Bridget's return to dating after Mark's death

Bridget's return to dating after Mark's death is a movement from hesitant self-consciousness to revived desire, then from romantic hope to a painful, abrupt ending. At The Stronghold, a dance and kiss make intimacy feel possible again; over the weeks that follow, Bridget invests heavily in the man she calls Leatherjacketman. But the courtship never becomes secure: when she asks him to promise they will meet again, he declines to make her feel responsible for his choices, and soon leaves for Zurich. The episode makes renewed sexual confidence real without making it a guarantee of lasting attachment.

Background and first encounter

The encounter begins at The Stronghold, a club concealed inside a brick warehouse behind an unmarked metal door and a coded buzzer. Tom enters the code, and Bridget, in towering heels with Tom and Jude, climbs a concrete staircase that smells of cannabis. Inside, the brick walls, straw bales, battered sofas, band, and dim artistic lighting make the room seem both makeshift and exciting. Talitha spots attractive men; the setting, unfamiliar but not exclusively youthful, gives Bridget a chance to test her assumption that she no longer belongs in such a place.

While Talitha, Tom, and Jude go dancing, Bridget sits alone on a hay bale and longs to be home with her children, where she feels she knows who she is. She recognizes that this wish also lets her hide from the fear that she is old and past it. The turn comes without a strategy: a man in jeans sits beside her, leans close, and asks her to dance. She accepts, and he helps her to her feet, keeps an arm at her waist as they cross the floor, and draws her close during a slow dance. The physical encounter answers the group's earlier insistence that sex can be simply sex: attraction arrives before Bridget has reasoned herself into it.

Desire and renewed confidence

The dance becomes a kiss, and Bridget experiences the shift as a sudden release after years in which she has felt blocked. The return of sexual feeling is exhilarating but unsettles her almost at once. As the kiss gathers momentum, she thinks of her children and Mark and questions what she is doing with a stranger. When the man suggests going somewhere quieter, she abruptly leaves. Her fear turns the invitation into a comic imagined threat, but the underlying conflict is serious: wanting intimacy does not erase her grief, parental responsibilities, or uncertainty about what intimacy might require.

On Wednesday, 12 September 2012, Bridget records a lunch with the man she calls Leatherjacketman in Primrose Hill. He wears a brown leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, and they sit outside at a pavement cafe on an unusually warm, bright autumn day. Her diary's numerical accounting captures how quickly the encounter has taken over her attention: she reports 347 minutes spent fantasizing about him and 37 checks for texts, while he has sent none. She also records checking an inbox for an email from someone who has no email address. The absurd precision turns infatuation into a visible daily habit, at once funny and revealing of how much expectation she is placing on small signs of contact. The entry ends with her declaration of love, a strikingly intense claim beside the meagre evidence of his communication.

The party and the failed negotiation

At a later party, Bridget loses sight of him and hides in the toilet before finding him smoking cannabis. Having not smoked for fifteen years, she gives in to pressure from his friends and takes two drags; she immediately becomes very stoned and paranoid. He gestures toward a closed door and asks whether they should go inside. In a spare bedroom covered with coats, he kisses her neck, moves his hand up her skirt, and asks whether her babysitter is staying over. The episode places sexual opportunity inside an altered, uncomfortable state rather than the easy romantic confidence she had felt while dancing.

Bridget's response exposes what she wants from the encounter. She asks whether, if they have sex, he will promise to call and see her again, or arrange another date then, so that neither of them has to worry. He hesitates, apparently unsure of her name, and tells her she is a great girl but that he does not think she is ready for this. He says he does not want to feel responsible for upsetting anyone, offers to put her in a cab, and says he will call. Bridget accepts miserably. He sees her into the taxi; when she turns to wave, he is already going back toward the party. The exchange is less a settled agreement than a mismatch: she asks for reassurance and continuity, while he offers an uncertain future contact and ends the evening.

Ending and significance

A subsequent text says that he is very overloaded, is heading to Zurich the next day and may be there for a while, and wishes her a good Christmas. Bridget records that this is the end of it. The distance is practical as well as emotional: the message offers no date for his return and no plan for seeing each other again. Her hopes, which had expanded from a dance into repeated fantasies and declarations of love, meet a final message that is courteous but noncommittal.

Talitha advises Bridget not to let the man possess her self-esteem or her sense of sexual viability. That response underscores the stakes of the episode. The failed courtship does not undo the dance's evidence that Bridget can feel desire again, but it shows how quickly she can make a new attachment carry questions larger than the encounter itself: whether she is still desirable, whether she can begin again after Mark, and whether sex can be separated from the need for security. The story gives her no romantic resolution here. Instead, the brief relationship ends with renewed possibility on one side and withdrawal on the other.