I had been out with girls before, of course, in Belfast. I liked them well enough, but I was never very sorry to see them go. In fact, by the time they did go, it was a relief. I could sense that there was a whole range of emotions they wanted and expected me to feel: passion, jealousy, acute distress if they weren’t available that evening and a keen excitement if they were. I tried to feel this way, if only to make them happy, but I didn’t. The more I didn’t feel that way about them, the more they felt that way about me.

They exhausted me, with their storm of inexplicable feelings. I could see them, like mime artists watched through a thick pane of glass, gesturing furiously, weeping with frustration because I had forgotten to phone them when I said I would, or tearful with joy if I had forced myself to make a special effort and bought them a bunch of flowers. It was a fake, though. I realised that they were happy with the flowers because they thought the flowers said ‘I love you.’ But I didn’t love them, I only quite liked them, and so gradually I stopped buying the flowers because I knew that the flowers were telling lies. Then, after a while, my heart would slowly sink when the phone rang, with its irritable summoning. Brrrrrrring. I had briefly enjoyed sleeping with them and maybe kidded myself it could go further, but the weight of their disappointed expectations became a burden to me. I would catch myself guiltily yearning for long rows of evenings spent on my own, or just watching television with Big Jacky.

I had the hazy feeling that perhaps I was the kind of man who was discussed in detail in those articles in women’s magazines with headings like ‘What to do when he seems distant’ or ‘When he won’t commit’. All that endless talk. I always felt a bit sorry for the men in those articles, the anonymous villains of complaining anecdotes. If you ever got to hear their side of things, perhaps they wouldn’t have seemed so bad after all.

If a woman has a pretty face and a laugh just a wee bit like the buzz of an electric carving knife, for example, what should a man do? Should he be frank and say: ‘I have slowly come to realise that if we were to spend thirty years together, the cumulative effects of your distinctive laugh – in spite of all your other virtues – might one day make me dream of going after you with an actual carving knife. It is surely better for us to stop seeing each other now before things get that serious’? Or should he just let longer and longer intervals lapse between his phone calls, until – wreathed in mystery and irritation – he finally disappears from view, a misty folk-memory of masculine disappointment?