Oh blah blah blah, you’re in love. Congratulations, what do you want? A medal? Do you expect the rest of the world to be pleased you’ve found some simpering fusspot to follow you around like a drunk tramp, groping you in public and making everyone else not want to sit next to you on the tube?
Lets face it, love stinks. It’s great for a bit, but sooner or later it all comes crashing down, and you waste a good few months of your life listening only to jungle, the only musical genre you can find with no emotional connotations. Then you accidentally think it will be the same with garage until ‘Teardrops’ AKA ‘Footsteps On The Dancefloor’ comes on and your friends find you slumped on the floor next to your bed, sniffing your ex’s jumper, your face covered in melted Terry’s Chocolate Orange, and your eyes little red bruises of pain.
What, you need more reasons? Fine.
1. You lose all your friends
No I will come out. I promise. No I will, tell me all the details and I promise I’ll be there. I love that band! Shut up, as if I’d cancel on you for him, he’s just my boyfriend, friends are for life. Yeah I know I did it with Gary, a bit, but that’s different. Gary was so controlling, he didn’t want me to have my own life, remember that time at the ice rink…Oh sorry, yeah I know you’re in a rush. OK well yes I will definitely be there. Can’t wait! Girls night out wooo! You can be Samantha! Oh yeah, Lucy should be Samantha. The slag. Ok, love ya bye.
You’re not going to fucking go. You’re going to sit at home with your boyfriend talking about how you’re really above going out now, how it’s all so superficial, how you’re better than that. It’s much nicer staying at home and cooking a nice dinner, then maybe re-watching the entire series of 24 and trying not to notice that your boyfriend is obsessed with Elisha Cuthbert. Meanwhile your friends have their own lives and stop asking you to join them on outings after the billionth time of you saying you’re sick, constipated, or trapped in your jeggings. After a while the fact he’s more attracted to Elisha Cuthbert than you will start to drive you insane, until eventually you start shouting at him all the time, put on 2 stone, and wind up single and chubby with no friends. FACT.
2. You stop reaching for your goals
When you’re single there is nothing holding you back. You can go to New York for 8 years, or change your name to Clint Sparklehorse, or start doing pottery, or make really weird performance art about the economy, or kill an antelope and start wearing it’s skin, or join a band where the music is Aztec Dancehall, or talk about yourself constantly on a blog, or start taking photos of old people kissing, or shave your head, or grow your fingernails really long, or run for Mayor, or have a bisexual period, or join the cult of jaffa cakes, or only watch Lost and start calling yourself Locke, and there is no one to tell you that you’re a flaming moron. You can do and be whatever you want, with only yourself to rely on and worry about, and form an incredible character and life experience that means when you do finally want to settle down you’ll get someone really really hot. Then your kids will be proud of you, and will brag about you at School. They’ll take your photo albums in on ‘Show and Tell’ day, and will smugly recite all your old stories. Until they’re about 15 when they’ll hate your guts - cos no parent manages to escape the kids-hating-your-guts phase. When you settle down too young you lose all your lust for life. There’s no reason to strive to extract that aching loneliness inside you with other things, because you’ve got someone there constantly to ease said loneliness. Love kills your dreams.
3. You will break up
Ok so you won’t all definitely break up, but the majority of the people reading this who are with someone will, at some point, be alone again. It’s a really nice idea that love lasts forever, and that it builds bridges (which ones, exactly?), and that you can get through anything as long as you have each other. But that’s basically deep fried hogswash. Any young jetsetter person, which you surely all are, is going to grow and develop their personality and interests to the point where the girlfriend/boyfriend they liked 2 years ago seems boring and staid in the context of all their new interests and friends they met playing Aztec Dancehall. You’ll start to get jealous and resentful of each other, until one day you wake up and they go to kiss you and you realise in one painfully vivid moment that you’ve simply grown too much emotionally to buy into their desperate need for love and attention, which basically stems back to their issues with their father, and they’re not actually that funny, and they dress kind of like a Mormon. Next thing you know you’re standing outside with your bags, listening to them wail your name in the kitchen, howling their unending pain.
4. You become the same person
Apparently it takes half the time of your relationship to get over it. So if you went out for four years, it takes two years to fully recover. The reason for this is that the longer you’re with someone the more your lives become entwined, the more of their clothes you borrow, and the more times you bring them up inappropriately in conversations with people you don’t really know. You’ll find yourself buying them little presents all the time, then lending them money, then just giving them 50% of your wage each month. Your families will get used to them and your Mum will ring them for advice on baking or changing a plug, while your Dad will start taking them out back to show them things (that’s if you’re a boy. If you’re a girl and your boyfriend’s Dad starts doing that you should worry). They’ll begin to have a jokey piss-take relationship with your siblings, which makes you jealous and causes you to pick fights about their toiletry habits so you’ve got an excuse to shout at them. You’ll start day dreaming about marriage - first on your own, and then together - to the point where you introduce yourself as each other’s partners. You’ll accept jobs on the basis of how they’ll affect your relationship, you’ll have set meals you cook together, and finally you’ll buy side by side cemetery plots.
Then it ends, and you have to divvy out all your shared belongings and take round all the jumpers you borrowed (except one, always keep one). You’ll see films on TV that you first watched in the cinema with them, you’ll start crying in supermarkets because you’ve seen some Dairylea and their name was Lee. Or Dairy. You’ll call up drunk, you’ll go round drunk, you’ll beg, drunk. Years will go by with you still feeling weird when their name is mentioned in conversation, until one day, without really meaning too, you’ll find yourself outside their house. You’ll call up to them, they’ll look out the window, they’ll smile. You’ll smile. In a brief secondof happiness every perfect, blissful moment you ever spent with them will wash over you. You’ll think, “Maybe it’s been long enough, maybe we can make it work this time” You’ll part your lips to say that…when their new girl/boyfriend pops their head out the window and you hear you ex whisper “that’s the one I was telling you about”. You’ll run home crying and probably kill yourself.
Love. Stinks.
Happy Valentine’s Day!