John and I met at the opening of a group show in Whitechapel. He was both an artist and a curator. He had recently been interviewed by a high-profile critic for the Financial Times and was becoming a recognised figure in the art scene. He’d been organising packed events since his first year at university, pulling together work by a number of fêted young artists in exhibitions staged in post-industrial spaces, in anti-squat buildings and shuttered, dilapidated shopping centres.

I wasn’t aware of any of this at our moment of meeting, which took place in front of a portrait of John. The artist – like several of the others in the show – was a school friend of his. The painting, in which John occupied a dark, high-back armchair, had the swollen dimensions of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The style reminded me a little of the American painter Alice Neel, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said that his – John’s – thumb, indecently plain and out of proportion in the painting’s foreground, resembled a flaccid penis. John smiled then, asked who I was with.

I looked him up on the internet when I got home, coming across the piece in the FT first. Heading the short text was a landscape photograph of John’s face and shoulders, which were partly in shadow, his coarse hair flat against his scalp, the bow in his narrow lips cast into dramatic relief by the lighting. I found a longer profile of him in an exclusively online journal. Poorly written, it spoke of the way in which John’s work brought together ‘architectural concerns and virtual reality as a means of merging the real and the imagined’. ‘The relative emphasis assigned to the relationships between each of these elements,’ it continued, ‘depends on the viewer as well as on his or her presence.’ I couldn’t parse it. The other significant artefact was a quick-fire question and answer session on YouTube. Throughout the video, filmed outside Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, John, dressed in a button-down and chinos, was pulling, between responses, on a slim roll-up. A woman – French or Spanish or Italian, I couldn’t tell – was conducting the interview, laughing forcefully at most of his answers, apart from those whose tone requested a different sort of reaction. ‘Wow,’ she said at such moments, the way you might to a child showing you a new toy. He would furrow his brow then, glance down, ash his cigarette. I watched the video a few times, wondering what he was thinking.

I was relieved whenever I reached the end of the clip and found that it had done nothing to shatter my image of John, now part constructed in retrospect.

Our first date was at the Coach & Horses in Soho. John listened closely as I spoke about the writing I was working on, and, without taking his eyes off the table in front of him, said that it made him think of Susan Sontag’s Death Kit – ‘Her second novel, I think.’

I told him I wasn’t overly familiar with her work, that I’d only read one or two of the essays for my undergraduate seminars. I had recently realised, after years of pretending to have read or seen things I had not, that being as specific as possible about any gaps in one’s knowledge had the counter-effect of making you appear sufficiently informed. It was a trick I had noticed men deploying not only in private conversations, such as the one I was having with John, but in their writing as well – and not only in relation to their cultural consumption. The cleverest ones were attuned to, were endlessly articulate on, the subject of their own interpersonal shortcomings. I did not yet know that John’s tactic – the hasty provision of references, of names and titles in lieu of personal, subjective responses – was yet another method of obfuscation.

The synopses of Sontag’s novels and short stories I later uncovered online made them sound dire. As uncertain as I was of my judgements back then, it appeared clear to me that they employed experimental narrative techniques as a means of plastering over Sontag’s lack of feeling for fiction – revolving, as they did, around so-called unreliable narrators and otherwise flat characters defensively styled as archetypes.

So, John had been correct; in this respect alone, Sontag’s fiction sounded a lot like mine – or what it might have become, if I’d pursued it then. The comparison with Sontag is interesting also in that it now furnishes me with some key information regarding John’s first impression of me: superficially over-serious but fundamentally childlike. An open wound, in other words.

What was my fantasy of John? Meeting him, pursuing our relationship – it all seemed preordained. I loved John and, most of the time, early on, felt that he loved me too. But the beginning of our relationship also felt like a negotiation, like a setting-out of terms, which, being young and in awe, I had eagerly agreed to. I did not yet know that their flouting was something that I could – and would – be pulled up on.

‘I never want to be one of those couples,’ he had said, ‘arguing on the corner.’ Meaning: Never dispute me in public.

‘I need my space, a lot of alone time.’ My needs will supersede yours.

I met his friends. I met Jude, his older sister. We went to dinner, to events: gallery openings, screenings, book launches. The adult life I had envisioned began to take shape, all at once. Being recognised as part of a couple thrilled me; I felt legitimised. John had a life, a full life. He had immediate and extended family, people he had known since childhood, school, university. I was surprised to discover that he found it all quite stifling. My own upbringing had been rootless, what with our various moves and my mother’s long and definitive estrangement from her relatives. I suppose you could say that I was unencumbered – I think that might have been John’s word.