My first engagement took place in a nightclub. Despite the dancefloor being saturated with Smirnoff Ice and sweat, it didn’t deter my boyfriend from getting down on one knee and declaring his love amongst the dulcet tones of I’ve Got a Feeling by Black Eyed Peas. Three weeks prior, he and another man had been fighting (over me!) at 1 am directly under my Mum’s window. Not too dissimilar to the scene from Bridget Jones where Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver barge into a Greek restaurant, I watched my boyfriend jump out of a ditch to ambush this man (let’s call him Soldier Boy), punching him three times in quick succession to little effect. Soldier Boy, who’d recently returned from Iraq and was built like a redwood, muttered to my boyfriend that if he didn’t stop with the punching business, ‘he’d have to punch him back’. My boyfriend didn’t listen. He received a whack so hard you could’ve heard it in the depths of an Alaskan winter. He was immediately flat out on the floor, an egg on his head already sprouting.

‘Guys, if you’re going to fight, can you please do it down the street and not under my Mum’s window?’ Was the only sensible piece of advice I could offer, swaying in my 5-inch heels, having downed upwards of seven Jägerbombs. Because I was actually Daniel Cleaver in this scenario, I was having a torrid affair with Soldier Boy – well, as much of a torrid affair as you can have at eighteen years old. Soldier Boy and I had been participating in secret trysts all over Peterborough, including walking our Labradors and driving in his car, listening to an up-and-coming artist called Lady Gaga. So, how did I go from street fighting to an engagement exactly? It’s difficult to track the precise timeline. As soon as news of the ‘affair’ broke – my friend told his friend because she couldn’t live with the guilt – my boyfriend imposed an informal lockdown where he took a week off work, and we didn’t go outside. He monitored all my texts and calls, and I slowly pushed down thoughts of breaking up with him and running off with Soldier Boy. The engagement was both a carrot and a stick, except I wasn’t sure if the promise of marriage was a treat or something where my infidelity was repeatedly brought up and battered over my head to shame me into behaving.

My cabin fever reached critical mass when I suggested, unprompted, I might add, that I should get a tattoo of his initials near my nether regions to ‘make up for the cheating’. It was a modern-day cattle branding to plug the gaping wound in our relationship, negating the fact he was almost nine years older than me, a full-grown man with back hair and a mortgage, whilst I was still in 6th form. He’d also turned up to my prom wasted, and the only social commentary he could offer was to (very loudly) shout quotes from the film Bad Boys II. You could say he wasn’t much of a savvy conversationalist. Luckily, a few years after the first engagement, I briefly had a dalliance with a tattoo artist who kindly offered to cover up my heinous mistake in exchange for a slow-cooked beef curry from Madha Jaffery. This was handy because whenever I had the misfortune of bumping into fiancé number one, the first thing he’d ask would be: ‘Have you still got my name near your fanny?’ It was also a bit of a mood-killer in the bedroom when a lover was face-to-face with the acronym of my relationship past.

Some people say engagements are like buses; you wait for ages for one, and then two come at once – actually, I don’t think anyone says this, but maybe they should. After my first engagement ended, which was a gradual moving of my possessions out of his house and then letting him know via a Facebook message, I waited a whole seven months before my next happy ever after. We met at a house party on a Wednesday, he confessed, ‘he always thought I was fit at school’, and within one month, we were engaged: the epitome of romance.

I debated the ethics carefully, but I sold fiancé number one’s engagement ring to fund a trip to York to celebrate my impending nuptials with fiancé number two. It was only worth £60 at resale value, so hardly worth the ethical quandary. Fiancé number two and I toasted with the cheapest champagne on the back of a love that no longer existed and instead looked to the bright and endless future we’d have together.

Except the future wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I might’ve forgotten to mention a few tiny details, namely that my new fiancé was a drug dealer, and I was in the midst of a complete mental breakdown. It wasn’t full Scarface or anything, but he did get held at knifepoint during our short engagement, and there were threats of his house getting burned down. You know how these drug kingpins can be a little dramatic. If anything, it’s more like Mean Girls but with a few baggies.

Arson, or the insinuation of arson, wasn’t great for my fragile mental state, not to mention a less-than-ideal environment to plan a wedding. However, the show had to go on. My dealer fiancé and I continued to go wedding cake tasting, do a gift registry at John Lewis and book our country hotel for eighty of our nearest and dearest in two months’ time. There were a few other signs I might’ve ignored. Dealer fiancé took steroids and was prone to irrational bouts of anger; he also owned a samurai sword (massive red flag) and had an ex-fiancée of his own whom he met through ‘work’ because she was a regular ‘customer’. She was still in love with him and would call him after drinking a whole bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, confessing she’d been looking at my selfies on Facebook.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but dealer fiancé broke up with me. The guy with the samurai sword and no pension benefits. He thought I was too crazy, despite the fact he was a bonafide criminal and his uncle was in prison for the attempted murder of his other uncle. That was a bit of a reality check.

And yes, I was severely mentally unwell if you’d not gathered by now with the two engagements in less than seven months. I’d been fired from my job and was having hallucinations where blood dripped down the walls. My childhood doctor was an absolute angel, and he’d ring me on his lunch break to check I hadn’t smashed all the cups in the house (‘Again? For god’s sake, Rebecca’). After several psychologist visits and being wrongly medicated for bipolar, where my Gran told me the pills made me ‘extremely fat’, it turned out I was having drug and alcohol-induced delusions. Spoiler: I was the root cause of all my problems.  However, being engaged to a low-level drug dealer probably didn’t help.

2012 was both the longest year and shortest year of my life; the second engagement felt like it’d aged me about two decades. After it was all over, my nerves and brain were fried from such severity of emotions. I couldn’t face dating again without being constantly reminded of them both. And what was even funnier was once the mania had gone I realised I didn’t even like fiancé number two – he was mean, selfish and had knowingly put me in really dangerous situations numerous times that probably enhanced my paranoia. I would like to add, however, I wasn’t innocent in this relationship either – I did write the word ‘cunt’ on his bedsheets in black biro. I still can’t figure out if it was warranted or not.

But never one to do anything mildly, I spent the next couple of years doing a detox of engagements and class As. Just say no (to diamonds) was my new mantra, and I embodied this with my full chest, except I’d now swung the other way and was, I guess, what Kat Slater would call a ‘total slag’. Nobody was safe from my ‘I-reject-the-patriarchy-cool-girl-shtick’, but I knew I’d gone too far when I woke up one Thursday morning, feeling like a caterpillar had crawled into my mouth and died, and lying next to me was another drug dealer (only weed this time) with a cracked front tooth that was rotten and smelling. And I’d kissed him with tongues.

Celibacy shortly followed, and I thought I’d write a blog detailing all my sexual exploits with people’s identities loosely obscured with TV and film references. It proved incredibly popular but a little too popular; one of my subjects was in a nightclub, and two women shouted ‘Chuck Bass’ at him and ran away, giggling. Unfortunately, my Carrie Bradshaw dreams were dashed when my Dad found out about the blog from his senior leadership team at work. He unceremoniously told me if I didn’t delete it, I’d be chucked out of the house. Being twenty-two, unemployable and in substantial debt, I couldn’t argue with the hand that was feeding me, even though he was essentially censoring my right to a free, slutty press.

Statistically speaking, I have a 33% success rate with engagements. Out of the three I’ve had, only one has led all the way to the altar – yeah, I can’t believe someone married me either. It was still a whirlwind, of course; we were engaged within six months and married within a year. I’m nothing but efficient. Seven years on, my brilliant, kind and wonderful husband still writes me poems about sunflowers and the Irish Sea, where we planned to be buried together in a communal plot. There’s still occasionally a bit of chaos. We did have the police raid our wedding reception with shields and a riot van, but I promise you it had nothing to do with me. They thought we were having an illegal rave, but we weren’t; the club owner had submitted legally binding documents for our wedding-poetry-on-the-hour-every-hour-come-rave. One of our friends did a 10-minute poem about Jeremy Hunt and doing unspeakable things with a spoon, which set a bit of an odd tone before our first dance.

So what have I learnt from being twice engaged before the age of twenty-two and thrice engaged before the age of thirty?

1. Don’t make any big decisions (marriage is a good example) before your prefrontal lobe has developed.

2. Work out what you want and don’t want in a partner. Also, if possible, make sure they’re not a career criminal. Stuff like parking on double yellows is fine, but selling narcotics isn’t.

3. Going out with older men is rarely a good idea. It feels chic when you go to their two-bed semi that has matching duvet and pillowcases, but these men are losers and only go out with younger women because women their age are sick of their shit.