A Rochdale woman who has a “sweep it under the rug” approach to the elephant in the room is puzzled as to why her relationships always end badly.

Edna Clowdes, 32, has been in and out of relationships since her teenage tears with only one of them ever making it to longer than a year.

“It’s ridiculous,” she told the Rochdale Herald. “I’ll hook up with some hot guy, it’ll be great for a few weeks, and then he turns out to be a total wanker, just suddenly out of nowhere. What’s the matter? Why can’t I get with a good one?”

Wanting to get both sides of the story, we tracked down some of her exes. One of them, Howie Trilly-Append, 31, had a rather different version of events:
“Hey, she’s a good laugh to be around when everything’s cool,” he told the Herald, “but then there would be issues, of course every relationship has issues. Of course whenever I tried talking to her about it, she’d just ignore it. She’ll talk about anything rather than face up to the idea that there’s anything wrong. Eventually it would get too much and the whole thing degenerated into a slanging match, or even worse. It was when she broke a glass on my head that I decided enough was enough.”

Andy Notherthing, 29, had a similar experience with her. “When you’re trying to save a relationship and she doesn’t realise that there’s a problem and just carrying on as normal, there’s an elephant in the room and she’s just trying to sweep it under the rug, eventually you just have to say enough is enough.”

Miss Clowdes was quick to scoff when told of these comments. “They would say that. I’ve got lots of male friends who really sympathise, they’re great, they’d never do what those jerks have done.”
Which begged the question why she didn’t get with one of them.

“Oh I just couldn’t,” she said.

When asked for an actual reason, she couldn’t come up with one, and simply repeated, “no, I just couldn’t.”
The lack of explanation spoke volumes. She did however confirm that the number of men with whom she is just friends has been steadily decreasing over the years. Her reasons – and indeed the reasons of the ex-friends – mirrored her stories about her relationship breakups.

We at the Herald can only speculate on the real cause of these breakups. All we will say is, if you’re going to try and sweep an elephant in the room under the rug, you’re going to need a either new broom or a new rug very quickly.