Romantic comedies are good-looking, they’re pretty, but essentially they’re just lying, and that’s why we like them. Sometimes you can escape into them for a few hours and pretend that life’s really like that. Except it’s not. Because nobody sees the romcom couple 10 years down the line, when they’ve stopped having sex because one of them is angry that their career never took off and the other has porked out.

Romcoms assume that people end up together because they’re made for each other, but they don’t face the possibility that people end up together just because they’ve hung around long enough. That’s not a negative view — it’s realistic and honest. There’s dishonesty in TV and films — not many people are referencing their own experiences, so the romance that’s served up makes our own lives harder to accept. In celluloid romance, there’s no cellulite. Sex always looks nice. And where are the fictional arseholes?

Nobody ever ends up with an arsehole in romantic comedies, but I know plenty of people who have. Let’s look at the staple fare of the romcom: love at first sight. Does that happen? Isn’t that just sex on a first date? And fate. Fate? It’s not fate. It’s coincidence. And this soul mate thing doesn’t seem logical. The notion of meeting your soul mate in a pub or at a party always made me think, “That’s a bit convenient”. Why couldn’t it have been the man you missed by 20 minutes because you left the pub early? Or a bloke in New Zealand? And one thing you rarely see in a romantic comedy is people getting it together because they’re drunk. And surely that’s how 96% of modern relationships start? With Pulling we wanted to make an “unromantic comedy” and concentrate on the lack of romance in most relationships.

I went from relationship to fling to relationship for about 15 years, and most of them were based on the attraction you feel when you’re drunk. Not that I was drunk for 15 years. That’s just how I met men. Sometimes it turned into a relationship and sometimes it didn’t. I wasn’t always looking for the right person, though. Quite often the aim was to find someone who couldn’t be any worse for me and then see how that worked out. (When you live somewhere as big and scary as London, sometimes the easiest thing is to make yourself into a couple. That makes me sound weak. I’m not. I’m lazy.)

And I fell in love many times. Or, at least, I was definitely into the early stages. But then those intoxicating early stages of being in love turn into just being in a live-in partnership. When love turns as stale as stale bread in a disused stale-bread shop, then of course it’s time to part, but just because the initial spark dies down, it doesn’t mean it’s over, and I don’t think I realised that then. I could never take the relationship to the next stage. But that’s because the type of man I ended up with would be dependent on the one before. If I’d spent two years with a crack-smoking hedonist, I’d go for a play-it-safe mummy’s boy. If I broke up with a guy who was all about his looks, I’d head straight into the arms of a potato head. And I’d stay until it fizzled all the way out.

It used to take a long time to leave, though. The longest was three years. That’s the problem with starting a relationship when drunk, you make silly choices. Then somehow you’ve moved in together. And then you can’t just move out again. Not for at least six months anyway. You’d look an idiot. I don’t know how celebrities divorce after three months. I know life’s too short and all that, but seriously, you’d look a fool.

I did meet my husband and the father of my two children while I was drunk, but it was a different kind of drunk. It was a kind of drunk where I didn’t end up with him that first night and he had to come looking for me a week later. I did end up doing the moving-in thing way too quickly, but it felt different because he was a grown-up. A real, grown-up, human man. And it’s easier to make things work now because, at 38, I’ve figured out that there are two types of love. There’s love as in “falling in love”: this type can last anywhere between five hours and 10 months, and it’s very passionate and exciting and moreish. And then there’s the other sort. The sort that the romantic comedies don’t address: the love that keeps you together for 50 years, that makes you argue, that builds a life and a home and a family. And it is different, this love. I should call it another name — “long-term love” sounds like a prison sentence, and it’s not. It’s a brilliant adventure.

You can, however, get addicted to the buzz of the “falling in love” love, and feel as if you’re missing out when it’s gone. My Pulling co-writer, Dennis Kelly, told me that he only realised his parents really loved each other when his dad had a quadruple bypass and the only person he needed or wanted when he was in hospital was his wife of 40 years. It didn’t matter that he’d spent a lot of those four decades fighting with her or staying in the pub. Their love was almost invisible to the naked eye, but it was there all along. And it was as deep and profound as only love that’s honed from 40 years of arguing can be.

Long-term love is about getting angry and then getting over it. It’s about no sleep and bills and holidays going wrong and not talking for five days. And that’s not a negative thing to say. Real-life relationships aren’t about finding your soul mate, they’re about longevity. And if that’s not romance then call me an unromantic fool.

The Pulling special is on BBC Three on Sunday, May 17, at 9pm

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