You could almost hear the tumbleweed drifting by.
“Bit of a long shot,” I tweeted. “I’m writing an anti-Valentine’s piece for @culturevultures. Who’d like to go for dinner with me for research?”
Whether it was the dour, grim, mildly smug ginger-haired facade glaring at potential dates from my profile picture, or the functional 140-character self-description beneath, or the sheer bad form of arranging a romantic date via a social network, the response of the Twittersphere was decidedly underwhelming. #DateMark didn’t trend; I didn’t go viral.
It was probably for the best: in general I’m good value on a date, but I’m not particularly good at relationships. I often look around, listening to one half of a phone conversation on the bus or watching a bored pair at the pub of a Saturday evening, and realise that in all likelihood very few people truly are. For as long as I can remember knowing what the words meant I’ve struggled between romantic idealism and a sour unattractive but necessary cynicism. I want to believe in true love, in the possibility of an emotional and psychological connection between human beings that transcends speech and deed, a tender space in the heart where hope and passion can reside without jealousy or bitterness or fear. But then I also want to win a Bafta some day.
What we call “love” seems to me to be selfishness: the need for someone to possess, someone to go out with you, to be there for you, to be on the other end of the phone when you need help, to satisfy and please you, ever and always for you. And you for your part agree to meet half-way. I don’t have any wish to possess anyone. It’s a compromise, a cheap and flimsy agreement between two people who learn to say “I love you” when what they mean is “You’ll do”.
The odd occasion that I express my honest feelings to any loving couple, their rebuke is troublingly abrupt (rather like a North Korean worker might respond if a TV journalist were to ask him about his Dear Leader): I clearly haven’t had a truly fulfilling relationship, I must simply be bitter, etc, etc – all of which is broadly accurate. “Well we’re in love,” they insist, before they turn away and gaze into one another’s eyes and go on feeding each other olives, massaging one another’s shoulders, and not having sex… or whatever it is that couples in love actually do together in private.
Valentine’s Day love is especially tawdry: lines of doggerel printed in mass-produced cards; red roses that will be dead next week; the words “I love you” plastered onto everyone’s eyes. Joining in the Valentine’s circus is almost an admission of how weak your love actually is. How can your relationship be special and unique if the words you use to express it are the same as those you hear between the couple at the next table? When I am happily coupled (if that day ever arrives when I finally admit I can’t do this whole business of life on my own), we will celebrate our own occasions, the date we met, the date we first kissed; we will have our own words, our own songs, our own venues. We won’t dine out at Zizzi on February 14th simply because that’s what everyone else does. We will not be everyone else. Couples who buy each other cards from Clinton’s with words other people have written and pictures other people have drawn to show their love for one another are as bad as the boys who wear red trousers and joke-shop specs to show how edgy and individual they are.
Compounding all of this is the fact that I find most women beautiful. My concentration is limited, my attention in life always captured by what’s new and different. Very rarely does a day go by that I don’t meet someone, catch their eye, even glimpse them in the distance, and remember them long afterwards: one night in London last December, sitting with friends on the last Tube from Richmond, I was called out by a woman of about 24 or 25 beside me for leaving an empty wrapper on the next seat. I apologised and said she was quite right (I’m actually a nice young man when I’m tipsy), and in the few minutes before she disembarked at Turnham Green I found out she was a teacher, originally from Hull, before studying at UCL. We talked about Dickens and Ackroyd and the capital (I made some quip about how my littering kept alive the roughness and the grit on which London made its name; in my defence I was very drunk at the time). She said most people would have smacked her if she’d pointed out their littering, but I didn’t seem like I would respond quite so abruptly (I took this as a compliment, despite my tendency to shun them). She was like a primrose, if primroses had floral hazel eyes and delicate sweet-tempered voices. She left as quickly as she appeared, blowing me a quiet kiss as she alighted, but I still often wonder whether she may have been the woman for me, the one to prove that love is real. In my quietest moments I think much the same of most girls I ever meet.
If Woody Allen were a Yorkshireman, less neurotic but rather dryer (and less sharp), I expect we’d have a lot in common. I remember finding beautiful the blonde woman in front of me in the queue at the check-in desk on the way back from my first holiday to Spain aged 5, long before I knew what my body could do when I put my mind to it. I remember the bookish young fresher at university who told me one of her first student nights of enforced drinking that I have beautiful eyelashes. I remember the dumpy Australian girl in a sailor suit who was visiting England and who I kissed the last time I was back at Oxford for a night out. I find most women beautiful. But the last time I told a woman that she was special, she cut me off: “Everyone’s special. But then if everyone’s special, nobody’s special.”
And then, there’s the ultimate catch-22. I doubt I could handle polygamy, and cheating I don’t think I would ever manage either: my strength of feeling for one woman at a time is usually too strong, never mind more. But if I truly do love someone, how is it fair or right or loving in the slightest to submit them to me: to make them cope with my bad moods, my surly moments, my bitter feelings, my harsh words, my jealousies and my fears? I can be an utter arsehole at times; it’s just not fair to make someone else suffer for it too.
All of these thoughts and feelings speak to more than simply one day in the Hallmark calendar. Yet gaze at my unromantic navel all I might, in Valentine’s week it becomes as striking as the winter sun that nobody else seems to bother themselves with any of this. I’m reminded hourly of previous flings and flirtations when I check my phone and find emails from Hotel Chocolat and Malmaison and Interflora announcing their latest Valentine’s offers. When I overhear coupling conversations in barroom corners (even between forty- and fifty-somethings) I remember the times I tried out similar over-wrought and over-rehearsed lines.
Knowing full well how little chance I’d have to escape the compulsions and the obligatory mock-passion of Valentine’s Day, I set about looking for a date. I wanted to find someone intelligent, someone responsive, someone who captivates me but also challenges me; someone I can adore and express my love for, who appreciates my frequent arbitrary shows of affection or my occasional characteristically theatrical but always heartfelt gesture. It only slowly occurred that my ideal date is essentially myself.
So I invited myself out for dinner in town. Before we met I was tentative: I was worried that there would be a distinct lack of mystique. We know each other rather well, there for so many of one another’s less proud, less glorious moments. When I meet a girl I want to know everything, her life story, day by every single beautiful day: the time when she was seven and cried when she dropped her ice cream in the park; the day she first rode a bike by herself; everything she has seen and done and achieved; everything that has made her feel proud and happy. But as you probably gathered, I am easily jealous: some things I don’t want to know either…
When we met, however, it was much more easy-going, like a casual “sort-of-date” that couples who meet online have. We agreed to get together at the restaurant where we had a table booked: not the sort of highish-end independent establishment preferred by Culture Vulture readers; I prefer to wait until the second or third date for that sort of place, when we know there is a connection. Taking a girl you’re not sure you like for a drink at The Swan or a coffee at Bottega Milanese is a waste of a good venue. (There’s a case to be made for taking the opposite approach, but after twenty-two years in Leeds, most places in town remind me of someone so I’m sticking with my approach.)
I won’t say where exactly we went that evening: all I can say is it was the kind of restaurant where you go if you don’t know where to go.
Unsurprisingly then, it was packed. We took a table for two by the window, seats facing one another across our places. Square tables present a complex challenge for lovers: a circular table allows for two diners to position themselves closer together, and share greater intimacy before dessert but after that second glass of wine; a square table requires more concentration, limits the opportunity for a tender moment, but in so doing makes the prospect of what might follow the meal more tantalising.
Having joked briefly about our day, about finding the right place where we arranged to meet, exchanging raised eyebrows towards the overenthusiastic waitress, we took our seats and had a moment’s respite hiding behind the menu. Inches from our table was another couple: she blonde and toothy and doting, he neatly-coiffed with three days’ fashionable stubble gracing his bronzed face. Neither wore a ring, but they were speaking like man and wife about someone at work, about one of her girlfriends: the only difference is they were still smiling about it all. When they stopped their random chat, they carried on looking into one another’s eyes. No words were necessary.
He’s probably cheating on her, I said to myself, turning back to the menu.
“Would you like a starter, Mark?” I asked.
“No, Mark,” I replied. “Thank you.”
“The mains here are very filling,” I tried to reassure.
“So I’ve heard.”
It took all sorts. Towards the centre of the room slouched four blokes, each at varying degrees of fatness and baldness. They looked as though they worked in sales. They had clearly had a couple of pints between work and dinner, and weren’t modest in showing it. Their waitress approached and seemed to ask them if everything was all right. One of them – the leader, the baldest of them all – hollered, “Oh yes love, top quality. She smiled kindly, and walked off. He measured her from behind with his eyes, and crept into the group, made some comment which made them all cackle whether they wanted to or not, and gestured something in her direction.
“I should have had the ravioli,” I muttered, looking down at my half-touched risotto.
“Oh it does look quite good… More wine?”
With another glass of red, we got talking more: about our recent dates (women who were once “the love of my life” suddenly became “this girl I saw a couple of times”), laughing off the people we’d once almost given up, almost lost everything for, all just to briefly convince ourselves of something we didn’t fully know. What began as starched, stuttering attempts at conversation flowed more happily, more free: it turned out I had quite a lot in common with myself.
Almost beside the front door sat an older couple and what must have been their two daughters, pretty enough but only as pretty as two girls eating with their parents are allowed to be. They both had it all to come.
As the evening had drawn ever further out, sharing chat, exchanging tales and jokes between mouthfuls, it was time to say goodbye. We split the bill between the two of us, and made our way.
“Thanks so much for this, Mark,” I said, “it was lovely.”
“I’m glad you joined me. Hopefully we can meet again soon.”
We didn’t share a hug or a kiss, chaste or otherwise. We had talked so much that perhaps we didn’t have to.
Outside a bar along the street, a lad was raising his voice at a girl beside him. “Well then if you didn’t want to come out, why didn’t you say so?” he shouted, and more besides.
As the pale moon watched every couple walking homeward through the dim-lit streets I toyed with my phone, and logged into Twitter to see whether #DateMark was finally trending.
Ah Mark, aren’t you missing the point? The reason why the cards are bought, the flowers are ordered, the chocolates wrapped, and the tedious, tired, time-worn words exchanged is that it’s a ritual. All the major events of life, birth, death, marriage, have to be knitted into the common fabric so the individual doesn’t feel so alone and existentially abandoned. And so we have the Hallmark ditty . . . it makes love less individual, reassures us that we are just like everyone else, that our misgivings, evasions and disloyalties need never be discovered. It’s real love!
Wouldn’t ever catch me sending a Valentine’s, however.
I like the fact that life’s events are marked so we don’t feel ‘existentially abandoned’. It is an honest attempt at providing meaning where there is none. Imagine the burden on the ordinary mind if we gaze to long at such abandonment. Mr Kirby and Mr O’Brien don’t have ordinary minds, they are questioners of the highest order, quite possibly minds which don’t shatter or implode at the existential void of it all. I for one kinda like my sanity and my puny humanness and rather weak mind so I will continue if I feel like it to send a card; or not if for one year I get all philosophical or more likely can’t be bothered. I will also celebrate all the other trivial life events using hallmark if their cards prove to be the cheapest and revel in my ordinariness, but please Mr Kirby and Mr O’Brien don’t think bad of me and keep providing your written enquiry, there are some minds which can gaze on all this and not go blind.
I didn’t believe in love either until I fell in it. Love is quite the opposite of the selfishness you describe: instead you want to be with that person all the time; you want to be on the other end of the phone when they need help; you want to satisfy and please them always. We don’t do Valentine’s Day, though.