I've forgotten how to fail like a normal person.

Guess how much tickets for the Ricky Hatton fight were selling at?

$41,999, is the answer you're looking for. I love how they've trimmed off the extra dollar to please the bargain hunters. Yeah, that'll make all the difference, that will.

Apparently, I'm suffering from a screw loose or two. I lack the sensibility to know when I'm getting in too deep where my emotions are concerned. That's probably an accurate call. I've been guilty in the past of chasing lost tails, but it's not an entirely hopeless cause.

Why would I be interested in changing? If you live for the gloomy no man's land between happiness and sadness, hurt and joy, there's really not much to look forward to at all. I have a tainted record in return for my efforts to avoid a lifestyle like that.

My past relationships, for one, tell the full story.

When I left school at 16, by some obscure chance I fell madly for a girl in the States. It was never going to last the distance and I overlooked some of the glaring problems that we were set to face. It spat in the face of sensibility. But that didn't stop me travelling across the Atlantic several times, plunging myself five thousand miles away from the nearest recognisable face.

Nothing tests your self-belief quite like being sat at Heathrow airport with a ticket shaking in your hand, wondering just how you're going to adjust to life in a completely foreign land. I still remember being detained at Minneapolis International Airport because I looked so frightened of what was to come that it arroused the suspicions of the customs officer.

Looking back, it's a story without a happy ending. But I'd rather have some stories with bad endings than a collection of one page memoirs starting "Well, back in the day, I had the chance to..."

Besides, you never know when you might strike it lucky and grasp the kind of happiness that turned your eye in the first place.

I didn't find long-term happiness in the States. But I do have some vivid memories of nights that seem as real in my head as they did at the time. There's something hopelessly romantic about compromising yourself for the sake of a feeling so strong that even through the inevitable hardships, you'll always take the memories from it.

I remember a late night car journey with my ex in Iowa last summer. We went to Grays Lake just after dark and wandered towards the water in flip flops. It had a little bridge which traced the entire perimeter, illuminated by dozens of different coloured lanterns. The sky was a clear mauve and I don't remember a single part of the lake that wasn't glistening or glowing in a different colour. It was really gorgeous.

We must've stood there for half an hour, my nose burrowed in her hair, looking out on to the waters and speaking in hushed voices as if not to disturb what was around us.

I wish I'd taken a photo at the time. Every picture of the lake that I've found seems like a betrayal of my own memory. It's eerie to look at a place so far from home, knowing that you don't know how to get there and that you'll never see it again, but having this one crystal clear image of the time you spent there.

The thought of ever going back makes me feel incredibly lonely. I look at pictures of the lake and I wonder whether they were taken before or after I visited it. I know that makes no sense. I'm sure many people have their own intimate memories of going there, maybe some young couple will discover it tonight. But when you see something that seems so beautiful at the time, it's hard to believe that the stars would ever arrange themselves in the same patterns to be experienced again.

It would have been easy for me to wipe the slate clean after such a shattering break-up. The first instinct after a relationship comes to an end is to tar what you've connected to it as a false start, a pale cloud of the love that's around the next corner. I think that's a bullshit way to look at life.

When I look back at what my ex has said since then, now that she's moved on and found another guy, I shake my head at some of the comments. Reading that she's never been so in love or felt such happiness, that she didn't even know what love was until she met so-and-so, it strikes me as a little self-derogatory in its forgetfulness of the past. I'm pleased that she's found what she has, but I hate it when people backtrack in the aftermath of a failed relationship.

It's that very circle which I can't stand the thought of falling in to. I don't want to be the kind of guy who goes from one girl to the next telling her how he's never felt so in love. Nor do I feel the need to measure love as true, unconditional or hopelessly deluded. It is what it is, and as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't even have to be love to be enjoyable. What happened to the passion of youth?

I could analyse all the things which went wrong in my last relationship, but I only have to remember that one night on the lakefront to know that what I felt was genuine at the time. And maybe, to my mistake, it was going unreturned all along. It shouldn't really matter. You carve your own experiences in life and you can't expect others to remember them in the same way.

I've also been accused of obsessing over the chase in the past. There's this idea that a guy will engage a girl and make her feel like a princess, right up to the point where he has her and then the focus shifts to finding his next catch. It might be a justified stereotype for some. But not for me. I do enjoy the chase, but when I like a girl, I'd prefer to have her in my arms than her name in my trophy cabinet. There's not such a dividing gender gap where those affinities are concerned, and it bothers me when my intentions are mistaken.

I guess I do lack sensibility at times. It's not like me to prioritise and organize my wants from my needs. But if I spent all day dwelling on how they affected each other, I'd genuinely die of suffocation. It's the constant battle in my mind to find a way that ties them together which gives me more hope than anything.

And maybe I do suffer from being too optimistic for my own good, but that's a blissful illusion to embrace. I wouldn't have half of the memories that I do without taking some giant risks with my feelings in the past. They haven't always worked out, in fact they rarely do. I guess I'm just disillusioned by the way some people go about their choices in life. Common sense is no friend of mine.