Falling in Lurve, the Bad News: a tongue-in-cheek guide
What is falling in love like? I mean, what is it really like, I mean, like totally realistically? Let me explain with a metaphor.
Let’s face it. Falling in love is like buying a car without knowing anything about it: its age or condition or how many previous owners it’s had, or how any of them looked after it, or whether the thing even works at all. There are any number of unknowns: for instance, how many car crashes has it been involved in (now you know why they use that term for bad relationships)? Has anyone died driving it? Most of all, falling in love is like buying that car from a dodgy dealer who’s going to disappear off the face of the earth as soon as the sale is completed. There are no guarantees There is no insurance. And you’ll never get your money back.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. Falling in love with someone new is like making a purchase at a downmarket boot sale. Everything is “as seen”; you don’t know whether your purchase is in working order, whether there are any important bits missing, whether indeed it ever worked. And you won’t find out how much you’re actually paying for it until much later — if indeed you ever find out. And this stepping into the unknown, they say, is supposed to an upside — part of the thrill of falling in love! Even if you previously knew the person, you’ll find they’re a different kettle of fish when you get into a romantic relationship with them — the Harry meets Sally effect.
Oh yes, of course there’ll always be some sort of mandatory period of relative bliss early on, when everyone’s on their best behaviour and trying to create a good impression. You might even be able to extend this euphoric period, before reality sets in; by choosing someone so that there are restrictive circumstances that prevent you being together early on for too much of the time. For instance you could fall in love with someone who has a husband and seven children and doesn’t want to rock the boat, or with someone who lives on a different continent; or you could stay unconsummated for as long as possible, both of you channelling your sexual energies into marathon running or creating masterpieces of poetry or macramé. That’s called maximising the URT (unresolved sexual tension).
But sooner or later the honeymoon period will be over and reality will inevitably set in. What happens after that is one of the strangest phenomena in human relationship: over a period of time, the special little things that you found really delightful and quirky about the person when you fell in love with them — the cute way they laugh out loud with a mouthful of Coco-pops, the adorable way they wear their hair in a bunny rabbit shape, maybe their habit of using a very persuasive childish voice when they want something they don’t deserve, or that funny shape they make with their mouth when they’re watching TV — these very individual characteristics gradually become more ordinary and less special. And not too long after that they become annoying; then they become intolerable; and eventually they turn into the reasons you end up leaving each other.
There really should be some sort of protective legislation in place here. There should be consumer protection. Falling in love — the product — should be marked, “This offer is for a short time only”! But it isn’t.
You will have been given plenty of warning signs as you fall into this life-threatening condition — but you’ll ignore them; that’s the nature of the process; that’s why it’s been designed that way by some perverse entity; the warnings will only serve to make you all the more driven.
Instead, you experience and highly indulgent extremely naff sensations like feeling ‘incredibly alive’ and noticing how ‘incredibly beautiful’ everything is, except you aren’t aware how naff they are (but your friends are; they just smile knowingly, remembering how convincing it was for them, and not wanting to break bad news to you). You get embarrassingly spiritual perceptions about ‘how connected you are to everything else in the universe’, or how ‘complete’ you feel; or maybe you’re overwhelmed with a sense of ‘merging with the divine’. And you don’t even feel embarrassed by it (your friends do.) The mundane becomes incredibly special to you; you suddenly find extraordinary fulfilment in such lowly chores as washing the dishes or putting the rubbish out, when you’re in that bizarre, dreamy floaty state.
In this extreme but usually short-lived state, you effortlessly transcend your normal limits of passion. Your sexual appendages seem to work better. Everything seems to be bigger, longer, harder, more sensitive, longer-lasting. If you’re the woman, you put up with the man droning on about himself afterwards. If you’re the man, you enjoy foreplay. Suddenly, you understand why your friends’ have these ambivalent reactions: they’re jealous, they want to be in love too. In fact, you convince yourself, they’ve probably never really known what this is like, because this is The Real Thing.
Nor does it make any difference if you stop and think to yourself for a minute, “Hey! Hold on, this is familiar. I remember this, and I remember how it gets later on.” Even if you realise that you’ve fallen in love with completely the wrong person and you’re making a dreadful mistake — it doesn’t make any difference; you can’t stop yourself. On the contrary: the nagging sense of making a dreadful mistake drives you to plunge ever deeper into the thing. ‘Dreadful-mistake-ness’, in fact, is probably the most potent attractant specified by whoever it was the thought up this romantic attraction thing in the first place.
And that, my friends, is why it’s perfectly possible for us to fall in love repeatedly with the same kind of person — the same wrong kind of person. That I why we do it all the time.
Oh and by the way, you will forget all this when you met that Totally Right (aka Completely Wrong) person. Enjoy.
