I didn’t mean to dump my boyfriend of fourteen months over WhatsApp. It’s not my fault he wouldn’t accept my FaceTime call because he knew what was coming and didn’t want his mum to hear the fallout from the next room. I tried to hold it in, I really did. I, nobly, wanted to wait until after we’d finished our January exams. But when those seeds of doubt are planted they grow like ivy: rapid and uncontainable. The thought This needs to end was like an itch that plagued me every hour of every day; it was my first thought waking up and my last thought going to bed.

I picked up hours at work to distract myself, but stacking shelves is hardly the most mentally stimulating job in the world so my brain continued to tick, tick, tick, so resolute in my decision that I couldn’t even bide the time by weighing up the pros and cons in my head because the answer was already so clear. Decanting the last of the turkey-and-trimmings sandwiches into the Meal Deal fridge on Boxing Day, a coworker asked me about my love life:

“Have you got a fella then?”

I burst into laughter.

Then, composing myself, “For now.”

“But not for long?”

“Let’s just say I want to leave him in 2018.”

So, I did.

I think what stopped me from dropping the bomb sooner was the fear that maybe ending things wouldn’t make me feel better. The break-up clichés that TV and movies and music have drilled into us over the years portend a post-split ritual of moping, eating your weight in Ben and Jerry’s and crying over romcoms. After it was over I ducked for cover, waiting for the inevitable despair to hit me like a train. Only, the train never came.

I felt amazing.

I felt guilty for how amazing I felt.

A few hours after my now-ex boyfriend and I said our WhatsApp goodbyes for good, I went for drinks with some friends.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“It’s going great” I say, with an almost-maniacal smile plastered across my face, “These valuable goods are back on the market.”

The issue with ending a relationship that was never Facebook-official is that you actually have to tell people in person, and people don’t tend to be very good at responding to this kind of information.

“Wait, you broke up with your boyfriend?”

“I broke up with him, yeah” (as any dump-er knows, it is vital to linguistically incorporate the pertinent fact that you dumped them).

“Oh, I’m… I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be.”

No, really, don’t be. I understand why we typically respond to break-ups in this way; it would be my first response as well. In some cases, it may be exactly what somebody needs to hear. There’s no such thing as a “good breakup” because you’ve lost something that was once special to you. But in my situation, whatever made the relationship special had been missing for a long time, and – I don’t know who needs to hear this, but I wish I’d had someone to tell me – sex, cuddles and dinner dates really aren’t good enough reasons to stick around if so many other aspects are making you unhappy.

Listen: everything you can get from a romantic relationship, you can get from your friends. Meals, movies, drinks, emotional support, life advice, bloody forehead kisses, if that’s what you really miss. Ok, maybe there’s one thing you were getting from them that your friends can’t give, but there’s a whole pool of (That Thing) in clubs and bars and at work and in class and on dating apps so if you want it badly enough you can still get Doo Wop’d on a bi-, tri-, even quad-weekly basis.

They say there’s plenty more fish in the sea, and while that may not literally be true given the circumstances of the current climate crisis, let me tell you, figuratively? There are a lot of fucking fish. There are fish bringing things to the table that you didn’t even know you wanted. There are funnier fish; smarter fish; taller fish; fish who make you think new things and try new experiences; fish with whom you’ll have some of the most interesting conversations you’ve ever had in your life; fish with roof terraces; fish with better hair and kinder smiles and more chiselled jawlines; fish with bigger, ahem… fins.

Suffice to say, newfound singledom awakened this delicious, delirious selfishness in me.

“What are you going to do now?”, a friend asked when the dust had settled.

I paused. “I’m going to drink. A lot. And eat whatever I want. In fact, I’m going to do whatever I want, whenever I want. I’m going to do whoever I want. I’m going to book that flight to Bangkok. And I’m going to get a first-class degree.”

So, I did.

Admittedly, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. That train that never came? Turns out it was coming; there was just a six-month delay. It didn’t hit me, but it certainly caught me off-guard. When I returned to the UK from Asia in June, I had a slight existential crisis upon learning that all my close friends, not-so-close friends, ex-boyfriend, ex-one-night-stands, housemates, classmates, neighbours and even my former pulling partner would be graduating in relationships. I guess something about the looming uncertainty of the eternity heralded by graduation spurs this rush to couple up, but I didn’t get the memo.

Despite an initial flurry of panic, being the Single One made grad week a lot more memorable than if I’d stuck out long distance; I can tell you that much. Maybe it’s a little early for a year-in-review, but with my university career officially and explosively over now seems as good a time as any to sit back and reflect on just how fucking good 2019 has been. Not for everyone. Not for politics. Definitely not for the planet. But for this semi-affluent, responsibility-free, satisfactorily-good-looking white girl, 2019 is quickly ascending the ranks as one of the best years I’ve experienced so far.