Realising just how many times he's been dumped, Chris sets out to contact all his ex-girlfriends and, provided they don't slam the door in his face (and several do), ask them why they dumped him. Through the course of this painfully frank, often painfully funny documentary Chris confronts his shortcomings and personality flaws, digs over old wounds, analyses his erectile dysfunction, experiments with Viagra (for the record, it really doesn't go well with beer) and meets Alex, his current girlfriend. He could then be the bravest man in the UK. "Or a fool?" he suggests. "Probably a fool," agrees Alex.
What lessons have you learned from the experience?
It's all the standard ones, the lower level crimes. My personal hygiene, my dress sense - I have new jeans now, and a nice shirt, courtesy of my girlfriend. I occasionally brush my hair. Not today, you'll notice, but occasionally. I'd like to think my sexual performance has improved hugely. Then there's the more serious emotional stuff that's quite hard to put into simple "I learned this, I learned that" terms. When you screw up an important relationship, the lessons you learn aren't as straightforward as being cleaner, or being tidy. They're much deeper things. Even in the film I found it was better to leave those to the images and the music, rather than for me to try to put them into words.
If you could go back in time, is there one piece of advice you'd give your younger self?
The simple thing, if I had a moment, is "wash more". Just try and wash. I think I drove quite a lot of women away with the whole smell thing.
Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved before?
Definitely. It is definitely better to have loved, but the thing about that is it's very painful to lose love. In the film, there's only really one example, Vicky, the one girl I was very much in love with that didn't work out. Other than death, that loss is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to anyone. It's a really difficult thing. The final words of that interview with Vicky, she says "It takes a long time to get over these things" and I think in my case it took me way longer than I really expected. I think it does, particularly if you're a man, everbody knows that men bury their emotions and it was very difficult for me to confront that stuff in the film and to edit it. It was reliving a lot of difficult stuff and it surprised me, I didn't expect that scene, that moment to be as raw as it ended up being.
The subject of breaking up is comic and tragic, at the same time. A lot of the earlier interviews, the encounters, they were quite funny but they were awkward at the time when I was meeting the girls. Some funny things were said. It's only when you get onto the more significant break-ups that it's hard to keep laughing.
Is monogamy possible?
I suppose the definition of monogamy is to be happy with one person? At this current point in my life, the way I feel, I would say yes, monogamy is possible. Something quite extreme happens to me in the course of the film. I tried to be as honest as I could be about the way I was feeling, the darker stuff, the lusts because I think a lot of men do have these things inside them. They probably come out on drunken nights, but not in conversation. Like when I sing that song: 'I'd like to f*ck every girl in the world, but I can't seem to f*ck one', I'd not had sex in a long time, so by that stage it was pretty much anyone would do. That desire in me, I think that's why it turned into me rampaging the streets, like a werewolf, which I look back on with a certain amount of horror. Since I met Alex, that desire has totally disappeared.
I'm really happy in this relationship. It's the first thing since that break-up with Vicky, that's had a real impact on me. Alex has changed my life totally. We live together now, so it's even weird for us to look at the film and see how we met. We quite like it when people ask us how we met and we say "oh, we'll show you the clip..."
On a scale of 1-10, how important is sex in a relationship?
I think it's probably an 11. Or 9.7. I didn't use to think it was important but I think it probably is, not necessarily regular, I don't think it has to be that often, but I think the reason I couldn't get it up in the film wasn't because I didn't like those girls, or didn't fancy them, but because there wasn't that deeper connection. You know what? It's not to do with sex, it's to do with intimacy. There has to be intimacy.
Check out the official site of A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures.
