I am not someone known for going out. I regularly get home in the early hours, having dashed straight from one event to the next, but I have never been someone who feels the desire to go clubbing three times a week. A few days ago, however, I put aside my normal reservations and make the executive decision that I ought to be more fun. I neck the best part of a bottle of Sainsbury's Taste the Difference pinot grigio, apply two slicks of shiny black eyeliner, and then follow my friends into the centre of town. We wait shivering outside the club for twenty minutes, despite the fact that we already have tickets. It begins to rain, but there’s only a handful of people between us and the front of the queue so we decide to persevere. Eventually we make it in, and I expect to fall into a sort of rhythmic trance, like the nightclubs and parties of Hollywood blockbusters, swaying between tall, muscular men and girls with rings on every finger and perfume that smells pink. Instead, I have WKD spilled over me almost immediately, and a large rugby player with a misshapen mullet tucks me into his armpit.

“I am happiest somewhere where there are two people, not two hundred”

I want to be OK with it. I want to enjoy myself as much as everyone else seems to be. Surely they are not also pretending. I want to be a person who exchanges phone numbers with the girl in the smoking area because she loves my top and I love her shoes and we both went to that one thing that one time. I want to dance and drink and go up to someone I don’t know and press myself against them and that be it, to spend the night kissing and knowing each other better, in that limited way that strangers do. I want to be a person who does not worry about losing her card or dropping her phone, who does not spend the entire evening feeling around in her pockets to make sure she hasn’t dropped anything important.

After ninety minutes or so, I find myself perched on a stool at the back of the club. My throat hurts from shouting across at my friend, despite the fact she’s not moved more than a metre away from me the whole evening. There is no room for me here, in this club, I think to myself. The shape of me does not fit into this space. I know that people are happy here, but this is not me. I am happiest somewhere where there are two people, not two hundred, and I do not need the wine or the eyeliner to feel comfortable.

On the walk back from the club that night, alone, I pass groups of people heading in the other direction, far louder and drunker than I am. They don’t notice me, as if I am just a shop window or a bicycle chained to a railing. When I get back, I collapse down on my bed. The window is open. It is dark, but the black-framed glass lanterns around the old court light up the wet paving slabs. They blink as the rain hits against them, flashing silver and gold. I think of my friends still in the warm underground of the club, and pretend that I miss being there. Really, I feel relieved to be back in the cold silence of my bedroom.

“The best part of clubbing is the stories that are told the following day”

I have reached the perhaps contentious conclusion that most of us go clubbing not because we enjoy it — not really — but because it bonds us to the people we are there with. The best part of clubbing is the stories that are told the following day, the remembering that you were there when that person did that silly thing, and oh how you laughed, oh how you giggled yourself senseless in the middle cubicle of the second floor toilets. The best part of clubbing — let’s be honest — is not actually being there, but sharing the pain of a hangover with your friends the next morning over a greasy breakfast, recalling where that bruise came from, and which round of Jägerbombs was the one that wiped you out.

I seek out this sensation of excitement and togetherness in other forms. I would rather sit across from my friends in gowns and uncomfortable heels at a college formal, drinking cheap red wine and debating things that are wholly insignificant as if they are the most important issues in the world. I would rather go to the opening night of a play my most talented friend is in, and watch her ginger hair shine and her eyes sparkle under the stage lights. I would rather sit in the pub, for hours and hours, with the people I know best, hearing stories I have already heard a million times.

I will not bend to the pressure to spend my Wednesdays and Sundays in a nightclub. I will drink and I will dance and I will love people, both friends and strangers, but I will do so on my own terms, and in my own time, without spending all my money on tequila shots, or giving myself bruises from tripping over on the dance floor. Perhaps one day, in a different life, when I am older and wiser and I have new reasons to go, I will enjoy clubbing all over again. But for now I’m fine. For now, I’m going to spend my nights slightly differently.