STANDING in the queue at passport control, tears rolled down my face as I stared at my phone.
My boyfriend Clay, 32 and a civil servant, had committed an unbelievably savage act – and I’d been cruelly alerted to it via my Ring doorbell app.
Clay had moved out of my flat in Scotland. He hadn’t told me in person, or even over a text.
I only knew he’d dumped me because of the shock Ring alert.
There, in the video footage, I had watched the man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with take bag after bag from the home we’d shared for the past 18 months.
SICK WITH SHOCK
I felt sick with shock like I’d been punched in the stomach.
It was my flat, but I’d even given him his own drawers – like characters do in romcoms when a relationship is getting serious. I thought ours was.
My boyfriend had moved out while I was on a working holiday alone, in Tunisia.
Four days into my trip, he told me he “needed space”. It was completely out of the blue and the shock of being so far away that I couldn’t do anything about it made me panic with helplessness.
He wouldn’t answer his phone and tell me what was going on. All I could do was watch our break-up on a loop, via that Ring doorbell app.
It’s not the first time a doorbell camera has led to heartache. Earlier this year, The Sun revealed how US influencer Alexa Losey, 30, found out her boyfriend had been cheating thanks to footage captured on her Ring app.
Back in Tunisia, three Belgian couples in their fifties comforted me on white sand so hot it burnt my feet, but I barely noticed. Heartbreak burnt more.
I’d met these kind people on my first night at the five star hotel where I’d sat alone at a restaurant table, covered in red roses.
It looked like a table for a honeymooning couple – but with just me there, it was as if the groom had bottled it and the bride had said: “F*** him, I’ll honeymoon alone”.
That first night, I assured those concerned couples that I was fine, that I had a lovely boyfriend back home and was perfectly happy.
HEARTBROKEN
How painfully ironic that became by the end of the week.
Returning home to Glasgow airport, I saw a man standing in the arrivals area with flowers, clearly waiting for his girlfriend to run into his arms after her flight.
This was the first time my ex had not picked me up and the loss hit me like the freeze of a plunge pool.
It took all I had left not to fall to the floor.
Outside, I waited at the dark, cold taxi rank in the rain, watching the footage of him leaving me again and again.
On his way out for the final time, he even brushed the doorbell’s camera, as though it were my face.
When I recently heard about ‘comfort dating’, I wondered if this is what had led to me being so brutally blindsided.
Described as a “calmer, sweeter” form of romance by Marsha Goei, co-founder of new dating app Breeze, it centres around care.
“Comfort dating is all about being there, in the big and small ways,” she says.
“As we become adults, we often stop being cared for physically and emotionally, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it anymore.
He wouldn’t answer his phone and tell me what was going on. All I could do was watch our break-up on a loop, via that Ring doorbell app
“A partner who supports you can help you heal and recharge after a long day. No matter what you are looking for, finding someone you can be yourself around and who will be there for you is essential.”
Always quick to cook me dinner, or suggest a cinema trip, comfort is exactly what my partner had given me – until now.
“I’ll never leave you,” he’d say when we bickered, knowing I’d had some pretty bad break-ups.
But now I’d been furloughed from my relationship with no explanation, I felt stupid for trusting in so-called comfort dating.
This was the most comfortable partnership I’d had in five years.
Prior to that, I’d casually dated (app men and matchmade men and date-cute men), but nothing had ever gone on longer than four months. And I was always glad it hadn’t.
If I was honest with myself, it was 20 years since I’d been in a comfortable, non-toxic relationship.
I was 15 when I had my very first boyfriend. He was in the year above me at school – a wonderful, hometown guy I wish I’d have been happy to settle with.
‘TOO SCARRED TO DATE’
How had I got it so wrong since then? I thought my Ring doorbell boy might have been the one.
Yes, he couldn’t talk about how he felt about anything, ever.
But after dating a shouter with far too much aggression in between our good times, this one was refreshingly quiet, sensible and polite.
He was also fun and handsome and my parents loved him. Even my hard-to-please brother liked him from the off.
We didn’t need to do very much at all to have a great time together. He wasn’t perfect, obviously – no one interesting is – but I adored him.
He said he adored me, too.
Of all the men I’ve ever met, this one is the last I’d have expected to ghost me. But he did.
And isn’t that the story of so many break-ups now?
A staggering 80 per cent of Brits say they have been ghosted, according to a survey by dating app Plenty Of Fish, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
The Ring doorbell break-up last month has left me too scarred to date again.
When I first watched the video of him saying goodbye to my doorbell, I thought: ‘Is this the new getting dumped by text?’ It felt worse
When I first watched the video of him saying goodbye to my doorbell, I thought: ‘Is this the new getting dumped by text?’ It felt worse.
You could re-read a text again and again and it could crush you. But watching someone leave you over and over again makes you want to scream at your phone, begging them not to go.
It felt like a hand around my throat and left a mark that stayed long after the bruise disappeared.
According to the experts, I need time.
One study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that it took participants an average of three months to begin feeling better after a breakup. Another survey, conducted by dating site Hinge, agreed, with 75 per cent of respondents saying it takes them 90 days to feel better again.
The in-house expert at Happn, the dating app that ‘pings’ when you pass someone you’ve liked on the app in the street, tries to reassure me. I need a mini-breather from dating anyone, says Claire Rénier.
“If dating starts to feel draining, it’s absolutely fine to take a step back – but that doesn’t mean you have to disappear completely,” she tells me.
“The key is to reset without retreating – stepping away with intention and control, rather than just giving up – so you can come back feeling recharged and ready to connect again.”
She doesn’t quite use the word my friends are using about the Ring doorbell breakup: coward.
COWARD
The fact she doesn’t, almost makes me wish she would. Sometimes it’s nice to be told what’s happening, to not have to interpret feelings or silence, like I did with this man.
I still have little idea why he left and have imagined 100 awful reasons why. I put on weight. He met someone else. I wasn’t good enough.
The second-guessing that takes place in silence makes you feel mad. My friends told me exactly what I needed to hear. His behaviour was “savage”. And I suddenly started to feel more normal when I heard that.
I guess the only good thing about a break up this awful being filmed is that you can be in no doubt they’re not worth your time. I’d only have to re-watch the footage of him waving a Ring doorbell goodbye instead of me to remember that.