Savin’ all my love 4 me or 0 out of 10 for effort

Dear Readers,

As we approach this most joyful time of year for Hallmark, Thorntons, Champagne style wine producers nationwide, and Hugh Grant, let us just reflect for a moment on the joy togetherness alleges versus the known peace of the holy state of single.

I’m often asked whether I am ready to put the sturdy walking boots of love back on and set off up dating hill. But let’s just say I am still having therapy inducing flashbacks on a daily basis from last time. If love comes knocking, tell him I’ve got one of my heads.

You see you have to be so so careful with the suitors, as there is plenty of opportunity for poor choice and misguided judgement. This can be brought on by sentimentality, sherry, sex hormones (sorry ladies), and in some - thank heavens not me, desperation and a phobia of being alone. 

But surely I hear you call, surely we are all finally well-adjusted enough in our dotage, having been through the mill enough times to have learnt all those silly silly lessons and recognise all the silly silly games. Surely now we are strong enough in our understanding of what we need, and importantly for the mature dater (other websites are available) what we certainly don’t need, to stand up and not take any nonsense. Surely?

Well if only it were that simple. Beware!

For they have tricks ready to conjure from up their sleeves, they are wily and will tantalise you, not with a true picture of themselves, but with carefully edited highlights of their personality. Putting a positive spin on their dysfunctionality and hiding away the more annoying family members, they will pounce. They will lure you towards a Truman Show version of a beautiful sunset, then when they’ve got their feet under the table (your table), and you have started to grow fond of them - BAM!

This is when they start to put their master plan into action; they work quietly and without warning to turn otherwise pleasant moments or occasions nasty at the drop of their twisted witches hat. This will come completely left field to you and you will be to blame. You will have triggered this crash of happy energy by unknowingly not living up to one of the many points on their exacting, but never shared, list of what they want you to do and say, when and how.

No wonder you weren’t sure what to do and missed your cue - no one cued you! No one even showed you the script. You didn't even know there was a fucking script; you thought you were having a nice relaxing afternoon. Wrong! STUPID! DUH!

Now, I have regaled you with stories of my track record (derailments) in loving before, and some of you have even had the unadulterated (if only there’d been some adultery) joy of experiencing a lot of my traffic in the actual. So to those of you, I apologise if I am repeating the same old stories, but for the rest of you, and by means of my Valentine gift to you all - here for your amusement and hopefully your education are some comedy highlights from some of my spine chilling less successful forays.

For one, my greatest fault was I never got the right gift at the right time. Very poor I know. This would be explained to me through the expressive use of mood and inharmonious disquiet. So for Valentine’s Day I might have bought them a new jacket, some new trainers, some movies, books or music, you name it – all lovely gifts yes? No, don’t be silly, they were wrong – they weren’t romantic enough gifts, so I shouldn’t have given them (I was actually told this). My desire to be nice and give lots of lovely things was, I thought, the way to go. Generosity and imagination have always been my words du jour regarding gifting and I thought the gesture and the motivation were the romantic parts of it all, not the detail of the stuff itself. But no, silly.

Another time I planned on buying a nice ring, as this was a big, big issue. You see this one had bought me a ring, but I had also had it taken off me several times, and told that I didn’t really deserve it and it should never have been given to me in the first place. So I realised that a ring was the thing, and a big want at that. So I thought, I don’t want to marry this fucker, but I am happy to lavish a token of affection if it will calm the old goat for five minutes. But no, silly.  I did it wrong again, I told him I would like to get a ring for his birthday, and asked for hints at a preferred style, and confirmation of ring size. I’d seen the ring Aidan bought Carrie, I know how these things can go. So all good, a sensible plan, can’t go wrong! No, silly. He didn’t want it for his birthday - that was the wrong time to give a ring.

Oh dear, what was I to do? – well you’ll be pleased to hear - that straw led me to inform this one that he was ungrateful and impossible to please, and so mean not to share this detailed rule book by which he was expecting me to live and by which I was failing on a daily basis. I also made it clear that he had just ruined any chance of ever getting a ring at all! Yay me – go William!

Now I don’t want you to think it was just my lavish gift giving that I wasn’t very good at. No, silly! I also got greetings cards wrong. Once, on opening a very fine Christmas card, I was told ‘I didn’t know that we were going to buy humorous cards for each other!’ I said that we hadn’t actually discussed the type of cards we were going to buy, as I hadn’t known there were right and wrong cards (silly me). He wasn’t having any of it, he didn’t like it, and it was very unthoughtful of me. How dare I!

The real problem I suppose was that he wanted one which said 'To my darling boyfriend on this our special Christmas together, may the angels and the baby cheeses bless our love and cement our union, for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory, world without end Amen. Well no, it didn’t say that. But it did come with more presents than you could shake a stick at. Just not good enough William!

Oh and I could never get the TV right either. As you know, I don’t really care for the TV that much apart from Take me Out, Downton and anything with Joanna Lumley or Sue Lawley in. I think the problem with this one was that he was a bit too ITV for me, although he tried to pass himself off as a BBC3/Channel 4 combo. The other thing was that he wasn’t that keen on P&Q so the TV provided the correct dose of white noise he needed to function. This went head to head with my desire for quiet. So even though I smiled and put up with the TV, feigning great interest in all sorts of valueless shit, I did like to turn it off whenever I got the chance. There was one wonderful instance where we were watching some drivel, and he said that he was going into the bedroom to do his exercises. He normally took about 30 mins to workout, so I thought I’d be alright to turn the TV off. But 30 minutes later when he came back, he asked why I had turned the TV off ‘I WAS WATCHING THAT!’ My protestations that he had left the room and gone to do something else fell on deaf ears. I should have just killed myself then, I know. But I found it easier to just have another large wine and tell him to fuck off.

Once I got told off for watching a documentary with my brother about the Royals if you please. This one had had a real go at me afterwards saying he hadn’t enjoyed it and ‘hadn't known what to do or where to put himself’. I said he could have always mentioned that he wanted to watch something different or left the room and gone and done something else. But no, Silly! That was the wrong answer and not in the script. How dare I!

ENOUGH ALREADY! I’m exhausted remembering all this joy.

Oh my, what a lot of to do do, but some sound reasons I think you’ll agree for why the walking boots of love remain hidden under the stairs, and why I say tread very wisely in love my pretties. Be open to its glorious possibilities, yes, but by God be ready at a moments’ notice to run for your fucking life.

Happy Valentine’s Day my Darlings

Post Script

Can I just say to those happily together, and those looking forward to the joy a good relationship can bring, please do bear in mind that the above is a) mostly written for comedy purposes, and b) only using one person’s extra bad experiences.

For all of you who are in a happy pair, or who are looking for love, I wish you every success, and unless they are a twat, have serious baggage they omitted to tell you about, or are just plain rubbish, then there is every chance that you could be happy. And I do hope that you will be. But please, the second they start to get on your nerves, aren’t nice to you anymore or start demanding that you change or put up with a sub quality standard of happiness in the name of keeping the relationship going – run like the fucking wind, and don’t leave a forwarding address.

We all know people who have stayed in relationships longer than they should have done simply to avoid an argument or because it’s cheaper to share the cost of the verruca cream, I am one of those people. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and now that we are all grown up and the masters and mistresses of our own lives and destinies there really is no excuse. Only stay in a relationship if you are really happy and the other person is nice to you, and the whole thing enriches your life. Otherwise pack a bag, leave a note, catch the next stage coach out of town, and get on with your life in peace.