Freaks in love

I hate the fashion at the minute. How are we supposed to dress cool? It's all skinny fit jeans, neckerchiefs, and straggly hair... I mean I don't want to look like David Essex. What do you accessorise with, a dog on a piece of string? I say this because around the bustling uptown of Oxford's chic and trendy wine bars and boutiques on Saturday, chiseled chinned guys with kasabian-esque locks, girls with perfectly loose curls and a boho kaftan shirt over tight leggings, surrounded me. I was surrounded by beautiful couples seemingly doing beautiful coupled things. This in itself is not to be criticised or mocked with a sense of hatred, or indeed fuelled by my single lifestyle, even though amongst the beautiful couple festival I was beginning to feel like I was a lost member from the Schindler's list reunion party.
It is however, fascinating to try and understand; at what point in your life do relationships become so desired, so cool and so essential in ones striving for a successful life? As these thoughts were dancing around my mind, I returned to the cafe I favour in Oxford - a place where they do a wonderful traditional pot of tea and ditch the latte with the squirt of vanilla caramel essence. As I sat pondering, and deleting everything I had written down in the last three hours, I purposely distracted myself by eavesdropping on three twenty something girls also indulging in traditional tea and biscuits on the table opposite my own work station. One was, as she described, in a 'on off relationship that was great sex' to which I cannot help but ponder if in fact she was merely having sexual relations with a with a table lamp. The other companions of this lightscrewer were a single gal and an engaged lass. Despite their varied relationship status, they couldn't help but have a degree level standard in trashing men and the problems in finding a good man!
How many people admit to being screwed up by love? How many times do we hear about the disastrous effects of being in love. If divorce rates are sky high, and bastard children are at record levels, have we simply lost what we know love definably is? Or are we redefining an out of date ideal too high and too complicated, to become more easily labeled and so more enjoyed at the cost of allowing love to be temporal? - Have we really become the Sex and the City generation?
Let's invoke Freud - he won't mind; he's a sublimated patriarchal figure I can't get over (there is a joke in that sentence). Freud might have it that I (a somewhat visceral performer at times) use psychical processes that need unconscious repair in order to reset. I like to think that after I verbally ejaculate my truisms-glazed-with-madness, I collapse and lots of little thoughts climb into my ears and reset all the motors before I'm ready to go again. Perhaps that's what dreams are; the daily MOT of the mind. What I am trying to say in this point, is that in fact our thoughts on love change almost instantly - and on closer inspection, they change the minute we fall in love ourselves. We dream of love, and we dream of finding it, but it is only on discovering our first love that the feeling itself becomes clear to us as such a vital part of our being and well-being.
Take, for instance, your good self as a child. You recoil against love when you are watching a film. When you see two people staring at each other in that specific way, or touching each others lips, the mere motion is nothing short of pathetic in your eyes and mind and the film is ruined. But suddenly it hits you and it all falls into place. You quickly understand why nearly every novel you have ever read is a love story, you become connected to all these extraordinary voices that have passed you by before it had hit you. But you also feel a curse, a welcome pain which does lead to a catastrophic (in the proper sense of the word) not necessarily disastrous but a life changing and turning moment leaving nothing the same again.
It is simple to see that such a volcano of feelings can only lead one to become more....drippy, if you will. The senses sharpen and you become sensitive and appreciative to poetry, art, nature and landscape which all connects itself to this one big feeling you have.
The very time you lay eyes on someone and that enormous spark of electricity occurs it is indescribable, what happens cannot be expressed to even a tenth a degree of what it is one is actually feeling. You are completely enthralled, and transformed. There elbow is astonishing, they way clothes hang off of them is so much classier then on anyone else. Every single part of them is made beautiful. It is still one of the great miracles of life.
We spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture that very moment when the incoherent became coherent, when:
"The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean;"
(Percy Bysshe Shelley - Love's Philosophy)

Perhaps then writing about love is so very pointless, for in truth it cannot be understood by those who have not fallen in it, and to those in it, it is so incomprehensibly beautiful it is not possible to describe to a level of recognition by you, the reader. Be that as it may, pointless, does not sell, so I am forced to try and make a stand-point, discuss an issue, even better - spin skeins of thought into humorous fronds and webs of introspection; take my red-brick truisms and plaster them with neurotically over-patterned wallpaper. The truth is - love does that all by itself. To me, single (not available), I resign my mind to thinking love is merely hassle and foolish, and coupled life is nothing but a time where you wait to split up and exchange half of your property and possessions for one, two or at best three years of sex. But when I fall in love.....?
On the other hand the couples, who are now filling the cafe in which I write, are beacons of triumph that love does not do what it says on the tin because it makes very little promises beyond the over whelming feeling of completeness and madness and as far as I can witness from behind my laptop - happiness. Of course sometimes it won't work out they way one had thought it all would, but that is no reason to resign oneself to eating Pot Noodle and listening to power ballads night in night out. It is simply another chapter in the journey that makes your life and mine strong enough to hold the weight of time.
We may be about to turn into the Sex and the City generation of which I wrote earlier, but I think we should and will make a u-turn back to looking for our own true and real love, then the suggestion box presented to us in five extreme women. Sure you are reading this article thinking it will help you in some way, and it will, consider this a slap in your face. It WILL HAPPEN and you will go from being swarmed by couples to double dates and synchronised texts and phone calls to your better half. DIS-GUS-TING
I read a woman’s valentines magazine the other day and saw an article entitled ‘How to know what’s going through the man in your life’s mind as he’s choosing your present”. It was a surprisingly long article, which at no point featured the words “This’ll do! A giant Toblerone, she’ll love that!”
Weird. Humans... we live, immured in the thick slimy walls of our own egoism, comfortably convinced we can perceive how we’re perceived, but of course, that’s bollocks. The rosiest tinted specs are in fact mirrored. When we colour the objects we survey, we paint in ourselves, waving.

……right, now to go and hit the couple in front of me with the crust from my pannini.

Chris McGowan