A year in love

Travelling home on a very packed ferry yester-evening I had the uncertain privilege of being sandwiched for the 25 minute duration between, on my left, a couple sitting in silence, apparently on or coming home from a date; he trying to stroke her knee but succeeding only in affectionately patting the designer handbag that took pride of place there...Or, now I come to think about it, perhaps that was his true object of desire. For I have learnt, in my time observing the species of rich Hongkongers I dwell among, never to overestimate how much care and attention can be showered on a costly Louis Vuitton or Prada by both the woman who owns it and the fella who bought it; the handbag being, it seems, something synonymous to a couple’s first child before they get the dog and eventually, if they have endured those preliminaries tests, the real kids, and often even then outperforming the others in terms of affection. After all, it is always at and on your side, silently asserting its superiority over others without ever arguing back... Meanwhile another obstacle intervened between them. Like a privet hedge between two neighbours, sat an ostentatiously oversized bouquet of Ferrero Rocher and which, it strikes me, must the perfect gift-concept for Valentines who, judging from this pair (and apart from reading my book and slurping my drink as quietly as possible so as not to spoil the romance blossoming at my elbow, what else did I have to do given our imposed proximity but judge?), like to kill two clichés for the price of one, and which clearly they had acquired earlier in the evening as part of the elaborate but dubiously successful, given the complete dearth of scintillating conversation sparking between them, ritualised public foreplay going on beside and all around me, thus forcing me back to my book. While to my right sat a kindly middle-aged woman who, until I pointed it out, had completely failed to register that the inordinate numbers of spruced up people parading back and forth between island eateries and forcing us to sit like sardines in a tin – instead of aphrodisiacal oysters in our own little paradisal shells – signified that it was St. Valentine's Day.

So that was what I had to come home to after work. Joy! Oh, of course, there were red envelopes in the mailbox, a candlelit dinner waiting, followed by a hot scented bath and the bed loving strewn with rose petals…but that’s when a stray thorn burst my bubble and I realized I was in the wrong story: I was Goldilocks and this was someone else’s perfect Valentine's scenario.

But having endured the couple(s) on the ferry and having spoken with the lady who so innocently sat beside me in the midst of the Big Love In, it struck me to ask: who was having the best time that evening? They, with their glad-rags on, clutching their bunches of chocolates ready to do battle with anyone who accused them of being single, and traipsing out in the cold to go and sit with all the other couples in an overpriced restaurant; or she, who was simply pleased to have the reason for unusually heavy traffic revealed to her, and even more gratified to think what roaring trade our island’s restaurants would be doing, because, she assured me, they need the business. Clearly an economist if ever I met one! Well, after much careful consideration, I think I have to conclude, from my brief survey of the market, that the economists are winning in the happiness stakes. After all, it certainly cannot be me, a single girl. No, not I nor any of my many other single and equally ineligible friends, and especially those who have recently broken up with someone. We have no right to be happy on this day of the year, but since being in a couple does not seem to be much better – being positively coerced into buying cards, flowers, chocolates, and chocolate flowers, and made to go out with millions of other romantically expectant people to have a wonderfully romantic time at great expense… leading one to think that Alexandra Kollantai had it quite right in thinking that, as Laurie Penny put it, “the fetishisation of the bourgeois couple above all other forms of human love was the foundation of oppression of all working people” and so leaving her husband to pursue revolutionary activism - I feel I can hear her now: “Darling, I’m leaving. It’s not you, it’s Marxism” - ...I guess, we shall leave it to the capitalists to rub their hands and smile.

And yet…being in someone else’s "just-right" fairytale home alone, does give a girl a chance to don their most outlandish, unmatching sets (plural, because Hong Kong’s just got cold again) of pyjamas, crack open the bubbly, scoff down their Cadbury's Roses and contemplate the age old question: Is love a fancy, or a feeling? Hartley Coleridge’s Sonnet VII, from which this question derives, argues against the idea of the merely conceptual or perceptual nature of Love – against its relegation, demotion or trivialisation to the realm simply of thought, feeling or imagination: fancy. Instead, the speaker argues for love as an objective correlative to experience, as something that does have existence - and even greater existence – outside of ourselves and our control; argues, in short, for love’s endurance and steadfastness, untouched by the tides that come and go, the years - the ferries - that shuttle back and forth, marking time and the beginnings and endings of love as numerous as our daily journeys. No, he says, love it not a passing fancy: a 20 minute commute… But here, you may read it for yourself:

Is love a fancy or a feeling? No.

It is immortal as immaculate Truth,

'Tis not a blossom shed as soon as youth,

Drops from the stem of life--for it will grow,

In barren regions, where no waters flow,

Nor rays of promise cheats the pensive gloom.

A darkling fire, faint hovering o'er a tomb,

That but itself and darkness nought doth show,

It is my love's being yet it cannot die,

Nor will it change, though all be changed beside;

Though fairest beauty be no longer fair,

Though vows be false, and faith itself deny,

Though sharp enjoyment be a suicide,

And hope a spectre in a ruin bare.

It being the season to be loverly and all, I recently came upon an article in Time Out magazine on the vexed question of the “barren regions” of romance where “all be changed beside”: that is, of the long distance relationship, or LDR as they abbreviated it to and which when you put it like that, does indeed sound like some terrible sexually-transmitted disease. Seeking to offer advice to those poor souls who find themselves in one, the article began by investigating the main problem with LDRs, which – for those of you unable to possibly imagine – was (shock horror! Knock me down with a feather!) lack of physical contact. Try as they may to remain in touch, the lands-aparted lovers are ultimately doomed by the lack of touching. Write as many letters, emails or make as many phonecalls as you like, but we all know that it is not the will of the head or heart but the oxytocin that is released when couples are intimate that makes them – at least believe themselves to be – in love: it is merely a feeling that gives way to a (albeit chemical, neurological) fancy that is love. Nothing more. Without the feeling there is no true (oxymoronic) fantasy and no love. So, sorry Hartley, you with your romantic notions of eternities and immortalities had it all wrong: love will not grow where there is no water, no light, no air to feed it. It’s just a matter of chemistry, biology… Or is it?

Speaking as, it seems, a girl doomed to always leave romances behind in an English world for a life as a singleton in a no less romantic Chinese one (“no, I’m not married yet,” I once had to reply to a four year old student of mine, “not since you asked me last week”) I can vouch that no, absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder: passions can cool and the memory forget; that yes, time does heal and the endless, trivial, nonsensical but delightful things that once one had to say to the loved one can dry up, fall away or be said to another… and another... For, if not to touch and see and be seen, how is love different from any other passing acquaintance one might have, say, with colleagues, neighbours, fellow passengers on the way to work or the grave? Listening to Harold Jacobson on Desert Island Discs (thanks BBC, your Radio 4 airwaves colour the world a shade of pink still!) I was struck with the way in which he described his relationship with his wife. Asked whether he would survive if cast away on this imaginary desert island with nothing but his eight disc tracks, he replied very much that no, he needed company – that people, his wife not least of all, gave him his sense of self: “I need the company [of marriage], I need the support, I need to be looked at with love to be sure I’m there, maybe I need to be looked at in the beloved’s eye to see a nicer version of myself than is actually the case or than I fear might be the case…It’s as though I can’t trust my own version of myself,” he said. Scary! But perhaps at the heart of each of us is this unknown – this void – that Jacobson expresses, or as Shakespeare has Achilles say in Troilus and Cressida: the “mind is troubled, like a fountain stirred; and I myself see not the bottom of it”, the idea being that we cannot wholly know ourselves, but rather that it is other people who help us create and shape our image, like looking in a mirror. But what if we look not in a faithful mirror? A cruel or selfish lover; possessive, jealous, mean? Someone who does not reflect but imposes, who twists and distorts - a carnivalesque hall of mirrors. Couldn't that be as harmful as being left Crusoesque alone gazing deep into the dark abyss of ourselves? But to be in a loving and faithful relationship can, as Jacobson suggests, be creative, affirmative. It can be to have a Mirror Mirror On the Wall – a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder, a conscience and guide telling you who is fairest of them all and whether and when it is or is not You. And, I suppose, this loving relationship need not be just with someone else... Couldn't it be with oneself? 


Is love than nothing more than a passing fancy or a feeling: the desires and impulses, racing heart and beating veins; the attendant dreams and imaginations that weave a fairytale romance about us, give our   chemical-biological flutterings form, decorum and longevity in the belief in a happy ever after? Or is love as fundamental and eternal as Truth? Does it reside in the beloved, or is it merely imagined and overlaid there by the fancy of the lover? Or, a third option: is it possible that the feelings and fancies, passions and conceits – the conceit that you are here with me now, that I am talking to you – give us access to something higher, more enduring, something possibly resembling truth, that the beloved for example, might not only to reveal to us the image of ourselves but be instrumental in creating that image? Not the passive receptacle of our desires, fancies, feelings, but the maker of them through time – from here to eternity?

Wow! But what about me, I hear you ask: what loving relationship are you in? When I think of my family and friends now it is as if I must needs chart them on a map. I see where we were, where we have been, where they are now, including who they are with and where their friends and family are, where they might yet go and where I might see them next. My relationships are a map that stretches around the globe in a way that even Columbus or Cook might be jealous of! Some dearly beloved are here, but  relatively few. “Thou must needs find out new heaven and new earth,” as says Anthony in an attempt to verbalise – to declare and by declaring prove – the vast size and scale of his love for Cleopatra; and I too it sometimes seems must do the same if I were to have in one day, one life, all the people and loves I have known. But are not all modern relationships doing - and having to do - the same? Email, Skype, Facebook… When the loved one is beyond the reach of touch, they are no longer (as too they were not for the speaker of Coleridge’s Sonnet VII) quite out of sight. But do then we think of them lovingly, or only with jealousy, fear or the sadness of loss? This, Time Out claims, is the reason for LDRs’ limited success and poor reputation: without the euphoria/eudaimonia of physical presence - its reassurance - these emotional and psychological demons reign supreme. But why, I would cry, when our friends, family and lovers are not 'ours' to begin with do we presume to lay most claim to them when they are gone? Must they be hurting us in their absence, detracting from or diminishing us - separating us from our enjoyment of ourselves - either by their happiness or by their mutual sense of loss? No, rather, let us be reminded that they are individual, that ‘we’ – the couple, the pair of us – are divisible and if we are alone, why then, we are merely back in the place of our beginnings. Why can we not then imagine ourselves young and new again in love, free to love that person, another or simply ourselves and the world all over again? The excitement of discovery, the thrills and laughter, the feel-good of talking late into the night, or being surprised by a kiss boldly written into a message. Should not we treat all our relationships – near and far – in the same way: as a chance to court, to come out from afar and meet the other halfway? And if that relationship is romantic, then to embrace the coyness and frustrated longing that the distance imposes for that kiss, touch, sign of understanding and affirmation? It’s just a thought – a passing fancy, really – that out of sight doesn’t necessarily need to mean out of (your) mind, but rather in one's mind as the autonomous, charmingly individual and unique person they and you are. Did we not love first because they were different: different from others and different from ourselves? They were a looking glass seen for the first time and in which we saw ourselves anew. Do we not all secretly think (and sometimes suffer in feeling) of ourselves as different while wishing that our difference was understood by another, held within them and their hearts: that our uniqueness was perhaps not so different after all, but loved all the same - nonetheless - from a distance that does not seem far? Or, perhaps, I am just speaking for myself as a stubborn, single girl. One who knows that even when in family, friendship and in love, and perhaps then most of all, there is a need to remember who you are, who you were and who you would be, individually, and to celebrate the same in the other - first and foremost and to the very end. As immortal as immaculate Truth.