When I realised that I actually have a system for breaking up with girlfriends I decided it was time to find out how to maintain a long-term relationship. The break-up process is drilled to perfection. Begin by unfollowing their social media, throwing out their personal paraphernalia and breaking off contact. Cry as much as necessary. Occasionally write her an email but – and this is imperative – do not send it. Listen to the Cure and Gary Numan and, if you really must, that angry Alanis Morissette song. Do this and you’ll come up smiling in a couple of months.  At the age of 30 my longest relationship is 18 months. But, in all honesty, we spent a quarter of that time broken up and waiting to get back together. And the rest? Too polyamorous, too interested in running off with comedians, too unable to leave their boyfriends and too abroad. When the last one finished with me via Facebook the week after she moved back to America, I sat on the toilet lid and blasted the shower so my room mate couldn’t hear me sobbing.  Couples who have been together since their early 20s baffle me. They make it seem so effortless. One day they are posting an indecorous number of selfies to social media and the next wearing suits and dresses and talking about “finding a window” for dinner.  Nearly every member of my family is in such a relationship. Now I worry about turning into the gin-addled, bachelor uncle – the male equivalent of the crazy cat lady.  My family is unusual, statistically. The divorce rate in the UK is 42% but each of the five couples in my family are in relationships so long-term they may as well have been consummated on the maiden voyage of the Mary Rose. My father has two sisters and my mother has one brother; they have all been married about 30 years and my paternal grandparents have been married twice as long as I’ve been alive.  You have been more interested in your relationship with yourself, said Uncle Phil  Maybe it’s turning 30, but recently the tides of familial and social opinion have started wearing down the anti-marriage convictions I formed in student digs over battered copies of Nietzsche and soggy roll-ups. I feel them eroding like the sandcastles my father, siblings and I would build on bleak Welsh beaches. So my younger sister’s wedding seemed like a good opportunity to track everyone down and find out where I was going wrong.  The reception was held at a Victorian boarding school with expansive grounds, soft lawns and verdant views of Sussex. Towards the end of the day, I tackled them at the table. Uncle Mark ate a forkful of cake and peered into the pale yellow of his wine, giving it a discerning sniff while his wife, Aunty Clare, had her nose pressed against her baby granddaughter, Grace.  “Let me go first,” said Clare, a marriage-guidance counsellor. “It’s about understanding that people have different love languages,” she said. “So if I make a special meal I want lots of verbal affirmation but Mark might give me a hug – we had to learn to give each other what we needed to feel loved.”  I furrowed my brow as I struggled to relate this idea to my own experience. Working out the “love language” of the latest person I found myself in an inadvisable relationship with seemed premature.  Clare must have picked up on my yearning for more practical advice because she added, “Maintaining a relationship is bloody hard work.”  She passed Grace across in that way people pass new babies round, like a spliff. “You just haven’t yet met someone about whom you can say – right, no matter what, I want to make this relationship work.”  But I have, I thought. The girls just don’t seem to share my opinion.  “It’s about self-sacrifice,” chimed my old grandfather whose turn it was to hold Grace, his first great-grandchild. He had waited patiently for my grandmother to finish her account of their wartime courtship – suffice to say it involved writing letters for three years before their first kiss.  “When you join your life to someone else you sacrifice a lot,” he continued. “And people today are brought up not to be put out – it was simpler when we were young because we didn’t expect so much.”  Unable to return to a simpler age, I turned to watch the speeches. My sister’s new husband, rosy-cheeked with wine, spoke with stirring swoops of the arm. Sitting next to him, my sister and mother were on a rollercoaster of emotion, laughing one minute and exchanging profound hugs the next.  “You have been more interested in your relationship with yourself,” said Uncle Phil, a business coach, who was seated with his wife, Aunty Rachel, at another table. “I don’t think it has been a conscious decision, but that’s what your soul has been saying and life responds to that – when you are ready these things tend to happen fairly naturally.”  Perhaps he was right. Had I been overthinking it? “Yes, don’t compare yourself to others,” said Aunty Rachel. She rested a wine glass in her hand. “We never compare our relationship to other people’s – it stops us appreciating each other.”  As the band started up and the dance floor filled up, I pulled my parents to one side. “What I’ve noticed is that you tend to jump immediately to the extreme of falling in love,” said my mother. My father nodded. “It’s not just about getting to know someone. It’s about a slow drawing together and you have to give that time.”  I worry that I'll end up as a gin-addled bachelor uncle, the male version of the crazy cat lady  It’s true that I have what you could call an addictive personality. I find myself desperately trying to get closer to someone, closer than the incandescent metals that form an alloy, closer than the atoms smashed together at Cern.  “I need to have my own personality,” the girls would complain. I disagreed. They could have my personality. Hell, I needed someone to take it off my hands.  But I’m not just going to chalk all this up to the pathology de jour – sex and love addiction. I like to look at things more practically. My lifestyle has been wildly different to everyone else in my family. My mid-20s were racked by illness and instability and nowadays I live abroad with a sexy but transient community of expats. I have always lacked the stability to make a long-term relationship feasible and things remain that way.  And that’s no bad thing. I agree with advice columnist Dan Savage, who is fond of opining that society’s definition of a successful relationship is that you are together until one of you dies. Wouldn’t it be better to ask yourself instead whether you are better off for being with that person? Do you have fun? Are you still friends? If the answers are “yes”, then that’s a successful relationship.  Uncle Panos and Aunty Sue, delegates from the Greek Cypriot side of the family, nodded sagely as I shouted all this to them over the playing of the band. “Don’t get married,” Panos said. “I only married because I was tricked – I was promised parole after five years.”  Aunty Sue looked at him, eyes narrowed slightly. “He knew what he was getting into,” she said, timing her response to perfection. “He never reads the fine print.”
He’s got plenty of experience in dealing with break-ups but Nathan A Thompson has realised that, at 30, none of his relationships have lasted longer than 18 months. What’s he doing wrong?