Exemplars

Awake at 5am – I was immediately very conscious that it is almost exactly 12 years since I got the job at the medical library, over 10 years since the trouble with the threatening yobs began, and 10 years since my dad became so ill that he couldn't really cope from day to day anymore.

I remember thinking once it became obvious that the trouble with the yobs was going to continue, that this would probably take about 10 years to go away, by which time I'd be 50, my life would be past the time of promise and development, and would be more or less over, and my parents would probably be dead. In fact it took 7 years, but in the meantime my parents did die and my health failed.

Given the seven years after 1991, the summer I realised I didn't want to be an illustrator, when I was mostly unemployed, that's the last 18 years of my life, from 32 to 50, wasted – the years of children, of career, of career consolidation. The ten years before were hard themselves, but they didn't feel hopeless.

This is all something I already knew, but for some reason it hit me with great weight this morning, and I became very anxious – how or why I can be anxious about something that is passed, I don't understand. Sad, depressed, yes, but not anxious.

Separately I've realised how normal, how everyday the sexual and romantic part of life is in most people's lives. Because I was on my own so much I didn't notice, but it's utterly normal – it's why there are children playing in the street, young women walking with pushchairs. It seemed something extremely difficult to achieve to me, but almost every damn fool achieves it. It's not necessarily easy and straightforward but it is common and everyday. I think part of the reason that I didn't notice this is because it wasn't happening in front of my eyes, I didn't have a group of friends I saw pairing off, and obviously people don't commonly have sex in public. Even passionate kissing and clinching in public makes other people uncomfortable, the comic response to the sight being "get a room".

So for me at least the evidence of other people's romantic and sexual relationships was implicit not explicit, and I either didn't notice it, or I blanked it out to avoid the pain of acknowledging it.

It's only now, since my mother died and I've connected to some degree with people of my own age again, that I've realised how life works and how late it is.

Blowing a Wad

The contents of a shopping bag of porn I'm about to throw out. The pile is about an inch thick even spread out like this. What a sickening waste of money, what a heartbreaking waste of a life, over 35 years of life wanked away over this.

Even if there was no woman who would love me, who would make love with me, this was a ridiculous and wasteful substitute.

I'd have been better even spending on some whore, at least if I never knew love, I'd at least had the animal pleasure of poking my cock up some slapper's guts a few times.

Solitude is the Nurse of Love

It should go without saying that the belief is nonsense that there is only one person in the world for us.

We fall in love with those who are close by us, whom we know at work, whom we see in our local pub, who lives two streets away, or whom we deliberately seek proximity to by way of computer dating or Lonely Hearts columns.

We don’t have to spend decades trying to find the one woman or man for us, until we finally discover them half the world a way in a small town 90 miles north north-east of Novosibersk.

It isn’t sheer luck that our life-partner is usually somebody who lives near us. We fall in love with a girl we know at school, with a man we meet at university, with someone who happened to advertise for a date in the same paper that we read. We are formed to fall in love with those nearby, those who are available to us.

We fall in love largely from propinquity, from being close in location, and from little more. If we are lucky, we fall in love with someone who is a match for us in character and interests and achievements and background, but more often than not sheer propinquity is all the basis for so-called love.

In these cases “love” is no more than a passing phase that is propelled by loneliness, or lust, or the need to dominate, or even boredom. If there is no similarity of character, no shared interests, the relationship either disintegrates painfully, or - more sadly - carries on with the partners continuing to delude themselves that things will change, that their relationship will work out in the end.

These relationships don’t work out in the end, We all know people, long married, who do nothing but grouch about their wife or their husband, who could stop their own frustration simply by acknowledging their husband or wife was not a good match for them, and now that the kids are grown both parties would be happier if they separated.

But people rarely do this – because they are human and they are therefore afraid. It’s better to have someone to come home to, even when rubbing along with them is more a matter of friction than delight.

I am not faced with such a quandary. Women never desired me, and looking at myself and my history and what has become of me I don’t blame them.

My quandary is that being human myself, I fall in love too. And ironically, I don’t fall unrealistically in love. I love a woman who is a good friend to me, who is flawed, and who I see is flawed. I know who and what I am, and I usnderstand she cannot love me. I doubt any woman now will. But the only thing unrealistic in my love is I’m a ruined man with a ruined life who should never even presume to want a woman like her. That said, I am the ruin of a man who might have been a good match for her.

No matter, what is past is past.

But funnily enough, we have – or more honestly once had - a lot in common, unlike so many people who are in love. And I don’t look at her and think her a paragon. So many of the things she does I can see are rooted in her flaws and faults, I am content that she is human and so therefore flawed, and I know where many of her flaws and problems originate, so they endear her to me.

A friend said to me recently in regard of her “you’ve fallen for her like a soldier in a military hospital falls for his nurse” and I’m content to agree with him. She’s been a kind and supportive friend in a time of my need, when she didn’t have to be. Why not fall for someone with such an admirable quality? We can only fall in love with the people around us, not with strangers we have never met.

We have to fall in love with someone, it’s how we’re made, and it’s in the end all we’re here for. We are brought into the world by way of love, and by way of love we bring others into the world for their own momentary taste of being. If we are lucky that is, which I have not been - I will pass life on to no one.

Loving someone places no duty on them to love one back.

I’m sad she can’t love me, but I’m glad I love her, because she is good and it means I have deeply recognised and appreciated her goodness and have a little of it in my life.

Love seeketh not Itself to please

The myth of the love-vow had a lasting influence on Western culture. [...] Other societies have viewed love, desire and marriage in other terms, and the idea of marriage as rooted in a personal choice is as foreign to oriental traditions as the love of counterpoint, the belief in the Incarnation or a taste for confit d'oie.

It is hard to disagree with all that. Yet there is something that it overlooks, something which is at the heart of the medieval conception of the love vow, and of the marital practices that it has been used to authorize. This thing is the peculiar intentionality of human sexual emotion. Sexual desire is not a desire for sensations. It is a desire for a person: and I mean a person, not his or her body, conceived as an object in the physical world, but the person conceived as an incarnate subject, in whom the light of self-consciousness shines and who confronts me eye to eye, and I to I. True desire is a kind of petition: it demands reciprocity, mutuality and a shared surrender. It is, therefore, compromising, and also threatening. No pursuit of a mere sensation could be compromising or threatening in this way.

These are not claims about culture, nor are they claims about the way in which desire has been rationalised, idealized or constrained by institutions. They are claims about a particular state of mind, one that only rational beings can experience, and which, nevertheless, has its roots in our embodiment as members of the human species.

Roger Scruton "The Meaning of Marriage" 2006


Love is a matter of desiring the persona of the loved one as it is. It is most emphatically not a matter of selfishly manipulating the persona of the other to match one's demands, needs and preconceptions; that is merely a subtle kind of rape.

Roberta Holzmann "A Sceptical Feminism" 1987