I’m allergic to romance. It’s the only thing my body can’t process – everything else I can digest without event. Peanuts, gluten, sketchy limoncello, self-loathing, psychedelics, African goat tongue, oysters, expired mince, impostor syndrome: I have stomached and survived all of them, but send me a man with a bouquet of flowers and my entire being will erupt in mental hives.
And it’s not just my own romancing incidents that bring me out in an invisible rash – witnessing the romancing of others can easily send me west. If someone else is getting romanced in my eye-line it will trigger me. Something as innocuous as a woman holding roses on a train platform is enough to compel my eyes to roll back up into my head, down my spine, wrap around my groin, up my stomach and back into my sockets. Why does visible, intentional romance make me so uncomfortable? Why the hell do I find romance so embarrassing?
I asked the internet, and the results were predictably grim. It’s childhood trauma. Childhood trauma is huge right now, it’s the new fidget spinner. Anything and everything slightly off-key you do as an adult is because you’re actually traumatised. Can’t stomach romance? You’re traumatised. Got a tendency to procrastinate and avoid everyday tasks? Traumatised. Hung an ill-advised dado rail in your hallway? Clearly were not breastfed.
I ring my mother regularly, demanding to know what trauma I have blocked out that means I now can’t stomach holding a man’s hand in public. My entire personality is starting to feel like I might be the product of an abduction.
My anti-romance issue seems hugely at odds with the type of girlfriend I am. I’m fairly full-on. Were I to try to describe the experience of being loved by me, I would say it could be similar to opening your washing machine and realising you’ve left a tissue in a jeans pocket and now every single thing you own has tissue paper embedded into it and it’s impossible to get it all out – and just when you think you are tissue-free you find another tuft of it hiding in your zip, and you’re scared. I am that tissue paper.
I also have a strong urge to mother my boyfriends. I like to bathe them, brush their hair and tuck them in, and while I have never stretched to breastfeeding any of them, I’m guessing that was their boundary, not mine.
I’m also territorial, which plays havoc with the fact that I seem to go for quite gamey men. I’m drawn to the ones who are great craic when they’re trying to win you over, but once you’re won, you’re snookered into their pockets. In the words of the great philosopher Stevie Nicks, players only love you when they’re playing. One man in my life played me so hard I could legally identify as a shuttlecock. And still my attachment style remains paranoid lunatic. My love language is adoration, sexual manipulation and pining.
I love being in love, and, dare I say it, I’m actually really good at it – too good, perhaps. For example, even when the man on the receiving end no longer wants my love, and moves out, and has redirected his love elsewhere, I will continue to give my love regardless, to the detriment of everyone involved. Twelve months after one particularly tricky break-up, my therapist announced they had bought a holiday home near the Amalfi Coast. Make of that what you will. They showed me a photo of their new home. It’s all quaint and dreamy-looking. I considered sending a photo of it to my ex to say, look what we helped build together, but contact with him is not advisable, or possible, on account of all the blocking.
The force with which I lock into love would suggest that I would be mad up for its national holiday on February 14th. I should be setting countdown clocks and banging my chest to get my heart ready for all the love and romance coming our way. But no. And it’s confusing.
I don’t lack the feelings for the occasion: when I am in love I am like a dog with a bone, I am the girlfriend who watches my man while they sleep, who fantasises about unzipping their skin and crawling inside them where I can curl up and hibernate like I’m in an animal den. Love hits me with the same madness it hits most people. But romance is a different thing. I am allergic to organised romance. The moment anything curated starts taking place I’d unzip my man and pop my head out in confusion. What the f**k is this? Who ordered the balloons!?
Sneering at Valentine’s Day as a single person could be easily chalked up to jealousy. The day is fundamentally a show-and-tell of successful relationships. It’s basically Crufts for couples, happy duos walking each other around agility courses and holding each other’s tails up to the camera. “See – my partner will wrestle hair from plugholes for me and they’re worm-free.”
I can only imagine what Cupid is saying about me behind my back, that squished-up little bow-wielding baby, mocking me to his Cabbage Patch Doll-looking mates, dangling my dignity to his co-workers to demonstrate the depths I have lowered myself to in the name of love
Maybe the 24-hour show-and-tell of successful relationships when I myself keep failing at them bothers me more than I care to admit. I’ve studied enough philosophy via internet memes to know that if something or someone bothers you, it’s because they have something you want. We are pretty basic in that regard. Now obviously this is not a blanket philosophy – Vladimir Putin bothers me but I don’t believe it stems from jealousy. I’ve never had any designs on a Russian dictatorship.
But my point is that any time I am bothered by something I just assume it’s a jealousy issue and try to it work back from there. I’m also wise enough to understand the at-times soul-destroying effort that comes with being in a couple and making it look effortless – a lot of work, tongue biting and pride swallowing goes into making a relationship survive.
The lengths to which I have gone to try to make relationships work, the shame of it still haunts me. I can only imagine what Cupid is saying about me behind my back, that squished-up, little bow-wielding baby, mocking me to his Cabbage Patch Doll-looking mates, dangling my dignity to his co-workers to demonstrate the depths I have lowered myself to in the name of love.
Relationships are hard, anyone who has dabbled in romance understands the work that goes on behind closed doors so that you can then publicly smile together on your two-seater canoe in matching fleeces. We all know that. Serene up top, while all four legs pedal like maniacs under the water to stay afloat. Maybe Valentine’s Day is a reward for couples who are still together. Maybe all that frantic, behind-closed-doors pedalling means they have earned their public display.
[ Love Ireland: nine Irish hotels with great romantic walks for Valentine’s weekendOpens in new window ]
Some people take umbrage with the commercialism of Valentine’s Day, the pressure the day brings to spend money on your loved one. That part doesn’t bother me at all. I’m commercial, I’m an industrial animal, I sell stuff so I can buy other stuff. I have a fairly active Asos account. I own expensive candles that I set fire to so I can watch them burn down to nothing. It’s a waste of money but I do it. I am a product of my generation and, of all the things we waste our money on, a Valentine’s Day card feels like the least of my worries. Also, when I think about the fact that I set fire to waxed cash to relax in the evenings, I remind myself that my mother owns a motorised mascara wand. We can’t escape merch culture no matter the occasion, and let’s face it, I bet Jesus didn’t bank on his death being the catalyst for tinsel.
A friend of mine wants Valentine’s Day banned for giving people what she calls “unrealistic expectations on love”. Her husband recently left her and is still pretending there is no one else involved. Sure thing, dude.
Personally, I don’t hate Valentine’s Day. I’ve more important things to be triggered by, such as the fact that my mother has started walking head first so she constantly looks on the verge of toppling over. I’m also trying to get myself out of several legally binding gym contracts.
But I need to admit this: chaos is my default and sometimes my comfort zone. For most of my life, if the options were between figuring out how to validate myself while in a happy and healthy relationship or outsourcing all that thinking to a random man with a tribal tramp stamp, I’d always go random man.
I’m not an occasions person: the pressure of anything pre-arranged or formal makes my brain go into spasm. I only acknowledge my own birthday because it’s important to keep track of my ageing process so that I know when it’s time to get a facelift
An old English teacher of mine once gave the class an exercise of writing non-stop for the full 45 mins he had us, no pausing, no thinking; we were to purge our thoughts onto the paper with as little thought as possible. The letters would then be sealed and posted back to us in the year 2012, like a fun time capsule. What a maverick! As a big sci-fi fan the idea that 16-year-old me could communicate with the very elderly, decrepit, potentially-on-her-death-bed 2012 me felt like the closest thing to time travel I’d ever experience. This man was ahead of his time. I had also decided he fancied me. I can’t quite remember what evidence I had for this but I was confident he did.
My entire letter was about one person, a 17-year-old boy I’ll call Augustus. I was obsessed with Augustus, I was possessed by Augustus. He was my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night. We had scored a handful of times and done some heated teenage gyrating at house parties but it was clear that while I would have died for Augustus, he wasn’t quite as invested in the “relationship”. I imagine that once I dismounted him to tend to my carpet burns, he did not care if I lived or died. But I’d never let a small thing like complete disinterest stop me from building a life with this boy. The entire letter was about Augustus, his face, his hair, how he made me feel, my concerns about how he looked at other girls. It was a full 45 minutes of Augustus, no one else featured, and the reason I bring this up is that my father had just died. Frank McNally was still warm in the ground and the poor man barely got a look in. I was boy-mad.
It’s worth mentioning that I never saw that letter again. As an adult I now realise my English teacher was giving himself the afternoon off and he most certainly did not fancy me on account of his being gay. We move on.
[ Nothing says ‘I love you’ quite like a diamond studded bunny broochOpens in new window ]
I believe my aversion to Valentine’s day is twofold. The first fold is, I’m not an occasions person: the pressure of anything pre-arranged or formal makes my brain go into spasm. I only acknowledge my own birthday because it’s important to keep track of my ageing process so that I know when it’s time to get a facelift. The second fold – and this one took me some time to understand – is that I’m way more comfortable being the admirer rather than the admired. Valentine’s Day confuses my learned sexual dynamics.
I see women getting proposed to in shopping centres with full flash mobs twirling in unison in the background and I picture what would happen if I was on the receiving end of one of them. I imagine it would go something like this: I start hyperventilating. I try to find the exit so I can “touch grass” but I’ve gone temporarily blind from the fright so I collapse outside a Claire’s Accessories, my soul then leaves my body and does not return to me until a spiritual f**kboy finds it and stabs it with an epipen. I come to, the flash mob are screaming, a very attractive security man with a hand tat is giving me CPR, I wonder do me and him have a vibe because to be fair he is touching my breasts and I don’t hate it. I then remember I’m in the middle of a proposal. I sit up and assure everyone I’m okay, the screaming stops and then we call Powerscourt Hotel to check availability.
I don’t wish to urinate on romance, I really don’t, and I understand that my aversion to it is also my own problem. Everything I think and feel is ultimately my own doing – and my mother’s, obviously. And you never know, maybe I will develop a taste for it, in the same way I did for platformed crocs and sardines. Maybe it’s a byproduct of being Irish: as progressive as we are now, we can be a little slow to the podium at times, and sexual expression has always been a tricky one for us. Maybe that’s the childhood trauma that the internet means: it’s my nationality.
This year, perhaps I’ll do the work on myself to accept romance and flowers without wanting to gag and gouge my eyes out with shame. (I won’t.) But for now, I look forward to doing what I always do on Valentine’s Day, and that’s slam wine with women.
Happy Valentine’s day!
Tickets for Joanne McNally’s European tour are on sale now. For details, and Irish dates from November, see joannemcnally.com
