‘That show is a fantasy of a love that hardly ever comes true,’ Mum said. ‘Jac realising she made a mistake and coming back to you is a fantasy too.’
Tears sprang to my eyes. I blinked them back.
But I couldn’t fool Mum. ‘Swapping one fantasy for another isn’t going to help anything, sweetheart,’ she said, reaching across the table and taking my hand. ‘You need to make some real steps forward, towards a new life of your own. A real life. Without Jac.’
I heard what Mum was saying. I really did.
But when I headed upstairs after dinner, to the bedroom that had been mine as a kid and had suddenly become mine again two months, three weeks, six days, and three hours ago, I opened up my laptop and went to the application website.
Mum wasn’t wrong. In fact, I could write a list of all the things she was right about, like:
1)Marry Me, Julietabsolutely was a fantasy.
2) The chances of me finding a soulmate on the show were minuscule, even if I was ready to put myself back out there.
3) No matter how hard I tried, Jac wasn’t going to get jealous and she absolutely wasn’t coming back.
I was right too, though. My application wasn’t about Jac. Or at least, it wasn’tjustabout Jac. It was about me.
Jac hatedMarry Me, Juliet.‘What can you possibly get out of this?’ she’d asked me once in frustration. ‘It’s heteronormative, it’s misogynistic, and on top of that, it’s garbage.’
‘I like seeing them fall in love,’ I replied.
‘You know they don’t actually fall in love, right?’
‘Some of them do! Luna and Roger have been together for more than two years now. And Basil and Megan—’
‘Mandie,’ Jac said, ‘I’m not interested. Come to me when you have something worthwhile to talk about.’
I’d tried so hard to be the girlfriend Jac deserved, someone smart and clever and deep. I’d bent and broken parts of myself trying to become that girl. But I’d never stopped watchingMarry Me, Juliet.
I didn’t know how to put it into words in a way that would make Mum understand. I couldn’t even really explain it to myself.
ButMarry Me, Julietdidn’t have Jac’s fingerprints all over it.Marry Me, Julietwas justmine.
The first page of the application was full of pretty standard form questions that I filled out quickly: name, age, occupation, clothing sizes, whether or not I had any serious medical issues, that sort of thing. The last question was:What is your sexual orientation?
Whenever this question turned up on forms, I usually just clickedbisexualand got on with it. I’d been out since I was fifteen. It had been tough for a while until I found my place and my little queer community, but I’d done that work a long time ago. I was comfortable with who I was now. It wasn’t a big deal.
But this wasn’t a drop-down list, it was just a blank space. I paused, finger hovering over thebkey.
There hadn’t been a lot of out bi contestants onMarry Me, Juliet, but there’d been a few. Every single one of them had been treated horribly, either in the Villa, by the audience, or both. It was a sort of escalated version of what usually happened to me at work: as soon as people found out you were into women as well as men, they found a way to be gross about it.
No matter what my reasons were for wanting to go on the show, that was… not the experience I wanted.
I date men,I typed in the box.
Jac would be furious with me. She talked a lot about theimportance of media representation. She’d want me to come out immediately, loud and proud.
But Jac had given up any right to a say in what I did two months, three weeks, six days and counting-the-hours-was-a-pointless-waste-of-time ago. I saved my answers and clicked through to the next page.
The next page of the application was all short-answer questions – quite a lot of them, I discovered, as I scrolled to the bottom.What are you passionate about? When did you last cry?(God, the answer to that one was going to be embarrassing.)What are your favourite outdoor activities? Your five best features? Your five worst features?
There must have been forty or fifty questions altogether. Ooof. This was going to take a while.
I cracked my knuckles. If I’d been wearing long sleeves, I would have rolled them up. I didn’t mind hard work. That could go under ‘best features’.
I scrolled back up, planning to start at the top, but one of the questions caught my eye and made me stop.What scares you?
