I gave up on love for quite a while after Eva, a woman I dated for a short while and loved for quite a lot longer, left me. It turned out that when push came to shove, I would (and did) actually choose boys’ nights and beer over her, as she’d suspected I might. She never knew how close it was, though.

A few years later, when I’d almost but not quite stopped missing Eva, I took the plunge and moved in with Amber. But despite following my mother’s advice to the letter, and despite the lovely Amber’s unbelievable staying power in the face of forgotten birthdays, multiple unpaid electricity bills, and many other things I’m too embarrassed to go into, even she had to hoist the white flag in the end. Both our hearts were undeniably broken, although in my defence, everyone, including me, had warned her.

I’ve given my relationship history a lot of thought over the years, because deep down I want the same things as the Ambers and Doms and Kaths of the world. I want to wake up in the morning knowing the face on the next pillow is the first thing I’m going to see every day for the rest of my life, and I want to go to bed at night knowing it’ll be the last thing I see when I take my final gasp on this earth. I do, I really do. But I just don’t seem to be able to get it right.

When Amber – like Joanne/Leanne, Eva, and all the others before them – finally exited stage left in a sad and gentle goodbye, she held my hand as she walked me to the Tube. Because she never didn’t love me, she just didn’t know what else to do.

Half an hour later, when I was drowning my Amber-tinged sorrows with my suitcase and two saucepans in a Waitrose bag on the floor of the pub beside me, out of the blue I remembered something else my mother had said to me.

She’d been called up to the head’s office for a chat about my regular less-than-perfect behaviour and, after being doled out some appropriate punishment, we were walking back along the hallway when she stopped dead and just stared at me, face like thunder.

‘You’ll never catch it, Danny,’ she said. ‘Whatever you’re chasing doesn’t exist. You need to know that.’

I could see how angry she was, but I’d had no idea what she was talking about, because the only thing I’d been chasing was a girl. That she happened to be the cousin of a girl I’d already spent a fair bit of time chasing was sheer bad luck the way I saw it, and I didn’t think I should be held responsible for what had happened next.

My mother didn’t say another word, and when we got back to the car Lou and my father were waiting patiently, two content little peas in their pod, not even slightly interested in chasing the clean heels of something they were never going to catch.