The hulking monster that is Valentine’s Day is a symptom of our belief that we can have it all in a relationship. It permeates the ether from the beginning of February, raising expectations with its odour of heart sweets and wax strips.
Our relationship should not be just the deepest and most elemental friendship of our lives, we are led to believe, but that friend should also be someone to woo, or be wooed by: a suitor, a person who will bow at our altar and worship us as being infinitely more important than everyone else. It should be someone who will empathise with us and think of us in poetic terms.
Despite the fact that we conduct our modern relationships in the era of The X Factor, internet porn and ever-longer life spans, we should still be fawning over one another like Petrarch over Laura, or Romeo over Juliet, or Kim Kardashian over herself. If this isn't how it is, then we're doing it wrong.
I had the opposite of the standard student experience. I stayed completely celibate for six years. Not for any devotion to God, or ideas about saving myself (people aren’t jars of preserve). I simply didn’t connect with anyone on a sufficient level to feel that I wanted to get any closer to them than friendship.
After those six years, I realised that a choice that had initially been made as a form of self-preservation was making new problems. Despite having lots of male friends, I found it cripplingly uncomfortable to talk to men in anything other than a friendship capacity.
So I met my boyfriend online. The uncle who thought I was gay for years and was relieved when he found out I’d met someone can sink back into mild discomfort now that it’s clear how we met. Since I don’t drink, I don’t like the standard Irish method of meeting partners, which is to get fluthered, collide with someone pelvis-first and then hope for the best in the morning.
I don’t trust anyone who can’t look you in the eye when they’re sober. Also, conversing with a drunk person is like conversing with a large, slurring, sexually precocious child, so I looked for alternative means of meeting someone.
Misogyny on dating sites
A dalliance with online dating platforms is now standard for younger people. Wanting to make a change in my life and to address what I felt was an unhealthy inability to open myself to the idea of a partner, I made a profile on a popular dating site more than a year ago.
The experiences of women on dating sites can be horrifying. Initial expressions of interest quickly turn into torrents of vitriolic misogyny whether you politely decline a man’s interest and wish him the best or ignore him entirely.
The number of men online with the linguistic capacity of overripe fruit is unnerving. Their blunt, sexist entreaties are matched in their intensity only by the force of their conviction to sleep with anything, anywhere.
There are lots of decent fellows with more grey matter too, but they tend to be somewhat drowned out by the weirdos, who are no doubt drawn in by the anonymity, like hyenas over a ripe carcass.
I went in with no expectations. Actually, that’s not true. Being a pessimist, I went in with negative expectations (and some of those proved justified), but I could not have anticipated the outcome. I met a few different men from the website for tea, generally in the middle of the afternoon, always in a public place. (To paraphrase Margaret Atwood, men on dating sites fear that the woman won’t look as she does in her picture, or that they won’t like her. Most women on dating sites fear they will be raped or murdered.)
The conversations over tea ended always in either polite mutual disinterest, disinterest on one side, or immense creepiness leading to immediate exit. When a man disagrees with a declaration that, although he seems like a very nice person, you just don’t feel a physical attraction, you suddenly remember that you left the stove on and extract yourself from his gaze with haste.
As is probably the case with most people, I didn’t end up with my “type”, whatever that means. I’ve found myself with a person who is my physical opposite in almost every way, and lives in another country. It certainly isn’t what I thought would happen.
It’s sometimes said that romantic love is a deep recognition of oneself in another person. You look at someone and see yourself reflected back, and you’re comforted to have your existence validated, and feel a bit less isolated inside your own skin.
Love is selfish
That’s shockingly narcissistic. It is comforting to have another pair of eyes look at the world and see what you see, but it’s also important to have someone to complain at, someone who will tell you when you’re wrong and to point out that there’s cat hair stuck to your trousers. Love is selfish. We choose our partners based on how they make us feel. When things get consistently bad enough, or we think a partner will persist in treating us poorly or making us unhappy, it often ends in a parting of ways. At least it should.
Valentine’s Day is nonsense. It pressures people into examining their relationships and finding them lacking in some twinkly quality that is difficult to name.
This will be my second Valentine’s with the unlikely partner I’m very lucky to have found, and I intend to spend the day celebrating another year of the most romantic aspect of a relationship: mutual tolerance. That sounds dull, but consider. If someone thinks that your overall character makes putting up with your failings worth it, and you think the same of them, you’re in luck. You are so worth being with that your sleep farts, your inability to take the food bits out of the sink are worth tolerating.
That’s true love.
