Lucy Holden: ‘Embrace conscious singledom for 2022 – or keep dating the pianist who lives in a van?’

January, January, January. The month of imaginative reinvention – most of us trying to imagine how life could improve without a hangover, basically.

But I’ll talk sober dating next time because right now those wild enough to quit alcohol in the bleakest month of all are probably trying not to think about it — and for the rest of us, it’s already annoying. Let’s face it – if you’re a couple, much easier. If you’re single and dating: awful. I never stay dry in January because it’s against my religion (the Coach and Horses, Soho).

After receiving New Year texts from all of 2021’s first dates and some great playlists from the Ethical Non-Monogamist (who’d had a dream I was wearing silk pyjamas covered in toucans and sent a link to Dempsey and Dempsey pair that were similar and he thought would look very fetching) it was still just me and the Pianist I’d met before Christmas clinging onto a slightly fraying rope of romance.

I was trying to get my head around the fact that I’d not be consciously single – 2022’s buzz term, according to Bumble – for the beginning of the year because I have a savagely honest (but hopefully also very funny) memoir, Lucid, coming out next month and didn’t want to have to consider anyone else’s emotions in the process.

According to most boyfriends I’ve had in the past, I either didn’t write about them enough or wrote about the wrong bits – plus I shouldn’t have slept with anyone else ever, so who were these exes, anyway? It was both draining and dull.

The Pianist was looking ahead in a different way, wondering if 2022 would be the year he’d set up his own company. In his day job he’s a Steve Jobs inventor type minus the glasses and turtlenecks, but he wanted to reinvent himself with glasses and turtlenecks.

“But you don’t need glasses,” I said. “I know,” he said, with a look of anguish. Apparently ‘geniuses’ micro-dose, and he was also considering that. Hmmm, I thought wondering if he was about to morph into an entirely different person.

We also had a more logistical problem. Dating each other was becoming extremely expensive because before Christmas – he having booked several fancy hotels on back-to-back weekends – he’d confessed that he lived in his van.

“VAN LIFE!” I whooped, having been converted this year. “It’s more of a car-life, to be honest,” he said, which – hey – was better late than never. I’d thought our hotel excursions were a gesture of romanticism, but now I was wondering if he was bankrupt. Or a bankrupt fugitive. He said he just wanted the freedom, so maybe he was a monied fugitive?

I had no place of permanence to offer either, still being between friends’ houses in London and my very old-fashioned parents’ house in Bath, the pandemic having thrown me out of my London rental. “Let’s meet in the hot tub of Homewood,” I said, which was to be our temporary home near Bath that weekend. Having felt the pains of Generation Rent for the last decade, I was wondering if it was going to ruin another relationship.