Ah. Another corporate global relationships festival is upon is. Rise up, countrymen! Impale cherubim on their scarlet arrows! Infuse heart-shaped chocolates with arsenic! Alight in Clinton Cards and vomit across the displays! I have anyway conceived myself incapable of any sort of successful relationship by now. As a person, I am incompatible with the faintest suggestion of this sickly dilution of self. Empathy I am lacking, closeness I despise. Compassion I have none. Love chills me to the bone. I am somehow deformed this way, abhorrent by birth. This is not so bad. Deformity is an inherently poetic matter, after all. It is responsible for all my childhood heroes, from the Phantom of the Opera to the Frankenstein Monster to the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Acknowledging one's own unattractiveness is a valuable stepping stone in life. A bone protrudes from my chest in the most disconcerting way. My voice is a bassoon recorded at half speed, a lugubrious spatter of muddy syllables and dropped letters countered by that loathsome, uncontrollable smugness. I have a sizeable hunch and misshapen spine, a veritable coup de grace of premature kyphosis. My neck juts out and curves in such a way that it resembles a worm emerging from its burrow. My movements are awkward, my walk that of a stork collecting its pension. We become what we joke about in time. I am far too old. Were I ever to engage with someone, it would be the ultimate feat of mind over matter. And the mind is an impenetrable thicket in its right. I don't think either of us would be willing to take the job on. One or both of us would lose interest, blows and partings would be dealt and we'd both wonder what the bloody point had been. This view does not stem from bitterness, but rather a hopeful pessimism. Life is invariably delightful when viewed through a tragic glass. Despite any number of personal brickbats, I am content with my lot.
For you see, this is preferable to the alternative. The pale, preening pose and posture of it all, the unhealthy squelch and slap of physical intimacy, that messy human nonsense. The relationship transfigured to flesh. It's enough to make you retch. It's enough to make you sweat the cold dew of fear. It's enough to curdle blood and bones to red-and-white jelly. It's enough to make you cry out to God. My God! It has all the profundity of an adolescent masturbatory fantasy, that pale, spotty concoction that informs all aspects of low culture. The wet dream of Hollyoaks. Page Three of The Sun. The twin tomatoes of a teenager's buttocks ricocheting against their exposed white underwear. Relationships are at one with this pallid, soulless trash, the force that stands for everything repugnant in modern society. Alas. 'Tis not for the likes of us.
That there's a day reserved for this ridiculous rite is even worse. Saint Valentine's Day, like Easter and Christmas, is rightly celebrated by Christians alone. Valentine warrants the faintest footnote in the Christian calendar - we know only two things of him. First, his name. It's Valentine, you know? Second, his burial place. That is of even less consequence. There's more love in a digestive biscuit. Since there's a selection of eleven Valentine's Days to choose from, there's no reason a Christian should celebrate it any more fervidly than, say, Saint Swithun's Day. Or Hannukah, for that matter. As ever though, in jumps Joe Public for the chocolate eggs and stocking fillers. Blame Geoffrey Chaucer for this sorry state of affairs. Stonking good writing in The Canterbury Tales aside, he's got a lot to answer for after creating the Valentine's Day myth. The idea that love and a commercial holiday are compatible is frankly laughable. It's like Santa Claus usurping Jesus Christ as the figurehead of Christmas. Beyond their natty dress sense and fathomless age, the two have strikingly little in common.
Fair enough. I am a cold sort of fish. But supposing you can live on in this puerile dreamworld, I beg of you, please ask yourself: just what the hell has it all been about? What, indeed, is the driving force behind these pathetic relationships?
It's certainly not love - not real love, true love, pure and untainted and unrequited love. A love worth having, in short. For it is not enough to love - you must love to love. You must be moved to shout your love from the rooftops to the heavenly serenade of birdsong and cathedral bells. Petrarch's love for Laura, now that is love. Peach Geldof's love for the no-name drummer she married, now that is something else entirely. That is madness, idiocy, egotism and near-unbearable crassness curled up into one insufferable succubus purring incessantly on the living room rug. A relationship cannot be excused as friendship either. By that definition, I'm more than married to Callum and Davies. In fact, I'm laid up in bed rubbing Vic on my chest after disgorging their seventeen children in a night of heated labour. If love is but friendship in acceleration, friendship with neon lights and and glow sticks and sparkles attached, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. Friendship has contained for me the same highs and lows, the same strife and stress, the same exquisite, sainted silliness and the same unmitigated joy. If that is all love amounts to, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. People have been too good to me. Far better than they have any business being, given my appalling heartlessness and generally surly demeanour. I am beyond grateful for them. I am quite satisfied - I need no more.
We must look to other areas to unravel the relationships enigma. A conformity ritual? Personal weakness more like. Practise! Practise for what? Life is no dress rehearsal in wait of polished performance. Life is a messy and thoroughly embarrassing improvisation with the odd moment of accidental genius. Best of the excuses is 'harmless fun.' Harmless fun! Oh, FUCK. OFF. We must have a little confidence, a little respect for ourselves. A little of the life-enhancing egotism we profess to suppress with these tawdry relationships! Relationships remain, as ever, the supremely selfish act: low, unconscientious, course and vile, disqualifying all others from your life. Relationships equate to a definite addiction, a selfish leave take of the senses! As much as it is claimed that friends will not be dismissed and rejected, they are - oh, yes they are, with breathtaking speed. The two are, in final analysis, incompatible. Think of it! Years of devotion cast aside for larger breasts, perkier buttocks, a particularly large dropsical-shaped sausage - whatever! A devout betrayal of all that is good and right in friendship. It is utterly shameful. There is no excuse. It is said that all we look for in a mate is a reflection of ourselves. I can believe it. Lovers come to mimic and mirror each other, gorging themselves on their own personality. So relationships are an ego trip, maybe. Self-justification. Two exquisitely narcissistic bubbles simply falling into each other. Perhaps that's all that's needed. Yet I find egotism is best performed within the safety of our own heads. Take this diatribe as an example. I have found the intellectual satisfaction of writing it ten times more arousing than a romp through the garden of consensual sex. The click and whirr of this exquisite marriage between keyboard and brain is worth a wilderness of licking, panting, heavy breathing and hot flushes. I am self-sufficient. I have discovered the joy of life without relationships.
And yet... and yet... and yet...
I believe in the reality of love. With painful, pitiless acuteness. I do not completely trust the love I feel myself - not yet, at any rate. I'll take some convincing. Far too self-referentially bitter and twisted am I to acknowledge personal truths at speed. I have had one so unbearably kind, well-intentioned, good-natured and, might I add, astronomically talented profess their love to me. It was a pleasant thing to know, a warm thing to know. It reawakened some jewel of faith in humanity. But it meant nothing. I felt nothing. What could I give back? What could I do in deference to that love? How could I possibly serve it? I felt nothing of the same. Simon Callow was right - 'equality of love is absolutely uncommon.' Equality of indifference, however, is not, and this is the code we tend to live by as human beings. You must look for satisfaction elsewhere. Otherwise you'll find yourself sacrificing sanity and reason for something you had already had. Contained within you. For love lies dormant within us at all times, should we only seek it. Love originates in the human beast and that is where it must remain. It is only natural.
The love I place my faith in is to be shared. This love is not selfish or furtive or attention-seeking or pig-headed or wrong. Here is love in its purest distillation, a unified state of compassion. The love with which we treat not just ourselves, not just one special other, but everyone. All the time. I am no saint (not even a Saint Valentine). I fall frightfully short of this standard every day of my life. I must get my satisfaction from trying. It is my eternal wish to do a bit of good in this world and, God help me, someday I'll succeed. For it is in this elevated plateaux of love that our salvation lies. Our final deliverance from the narrow-minded squalor of relationships.
Oof. I have issues.
