On imperfect loves (and stupid caps)

Behold! I have had a thought.

As a mise-en-bouche

A column

I like calling London my one great love because it is factually correct: I have never had another one. I have spent some time over the years trying to describe my predicament, and I think I have finally managed it.

There has never been a point in my life at which I couldn’t picture my future without someone else. I have been in love before but it has usually been unrequited, or inconvenient. Bouts of domesticity have always felt transient. I have dated and had things and things but, when people talk about the person they sincerely believe they are about to start building a life with, I am no longer able to follow. I imagine it must be a pleasant feeling.

It is probably an unusual state of affairs; I have tried looking for data before but never quite got a satisfying answer. Somehow YouGov has never asked people if they have had a series of flings, dalliances and well-meaning yet short-lived relationships but nothing else. 

I also have no idea why my life turned out this way; it is an unusual state of affairs and not one I can adequately explain. All it takes is to be in the right place at the right time just this once, and I’m yet to manage it. I imagine I will at some point. If you keep playing, surely you end up winning.

I talk about London like people talk about their life partners because that’s what it means not to have really known romantic love. The world we live in is obsessed with it, it force-feeds it to us from a young age, and if there isn’t a person you can pour it into then you might as well project it onto a city.

London is my husband, I like to joke, because sometimes I’ll get my head turned by another, more compelling city, and once in a while I consider packing my bags and running away but ultimately I always stay. I went to Venice for two months last year and it felt like an affair, but part of my heart never left the marital bed. 

London and I have been together for 14 years now, so it’s normal for us not to love each other as much as we once did. It was cold to me at first then it was kind, because I’d managed to figure out how to press its buttons, and for a while we had a really great time. We’ve now settled into a routine and sometimes I can tell it resents me, gives me the cold shoulder.

Sometimes it annoys me so much I want to scream in the street, at the sky and at passersby.  It rains and the tube is late and rammed and the drinks in the pub are too expensive and the music too loud, and when I get home I realise the lift is broken. That’s how I know we’re having an argument. Luckily, they rarely last. We do, after all, love each other.

I have one great love and I have many imperfect ones. It’s a realisation I came to a few months ago, walking home drunk, feeling carried by the warm, late evening air of the middle of summer. “I’m surrounded by imperfect loves”, I thought, and it made me feel even warmer.

I have friends who, in another life, would have woken up next to me in the morning, but we never got to the right place on time so instead we drink and hug for a second too long when we leave. I have a family who drives me mad but who never fails to make me smile, because we’re all part of the same weird and broken regiment, and we understand each other.

I have all the people who live in my phone and who laugh at my jokes, and like it when I laugh at theirs. Something mundane will happen to me and I will tell them about it, and we’ll make jokes about it together. If you squint, it nearly looks like intimacy.

I have the dogs and cats and foxes and squirrels and rats and mice I see when I walk around town, and I say hello to all of them, occasionally in the form of a solemn little nod if there are other humans around. I also say hello to all embassies and consulates, and lightly bow. It’s only polite to acknowledge the presence of a country when you stroll past its building.

It is both a deeply lonely life and a very rich one. I do not have that great big thing many people have but I have a thousand smaller ones. I’m not sure I would have been able to collect them and appreciate them in the same way, had I always had some great big thing in my life. If you had a large lunch, you probably won’t spend your afternoon feasting on little snacks.

The only thing that worries me, really, is the chasm I could ignore for a long time but which has now become unavoidable. People had girlfriends and boyfriends in high school and at university but they didn’t really matter. Partners went in and out of my friends’ lives in our twenties but, for the most part, they felt like the supporting cast. In some cases, you’d barely bother remembering their names. There was little point in doing so.

Things changed during and after the pandemic, both because traumatic events make people hold their loved ones closer and because the passing of time is relentless. After your twenties come your thirties, and if you didn’t sit down when the music stopped then you’re just left watching everyone have fun without you.

I am single and it means I have time, acres of it - vast expanses of time, spreading as far as the eye can see. I could pick up seven new hobbies and still there would be hours during which no-one needs me to be anywhere. I do many sports and go to the cinema a lot; every sunny day is a good enough reason to go for a walk and every rainy one an occasion to go to the cinema or the museum.

I play video games and I draw and paint, and my obsession with fashion coupled with my limited budget means that I spend much of my time in vintage and charity shops. I read a lot and I watch a lot of television. My flat is, for the most part, clean and tidy.

Still, every other day I will wake up and think that I should become a tattoo artist, or a pole dance instructor, or I should start riding horses again, or play the drums, or organise events again. None of those are random examples: all of them are genuine things I have considered picking up in the past few weeks.

I see friends when they have time to see me and they’re always running, to and from their jobs, away on weekends with their partners and other friends and other partners, back home so they can keep hunting for a flat to buy, or for ways to enhance their fertility. If they have children, I don’t really see them anymore.

It often feels like an unbreachable gap, because it is always there and there is nothing to be done about it. It reminds me of the time I went to party conferences and had nothing to do before 2pm every day, meaning that I was happy and well-rested the whole way through. I had a terrible time. I felt completely alienated from everyone else, as they were all hungover and knackered and at least there’s a sense of solidarity in that. I looked great and felt awful.

I look great and, often, I feel awful. There is one thing that cheers me up but I can’t usually talk about it, because certain things should only be said to the right audience, and I don’t really have one anymore. I may not have this great, big love but my horizons are still wide.

I see people who have done things right and do not have to wave to street animals to feel a sense of companionship but they have this weight to them. They aren’t even at the halfway point of their life - we can but hope - yet somehow everything has become inevitable, and there is nothing to be done about it. They refuse to move, choosing instead to get gently rocked by the tide.

They made choices and now there are consequences and I suppose that’s life, they say, that’s what happens when you get older, they explain to me, and I want to say that I am their age and I have also made choices but I still think it feels a bit early to give up completely. People stay in jobs and relationships and houses they dislike because they assume that having made your bed means that you must lie in it, and that’s another unbreachable gap standing between the two of us.

There is nothing and no-one pushing me, day after day, and that means that I must always force myself to go forward, and it is tiring but it means that few choices are ever set in stone. I can just wake up and change course, because I’m the only one on this ship.

I gave up on trying to reason with them a long time ago because there is no point. They probably do not want to hear it from anyone, and they certainly do not want to hear it from me. I feel empty a lot of the time because I don’t have enough things and people to fill my heart with but at least I’ve not been weighed down with lead, not quite yet, and that’s a thought I try to have often, so I don’t feel too sad.

I hope that one day I will be able to stop talking about London like it’s the love of my life because I have met a person that fits the title better. I hope that I also start running around, ceaselessly, and complain about it while remembering how suffocating it was to have all the time in the world. I hope it all happens but I still keep enough space inside of me for all the small imperfect loves which kept me warm when no-one did. I want the great big thing and I want to keep waving at embassies and foxes with three and a half legs.

I want the large lunch and all the small afternoon snacks afterwards. Heaven knows I’ve got the appetite.

A recommendation

This might be a bad thing to admit but despite being very online - or perhaps because I am very online - I struggle to enjoy most writing about internet culture. I suspect that it is at least partly because most people who write about it are also very online, and it can be hard to be astute on something you’re so immersed in.

This is why I was thrilled to read this piece on “replying”, in its broadest possible sense, and to realise that I’d really loved it. It’s so clever and vivid; written like a very sharp but very fun blog post from the old days. I really recommend it.

On a similar note - I usually also tend to shun writing about poetry, because a lot of it is boring and I don’t like being bored. Still, I enjoyed the replying piece so much that I had a look at the website that published it, and came across this essay on Anne Carson and Tumblr, and it’s also brilliant!

Turns out: it is in fact pretty good, on occasion, to click on stuff you would usually not click on.

Something insane, as a treat

Made the terrible, awful mistake recently of realising that thanks to the world wide web, it is now possible to have an idea for a cap and to then send that idea to someone on Etsy who will then make it for you.

I am yet to commission an unhinged cap for myself but I thought you would enjoy the list of possible designs I now have in a Google Doc:

• malthouse compromise

• a single portobello mushroom

• birds are fake

• a labour council?

• waluigi

• I love you Jordan Pickford

• eggs

• jfk is trapped in the moon

• hail Mithras

• tartiflette slut

• Big Mouth Billy Bass

• RACHEL WEISZ

• gondor calls for aid

• fancy little prince

• aspiring juggalo

• Dragostea Din Tei

• Barbara Castle

• ban wasps

• may I, papa?

• carpets should be cheaper

• block the Suez Canal again

And that is all. Good bye for now.