough to know that they were well and truly asleep. I didn’t care – until I did – and in a moment of mid-sex clarity I quickly realised this was not an act I wanted to be caught in, nor were the tiles ideal for my knees. We gathered the coins that had flown out of his pockets, laughing as we made the short distance to my room to continue our escapades.

In the morning, I still wasn’t sure what to expect from him, but a large part of me believed that it would be a one-night stand, a reaching for underwear trailed by a mildly rigid goodbye and no follow through. I was both still ok with the idea of casual sex, and too accustomed to men’s morning after behaviours to expect any differently. I was also familiar with the immediate feelings that usually came after spending a night with someone – that they were out of my league, and I was kidding myself to have thought they could be interested in anything more with me. If you tell yourself something enough times, eventually you believe it. And if you expose yourself to enough men who lack respect for your personhood, you’ll have crippling self-esteem. But when he was dressed and lingering at my bedroom door, he asked for my number in the same manner one would confidently ask a rhetorical question, like it was a given. I was still wrapped naked in my quilt, suddenly suspicious that his age meant he was only being courteous, but still I gave it to him. When he left, I tried to maintain my composure as the hyper-independent woman I’d let myself become in recent years, attempting to convince myself that I didn’t care whether or not I heard from him. But when my phone pinged just a couple of hours later, I quickly realised how much I did in fact, care.

The next two days were a constant volley of messages between us, no thoughts left unsaid, no parts of our days left unshared. It was this immediate and very mutual openness that made me feel quite safe. I still hesitated before sending a message, re-reading my sentences to ensure I was making sense, and sounding smart, and being the right amount of funny. But the mental labour of quick quips was lessened by the ease that came with speaking to him. He would always ask me so many questions about my days, and I his, but I never felt as though we were at risk of running out of anything to talk about. It was apparent that neither of us could wait much longer before seeing the other, and so on the Saturday evening, despite his poker night and my waitressing shift, we spent another night together. This time, filling in all of the blanks of our respective nights, side by side in my bed in the late hours of the evening.

The next time we saw each other was three days later. An official first date spent in the Adelaide hills, eating a late lunch at a quiet restaurant outside. It felt like I was meeting him for the first time all over again; it was honest and sober and sincere, and he made me laugh until my stomach hurt. I remember looking at him, with his hand resting on my thigh, and feeling my insides flip. I wasn’t surprised at how quickly I was relinquishing myself to him, giving myself permission to lean into the unfamiliar territory of a crush that didn’t frighten me. It felt safe to let him see me, to gently lay some of my cards on the table without withholding. I told him about my years as a sex worker, and he didn’t bat an eye. He told me he had a sixteen-year-old daughter, and I thought he was kidding. I wasn’t concerned though, at least not initially. Despite being closer in age to his daughter than I was to him, I was slowly garnering that perhaps there was a larger gap between the two of them that wasn’t age related. I considered myself at sixteen, and my relationship with my own dad, and in that moment, I didn’t want to ask any further questions, I wasn’t prepared to burst the premature bubble.

A few nights later, I was booked for a bucks show down South, and was feeling more unenthusiastic towards the shift than I normally would. Don’t get me wrong, I never went into these shifts wholly optimistic – I was getting half (or sometimes fully) naked for men and figuratively clapping along to their cave men-like behaviours – but all I wanted to do was spend my Saturday night with the dad. It was a combination of being in the early stages of courtship and crushes, paired with a disdain for the industry after seven mostly gruelling years of maintaining two personas with conflicting values. It was my second shift back after my hiatus, where I ran away to Bali for six weeks because a man had punched his fist through a door three times just inches away from me. It terrified me, so I fled.
I had a sense of unease in my gut on the drive to my shift. Feelings I put down to nothing more than apprehension towards the industry, to the job, to the men. Logically it made sense after the aggression I’d experienced weeks prior – a situation I’d convinced myself I would never find myself in again. But I was kidding myself in believing that I had more control than I did, that I was ever safe when I entered those rooms. Seven years in the industry did that to me, it changed me on a molecular level. What used to be intolerable became a normal facet of the job. What I previously swore to myself I would never do, I did. And with each shift, and each passing year of crossing a threshold from shame to “empowerment”, it became frighteningly easy to convince myself that it was liberating. That I believed I was wholly unscathed simply by deducing that I’d never been in danger because I hadn’t been hurt or assaulted. It’s like that quote about swearing to never cross a line until one day you do, and the line ceases to exist. That’s what sex work is. You clutch to your lines when you enter it, vowing to remember them, and with enough time they vanish. Until the last line left is the one between you, and her, the one you swore to never blur. And then you vanish too. I’d created a false sense of security in believing that I’d never been seriously compromised. But on this night, everything changed, and I later learnt that the unease I’d experienced on my way there, was a deafening alarm bell. That was the night that altered me, another molecular shift. A part of me was taken that to this day, I know I’ll never get back.

In the weeks that followed my final shift (I quit immediately), the dad and I had begun to spend almost all of our free time together. We pressed our feet to the accelerator at a rate that should have concerned me but didn’t. With him there was routine, and joy, and a constant and very welcomed distraction. On the nights that we weren’t cooking dinner together followed by a movie on the couch, we were at The Olivia Hotel, trying new wines and getting lost in a small world of our own making. It was there that he told me he still loved his ex, and I didn’t panic. It was there that he told me he loved me for the first time, with tears in his eyes. “I love you. I am so in love with you Tori”. It became our place, a home away from home to sit on the balcony in the shade of the trees, away from the dry summer heat. It was where we spent most of our time, second to his green three-seater couch. Where I told him with my feet resting in his lap what had happened during that shift. It took two bottles of wine for me to find the words, to reach for the memories of the night that my brain hadn’t let me get close to for weeks. I don’t remember much outside of everything spilling out of me and him holding me afterwards. He was the second person I told, and the second person to call a spade, a spade.

As our relationship progressed, I tried with all of my might to sustain our love bubble, to make it some kind of an impenetrable forcefield between us, and the real world. The one that I was denying to myself that I was still existing in. There was a sense of safety and escapism with him, as though being with him was proof that I wasn’t irreversibly damaged after my experience, that I could love, and be loved. He embodied security in every essence of the meaning, and I would spend my free days at his house in solitude, curling up on the couch in the afternoons so excited at the prospect of him returning home from work. Of being able to spend more time with him, to cook dinner with him, to press my body against his and listen to him talk. I felt more at home in the walls of his house than I did my own, with the exception of every other weekend when his daughter would stay with him, and I would remove all traces of my existence from the house. It wasn’t that I was in any kind of denial about him having a daughter, it was that he rarely spoke about her, and she didn’t know about me. That was the first crack to show itself. I would poke and prod, trying gently to coax things out of him, to learn about her, and he would always successfully talk around it. Sometimes I would potter around his house when he had left for work in the morning and peer into her lifeless bedroom. It made me sad; it made me uncomfortable. There was no presence, no personality, not a single picture, plant, book. It looked like a barren spare bedroom made up for last minute overnights. There was no essence of a teenage girl to be found in the entire house. I felt sad for her, this young girl that I hadn’t met and had only seen a few pictures of. I felt worse when he would talk about having a baby with me, which happened almost every time we were intimate.

We continued on like this, for the first two months of our relationship. Lust, love, sex, wine, denial. We would drink heavily, professing our love and showering one another in sentiments of adoration only to fall asleep on his couch; where I would wake in the early hours of the morning trying to pry him off of it, and into bed. It never felt good afterwards, clutching my head and my stomach the next day only to do it all again with him the following evening. I understood both what I was running from and running toward, but I couldn’t understand what he’d wanted to escape. Personally, it was easier denying myself of sobriety, than to acknowledge what I’d experienced. I was too consumed by shame in the stark hours of daylight, still believing that I’d brought it on myself. But all the same, I was still too self-aware to believe that our routine was sustainable. And when I tried to envision our future together, it concerned me. I told him we needed to stop drinking and he agreed, but only a few nights later I found myself pulling him to his bed, not from the couch, but from his porch where he’d passed out because he didn’t have his keys. It was the second crack, but it felt more like a small earthquake.

I started spending more time at home, and less time loitering around his house waiting to see him, to spend time with him, but not for a lack of trying. I could feel myself losing traces of me, at the same time that I was watching him slowly shrink. He pulled back, and with him his demeanour shifted too. Suddenly, there were no nights during the week left for me, there simply wasn’t enough time between his work schedule and his evening hobbies. He had also begun to pick at everything that I said, leaning on his intellect to pull my thoughts apart and diminish anything I tried to talk about. I felt small, and childish, and completely rejected by the man who until recently, had been moving mountains to see me, and listening to me ramble with awe written all over his face. I tried, for the first time in my adult life, to communicate what I was experiencing on my side of the relationship, but it always fell on deaf ears. Love wasn’t supposed to be this hard this early on. I took to my journals to word vomit everything he wasn’t hearing me say.

21/04/23

I’ve spent the last couple of nights at his place, but tonight something felt off. He’s been less affectionate both physically, and verbally. He’s stopped showering me in ‘you’re so beautiful’ and ‘you’re so wonderful’, and ‘you’re so smart’. Maybe we did the thing, the thing everyone warns you against – the ‘what not to do’ – spending too much time together. Maybe whatever façade I was maintaining is cracking. Something is sitting in my gut. And I am so aware that I’ve had tendencies in the past, and potentially still do, to be overly sensitive in regard to the outward behaviours of others towards me. I’m starting to feel like a pest, like my presence is irking him, like he doesn’t want to kiss me, or hold me, or fuck me anymore. Is he wondering if this relationship, or me as a partner, if we’re viable? I felt seen and it felt so wonderful, and now I just feel small. Wondering if I’m enough for him. Wondering if these old patterns that have shook the dust off of themselves are rearing their ugly heads. Wondering if he’s still in love with me. Don’t want to talk about my feelings because I do that all the time and I think I might be too much.
Sometimes he makes me feel stupid. Or, sometimes I make me feel stupid – I don’t know which one it is.

02/05/23

I’m met with a minor blow and suddenly I’m 19, 21, 23, 24 all over again. Holding my breath for the words I’d have to pull out of them. ‘Yes, no, maybe, I’m not sure, not sure that I love you anymore, maybe we should sleep with other people, I’m not ready for a relationship, we’re both lost, this can’t go on’. All different versions of the same sentiment. And all the blows hit the same way – rendering me a hopeless version of myself. Desperate to make my way back; I would have crawled through glass if given the opportunity. Picked up the fragments of myself and stuck them back to my body with adhesive.

09/05/23

I’ve found myself slinking back to my old bedroom. Maybe I can have a conversation with my former self. Think she’d ask me what I’m doing. Lately I don’t know what music I like, or how to dress. Surprised I can even respond to my own name at this point. How did I get so far away from myself again? There’s too much inconsistency, I want to run and hide.

12/05/23

I miss you. Miss the version of you I met and loved. The you who couldn’t contain himself. Had to always touch me, always needed to tell me the things you were thinking about me. Told me you could kiss me forever, that you wanted me to have your baby. I miss the you before soups and strained conversation. Is it just me with one foot out? Or are we both playing pretend? Too worried about hurting you when you’re hurting me. I remember when you said how sure you were, something to the likes of that. How you said you felt it immediately, how you knew immediately. I’m tired all of the time now. Sitting idle, waiting for something, for my feelings to come flooding back. I want to be washed over by them again.

I wanted to leave the relationship, to crawl back to myself on my own with the aid of my friends. I wanted my hyper-independent self back, the version of me that had been created over years of rejection and mother issues and love that I’d instead decided to create for myself. But I wanted to be loved, too. It had been so long that I felt like I was owed it, that the universe was indebted to me for my years of grief and loneliness. I understood that I had one foot out of the door, but my desire to experience a big love forced me to pull it back out of the frame.
I wanted to go back to nights on the couch, not with the wine, but with his hands holding my face telling me that I was beautiful, that I was smart, that he could kiss me forever. I wanted to lay in his bed in the morning, my stomach hurting from laughing before my eyes were even open. I wanted to walk back down the aisles of Foodland together, picking the ingredients for our dinner and sneaking a bag of hash browns into the trolley, knowing he would cook them for me in the morning as he made me a coffee. I wanted to stand in any room of his house, knowing in a matter of moments he would appear and wrap his arms around me, kissing my head, cheeks, the back of my neck. I wanted to hold him and experience again, that feeling of jumping into love, not knowing or caring where I would land, because I was doing it with him. I wanted to see a future with him, but I was living in the very near past, longing for everything to go back to the way it was; still not understanding how we’d gotten there in the first place. It was still the beginning, I didn’t want it to be the beginning of the end too.

It was during this period of uncertainty, that one evening I experienced a terrible endo flare up. I was home alone at 11pm on a Saturday night, and after trying and failing to get a hold of all of my friends in close proximity, I phoned him. I didn’t want to lean on him, didn’t want to ask him for anything. I had already convinced myself I was too much, too hard, too difficult. But in that moment, I was so desperate for someone to help me, to drive me to the hospital, that I put my ego to the side. When he answered the phone, it was obvious that I’d woken him, “hello?” he slurred. “Hi, I’m so sorry for waking you up, just wondering if you got my message? Um, I think I need to go to the hospital”. He sighed loudly, with an air of something that felt like frustration, “Why? Why do you think you need to go to the hospital?” “I’m just having really awful period pain, it’s bad, like it’s alarmingly bad”. He sighed loudly again, and my earlier suspicions about him being frustrated with me were immediately confirmed, “do you want me to take you?” he was disgruntled, almost bitter sounding. “I mean, yeah… that’s why I’m phoning you, to ask you for help, I’ve tried so many people, but I can’t get a hold of anyone else” Another sigh followed by, “I don’t really know how hospitals work Tori”. A 41-year-old man with a teenage daughter, who apparently doesn’t know how hospitals work. I could have screamed. “Actually, don’t worry about it, someone’s calling me back now, I’ll sort something out”. It was a complete lie, and not to sound like a martyr, but I’d dealt with flare ups before, I didn’t need the added stress of a resentful partner who might have a small meltdown because they didn’t know where to park. I spent the remainder of the night clutching my stomach and cursing him, before finally falling into an angry and restless sleep.

In the morning I was seething, and resolute. It was the nail in the coffin for me, followed by another, smaller nail when I realised that I hadn’t heard from him, and it was almost eleven o’clock. Surely the man cannot still be asleep. In my head it was as good as done.
When he finally called to check in, I was sitting in my car at the beach trying to find a semblance of peace and explained to him how frustrated I was at his response, that I’d lied to him on account of feeling like a burden. “You made me feel as though it was the last thing on earth that you wanted to do, to help me”. “It was. The last thing I wanted to do. I just wanted to rest and sleep, and to not be awake”. It felt like someone had punched me in the gut. When we got off of the phone after talking in circles, I spoke to myself out loud like I was in a scene of an MA15+ fantasy movie about to take someone’s life: you know what needs to be done. I messaged him, asking if he would be home at a point during the day, and he responded yes, that he would be almost all day. “Can I come by now?” I asked him. “No, I’m not ready”. Not ready? NOT READY?

By the time he was “ready”, it was 6pm, and I’d forgotten everything I’d prepared to say earlier. I walked into his living room, and he looked terrible. We sat, we talked, we cried, and he explained to me how poor his mental health had gotten. That it was the reason he’d lapsed in being a wonderful partner, and a present, loving person. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? That your mental health had gotten this bad?” “I’ve been signalling” he said. “I’m not a mind reader, I can’t read between lines. I wish you had told me when it started to get this bad, I would’ve known how to show up for you, we could have talked about this together. I felt like I’d done something wrong, like you were punishing me for something I didn’t know I did”. “I thought I could fix it all on my own” he said sadly. “It doesn’t work that way, you have to let people in, nobody can do it on their own, every single person needs love and support when it gets this bad. I don’t always get it right when it comes to my own mental health, and I wouldn’t have held your hand and walked you through the doors, but I could have at least helped you to find them”. “What if… can I just have two weeks?” “and then what? Two weeks to do what?” “I just need to get on top of work, and sleep, and the rest is life”. “It doesn’t work that way, something this big doesn’t just go away in a fortnight”. “So, what’s your decision then?” “Well, fuck… If I stay, I feel like I’m choosing you and your well-being over me and my own, and if I leave, I feel like I’m abandoning you in your hour of need”. More tears. “So” he said again, “what’s your decision?” I looked down in my lap at my scrunched, soggy ball of tissues that were enmeshed with my hands and his. “I love you” I said, “but two weeks isn’t going to fix or change anything”. He dropped my hands and stood up before asking me to please leave. I cried like a baby and stood to gather my remaining belongings from the room whilst he settled into his computer chair at his desk, his back turned to me. “Thanks” he said bitterly. “Why are you suddenly being nasty?” “I’m not, I don’t hate you Tori, I just have things I need to get done”. “This is really difficult, I don’t want to not have you in my life” I choked out, standing in the middle of the living room not knowing what to do with myself. “You don’t have to” he said. “And what… what if nothing changes in two weeks?” “then we’ve lost two weeks” he said. Resigned to my people pleasing tendencies and triggered by my history with my mum (fearing he would do something drastic), I agreed to the two weeks. But the moment I reversed out of his driveway, I knew that I’d made an error in judgement.

A week of regret later, I finally mustered up the courage to find clarity and resolve regarding our relationship. I messaged him and asked to come over, and this time he didn’t leave me in six hours of lieu; he knew what was coming. It was easier the second time around, despite his tears and his pleas. I knew I both needed and deserved more, that I didn’t want to hold a 41-year-old man’s hand as he dealt with both years of regret and unhappiness, and a strained relationship with his teenage daughter that I’m not sure he’ll ever give the time and effort that it deserves.
This time when I drove away, I felt nothing but relief. There were no tears, there was no pain, or sadness, just reprieve, and a knowing that for the first time in my life, I had recognised that a partner wasn’t serving me, and had decided against waiting for it to get better. I felt proud of myself, not only for understanding my needs, but for walking away from a person who in previous years, I would have clung to for love and support. It’s amazing though, how lightly I leant on him during that period, because subconsciously I understood how fragile his entire foundation was as a person, and as a partner. I couldn’t take care of both of us, I was only interested in taking care of myself. I had an enormous and daunting road ahead of me in the way of recovering from my assault, and I couldn’t have someone in my corner who I didn’t trust could be a pillar of strength for me in the way that I knew my sister and my friends would be. Walking away from that relationship was one of the best things that I’ve ever done, and until this moment, I’ve never looked back.

24/05/23

I’m watching my reflection in the mirror. Hair half wet, falling onto my face in ways that remind me of my twenty-year-old self. Strange and conflicting it is to feel both pride and envy for her. As though she was deprived of what I know now, what we know now, and yet had something that I do not currently possess. It is not tangible. It is vulnerability, and a striking courage to try. To keep trying. I wonder if she knew. Perhaps I too, have that courage, and I do not know it. What I do know, is what I desire. I’ve a longing to bury back into my bones, into myself, into home – me. Maybe if I dress like her I’ll be able to reach her. Tell her of the strength I’ve found. I think she would be proud, shocked. Think she’d smile and cry happy tears. To know we finally learnt. It feels like a life-altering learning. It’s kind of phenomenal to be in this position now. I know there’s another corner to turn, know it’s going to really hurt. But I actually can’t wait.