My boyfriend blew £200 a week on drugs then dumped me for being ‘boring’

Claire*, then 25, from London, was impressed by the good-looking Australian doctor at first but then saw his ‘wild side’ spiral out of control….

The first night I met Dan, we danced til 5am. I was drunk on wine, and the attentions of this exciting new man. But unbeknown to me, Dan was off his head on ecstasy.

We had met at a house party earlier that evening. I hadn’t noticed Dan initially, but he made a beeline for me, and we began chatting. Dan told me he was a recently-qualified doctor from Australia, specialising in psychiatry at a large London teaching hospital.

At 25, I was embarrassingly impressed by his job – as well as the fact Dan was six years older than me. I also had a thing for men from the Antipodes back then – so I agreed to go clubbing with Dan after the party.

In the club, Dan took his top off, which sealed the deal. He was ripped. We danced and snogged to loud techno music, but at the end of the night, we went home separately.

Experimenting with drugs

The next day, Dan called and asked me out. Our first date was at Le Gavroche, which at the time was a fancy Michelin-starred restaurant in London's West End. It transpired Dan was new to London, had come from a conservative small town in Australia and was very impressed by city life. He had never taken drugs before coming to the UK, but was having fun experimenting.

I wasn’t big into drugs myself, preferring alcohol, but this confession didn’t send me away screaming: I thought it was kind of sweet. After a few glasses of (very expensive) Chablis, I decided that Dan was intelligent and interesting and we went home together that night.

We saw a lot of each other over the next few months. Dan met my friends and family, who teased me about how orange he was (as well as hitting the gym a lot, Dan was a fan of 'the electric beach' – as he missed the Australian sun.)

Most evenings, we’d end the evening at a club – and invariably drugs would be involved. The first time I tried ecstasy was with Dan – I was a bit hesitant, so only took half a tablet. Dan took two.

If I’m honest, I didn’t really like the experience, which made me feel disorientated and strange. But I did enjoy the intimacy of trying something new with my boyfriend and how affectionate it made Dan.

Growing cocaine habit

At some point over the next few months, the pendulum began to swing. Dan was great in bed, and when he wasn’t off his head, was a clever conversationalist, with entertaining stories about his patients. But, in hindsight, I guess I was losing my novelty for him.

The pattern of our social life didn’t really change. But Dan started taking more and more drugs – I estimated he must be spending at least £200 a week on them. He would take coke, even when we were at home together and smoked dope constantly.

I noticed Dan lost a lot of weight, and started to wear two pairs of underpants to keep his trousers up, one on top of the other, which he always stripped off before bed.

My clubbing summer started to get a bit monotonous. Couldn’t we see a film, go for dinner again? I also had a regular job on a magazine (Dan worked shifts at the hospital, which fitted in with his clubbing) and really couldn’t keep up with the partying life. So, I’d stay home and go to bed, and Dan would come over at 4am, rapping on the window of my garden flat to be let in.

Losing my appeal

We must have left the house at least one more time, because I remember our last meal together at McDonalds in Leicester Square – a far cry from Le Gavroche.

In the end, we were finished off by a dull, drug-free barbecue at my house. Dan came to bed with both pairs of his pants on. We didn’t have sex, which was unusual for us. The next morning, I was mopping the kitchen floor when Dan stuck his head round the door, said he was "bored" and didn’t want to see me any more. Then he left.

I carried on cleaning the work-tops, trying to process the brutality of this rejection.

If I’m honest, it was more the suddenness of this news that wounded me, than the fact I was deeply in love with Dan. I wrote him an email asking for more of an explanation: he wrote back a heartless note saying that he really only wanted to have fun and that I wasn’t fun any more. So he was taking the next month off to go clubbing in Ibiza.

Prison drama

I heard from Dan once more after that. He called, asking me to come over. This time, he looked sad and diminished. It turned out he'd got into a fight in a nightclub, been arrested and spent 48 hours in a prison cell, where he had caught pneumonia. Dan was worried about losing his licence to practise medicine – to this day, I have no idea how he wasn’t struck off. We had break-up/pity sex, then I never saw or heard from him again, which was fine by me.

Ten years later, I was happily married and mooching on Facebook and something made me think of Dan. I looked him up: he was back in Australia, working as an addictions psychiatrist. It may have been the end of us, but I guess Dan’s clubbing summer had stood him in good stead for his career, after all.

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

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