June: Hah! Boyfriend

In which "I've never quite *pinned down* what's going on in Bosnia"

Dear Bridget Jones’s Diary Diary community,

Daniel Cleaver is such a quintessential Bad Boyfriend. His Badness is obvious, so obvious that it’s part of his initial appeal. If your initial flirtation occurs in the office, and he’s your boss, and it entails making jokes about sexual harassment ha ha ha … you know, you’re not really allowed to be surprised when he then turns out to be a slutty compulsive seducer and practiced manipulator of power dynamics. One thing that’s interesting about Daniel, though, and which elevates him from being a type, is that his worst form of Badness turns out to be another variety entirely.

Once he becomes Bridget’s never-totally-committed boyfriend, Daniel reveals himself to be mean, two-faced, and most damningly of all … boring. All he wants to do on June Sundays is sit inside Bridget’s apartment with the curtains drawn watching cricket and fiddling absently with Bridget’s nipple “as if it were a sort of worry bead,” drinking beer. The joke of this chapter is that Bridget spends the whole month fantasizing about a “mini-break” with Daniel but then once she gets him to go away with her, they end up … in a historic country house, with the curtains drawn, drinking beer and watching cricket. I wish I did not relate to this, but I spent many weekends of my twenties trying to create romantic situations with someone who definitely would have rather been indoors getting high than outdoors having a some kind of contrived picnic/outing to the farmers market. Even now, I have been forced to reckon with the fact that some things I would find romantic to do with my husband are better enjoyed with … someone who’d actually enjoy them. (“Restaurants are for women,” an older friend once told me. It’s not true of all men, of course, but does seem to be true of most men I’ve ever dated.)

Another thing that massively sucks about Daniel is that he turns on the charm for Bridget’s friends and her mom but then doesn’t bother to be that person when it’s just the two of them. That’s such a dark dynamic. In a light as air book like this one, it feels almost too heavy when Daniel calls Bridget fat, or admires someone else’s tits out loud in front of her, or tells her to shut up when she’s nattering on about Sarajevo “to try to put our problems in proportion.” I guess the plot function of him being that awful is so that we don’t have to feel bad at all when Bridget (MASSIVE SPOILER!!!) transfers her affections to Mark Darcy. But in a different book — or in, uh, reality — a guy who is a completely different person when people are around versus when you’re alone with him is, well, capable of taking the plot in a very different direction.

Things I enjoyed about this chapter:

*The absolutely indelible bit about underminer-friend Rebecca, who parachutes in for one scene in order to make Bridget feel insecure about aging. “An evening with Rebecca is like swimming in the sea with jellyfish: all will be going along perfectly pleasantly then suddenly you get painful lashing, destroying confidence at stroke. Trouble is, Rebecca’s stings are aimed so subtly at one’s Achilles’ heels, like Gulf War missiles going ‘Fzzzzzz whoooosh’ through Baghdad hotel corridors, that never see them coming.” Shoutout to Jess for having this passage committed to memory.

*When Bridget is drunk and mourning her lost youth thanks to underminer Rebecca — sorry I just think phonetic renderings of accents are hilarious when they’re not problematic — “Argor es wororrible. Am olanpassit. Face collapsin.” (You can always make fun of Bridget’s accent, it’s never racist)

*The part where Bridget is WFH and doing “catalogue stuff” for Perpetua and keeps putting it off (“bit of a scratchy nail”) resonates with me deeply, as someone who has felt many times that writing catalogue copy really is something one can only do when the muse is speaking, or at the absolute last possible minute before it’s due — and under no other circumstances whatsoever.

Tune in next time for “July: Huh” — I’m so sorry I’m not getting to Christmas in time for Christmas, though I suppose anything is possible … today is the last day I’ll have childcare til January 2nd though, so if any Bridgeting happens before then it’ll be a Christmas Miracle.