This week I help a listener move on after recognizing that they've been future faking and fast forwarding.

Plus I explain why I've been feeling a bit twitchy about turning 39 in a few weeks.

I'm Natalie Lou, a writer based in Southeast London who is dedicated to helping people to

improve their emotional and relationship literacy.

Let's kick this off.

For a few years, I pretended that the 2002 film City of Guard was my favourite.

Shot in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Ria de Janeiro's,

the Favellas, it tells the story of the growth of organized crime and two boys who take two very, very different paths, one who becomes a photographer that documents the increasing violence and the other who becomes a very

ambitious drug dealer. As it's in Portuguese it's alsoitled, and my ex at the time, this was the guy who had

the girlfriend, felt that I didn't watch enough subtitled films, and I was very, very eager to show that, you know, me and him were of the same ilk.

And so I watched City of God and I did enjoy it.

And admittedly it was the first time I'd actually watch

something with subtitles for a few years and so yeah I did enjoy the film but I

made out that it was my favorite and sort of took to watching other subtitled films to show

you know that I was you know the right type of girl for him never mind the fact that there were

clearly other things that needed to be

addressed about our situation, I would go out of my way to basically pretend that I liked

certain things far more than I actually did. Which begs the question, like, why do we pretend that we like something when we don't?

Now, I know that I'm not alone in this.

There are very few people I've come across who haven't pretended at some point even if it was just briefly

that they liked something far more than they actually did and sometimes they pretended that they don't like something.

So they pretend that actually

...