Just weeks ago I was a simple, romantic, English Literature student living in blissful ignorance, deeply in love with my girlfriend and pootling through my life writing about Marxist Structuralism in the Mr Men.

Then calamity struck, I got lost on my way to a tote bag crafting social and stumbled into the maths block. Horrified, I crept through the corridors, clinging to the walls and trying to ignore the terrifying posters of squares and Greek letters that seemed to have got lost on their way to forming proper words from the Iliad. But like Orpheus, just as I thought I had escaped from hell with my sanity and my relationship intact, I took one look too many. As I was emerging from the odorous nightmare that was Mathematics, I saw a word that would haunt me for the rest of my days. ‘Statistics’. Obviously I had no idea what it meant, but it was burned into my brain. I hurried back home and ran to my Scrabble Dictionary to find out more.

Once I had got a thorough understanding of the subject (I also asked Chat GPT), I applied its mystical ways to my life and came to a shocking conclusion… 

My partner had got married, grown old with and been buried beside precisely 0% of her former lovers. That’s 0 in every three, or a 0.0 success rate. Extrapolating those numbers through a complex statistical model, there is clearly something terribly wrong with her and our relationship is doomed. How am I to go on when I know that the laws of mathematics clearly show we are not meant to stay together? How can I trust a person who has such a terrible xGOT (expected growing old together)? Is this the reason no STEM student has ever felt the touch of another human being? These are just some of the questions that haunt me now, not helped by the lingering whiff of body odour and misogyny that has clung to me since my fateful trip into the world of maths.

Originally published in Issue 61