Really it couldn't have been more like a Nick Hornby novel or a film starring John Cusack. There was my poor friend struggling manfully with a Monday morning hangover brought on by an over-enthusiastic sport-watching incident in the pub the day before when the phone rang. He hadn't known where he was when he woke up, hadn't set the alarm and hadn't really wanted to face his boss that morning. He was looking at half a sandwich and wondering whether he'd manage to keep it down. He picked up the phone.
It was his ex-girlfriend, the one he'd gone out with for some years until they'd finally split up in November. Of course there were several "sex with your ex" type episodes in December, and after that, a couple of late night drunken phone calls. Then contact ceased and his relationship with his ex was confined to the inevitable sessions in the "re-editing suite", that mental space where you go through every possible outcome to the situation, other than the one that has actually occurred. Sessions in the re-editing suite are always signalled by the words "I wonder what would have happened if...", and they're neither particularly healthy nor useful, just an integral part of breaking up.
Indeed, this is pretty much how my friend thought of the last few months - neither pleasant nor particularly gruesome, just a normal late twentysomething break-up - until Monday morning's phone-call. His girlfriend, you see, was ringing to tell him she had just got engaged, all of four months after they had finally split up. My friend had only vaguely heard she was seeing someone else; now she was saying things like "We haven't settled on a day yet".
He says his first reaction was to be quite pleased. His second reaction was to start ringing his friends, because he just didn't know what to think. To be honest, we didn't really know what to think either. It just seemed like an unfeasibly short length of time since we had been making jokes about the pair of them being the next to walk up the aisle. Yet while my friend has been displaying what I consider perfect behaviour for the recently separated - lots of wild-oats sowing developing into a nice light romance with a girl he likes - his ex is talking china patterns with someone she's been with for four months.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the whole situation is just how unsurprised I was - when he told me. This was nothing to do with either of them particularly - the ex was not a woman who had been trying on dresses since the age of 16 so it wasn't as though I expected her to march up the aisle regardless of who chose to accompany her. No, the reason I was so supremely unsurprised was because I've seen it happen so many times.
It's a classic pattern: couple in mid to late 20s go out perfectly happily for years, break up, and quicker than they can change the answering machine message, one of them is engaged to somebody else. I can list four couples to whom this has happened off the top of my head, so I'm beginning to wonder why on earth people behave so irrationally. Because it is irrational, deciding to marry someone, when just a few months previously you were considering the same thing with someone completely different. It takes me that long to make up my mind about what colour to paint a cupboard.
The most romantic reason would be that they just fell in love, but to be quite honest, this doesn't entirely wash with me. The timing is too coincidental, too quick, and anyway, the most common response to a break-up is to get a migraine at the thought of being in a serious relationship again. Or maybe it's just me who meets men coming out of long term relationships who don't want anything heavy, but it's nothing to do with me.
Maybe there are people who discover that the very intensity of breaking up serves to kick off another relationship. I remember my ex describing his amazement at the amount of very intense conversations he had in the period just following our break-up. Oddly enough, people can often sense the layer of skin removed in the process of breaking up and it can either prompt them to run like a cheetah or to open up. I imagine that this could make a flirtation turn into something heavier rather quickly, in effect, the classic rebound situation.
However, I think it probably has a lot to do with a kind of ruthlessness that sets in at a certain age, for both women and men. The last couple of years have seen many of my friends ending relationships for the simple reason that after a certain point, there's no reason to continue in a relationship if it's not going anywhere, like marriage, commitment, or a seriously good holiday. It's not so much that we're dying to get married, more that it becomes an inevitable discussion if you're going out with someone for four years when you're 28 rather than 18.
The period prior to ending a serious relationship will usually be full of agonising, discussion, resolution and counter-resolution, a little like the IMF and World Bank meetings this week, only the issues for debate are your own emotional needs, and the rioters and police trying to stop or allow the talks to go ahead, are your friends, your family, and your own indecision. This kind of life evaluation often results in a break-up but it could also result in a re-ordered set of priorities.
In other words, perhaps those people who end up married so soon after breaking up, have spent much more productive sessions in the editing suite. Rather than wondering what could have happened if you had just worn the red skirt instead of the grey tracksuit bottoms, perhaps they imagine just what they want out of life and decide just how soon they want to get married. Perhaps they learn from past mistakes, only they learn that they want to be married within the year.
In some ways, this shows an admirable honesty, a willingness to accept that maybe you want to buy into the whole package. But the problem is that the editing suite only applies to our past - you can run and re-run all your mistakes and see what you should have done but you can only pitch your future. Of course this applies to everyone who decides to get engaged and not just to those who do it in haste, but when it comes to a life decision, there's nothing like having a bit of experience on your side. After all, the rushes might be an indicator as to whether the film looks good, but personally speaking, I'd rather have a bit more footage to play around with when I decide who's going to star opposite me in my own personal biopic.