Today I have been unsettled. I occasionally sit myself down to watch a film that I know is going to skew my head for a couple of hours and this post comes off the back of such a film. I'm a huge Ian McEwan fan - something that my Dad is mainly responsible for. A couple of his books are amongst my favourites - I even wrote my first critical analysis on his best book (in my humble opinion) 'Saturday'. This morning I decided that I would watch the adaptation of 'Enduring Love' starring Daniel Craig. Admittedly I've not actually read the novel but the DVD has been in the house for as long as I can remember and I finally decided that I would see what it was like. A deeply unsettling film about love and obsession, it has got me thinking about the question of love and what that actually means to me. A brief exploration into my head is sure to follow here - apologies are in the post.
I have never been in love. Well, at least I don't think I have been in love and surely that is the same thing? Oddly enough I think that this makes me qualified to be able to write about it more than someone that claims to have been under its spell. Untampered by bias and the pain of a 'broken heart' I feel that I could write endless blog posts and poems and sketch countless pictures about the enigma that is 'love'.
In this film, which I would highly recommend, love is discussed as being a grand illusion that we are put under to ensure that we reproduce. I should qualify that by stating that the type of love that is in the film is that of lovers and not of family - I don't want any suggestions of incest to infiltrate your mind here! From a neutral point of view I would tend to agree with that because my experiences of love or of people being in love have generally been through the tumultuous years of teenage lust which masquerades itself as love. Young minds are tricked into believing that they are in love when the truth is that most of it is down to that first quick fumble on the sofa when you're watching a film together. I look back on my experiences of this when I was a boy (wait, that was only a handful of years ago) and I have to laugh at myself when I thought that I might be in love - if anything, at times it was quite the opposite.
To give you an idea of this, I once wrote a poem that has been etched in my mind since the day it was scrawled in a notebook somewhere. The words in it come to me like they were written yesterday and, although a very basis poem, this piece of writing might be described as the day that I awoke to the concept of love:
It's hard to tell if love is real,
what you want or what you feel.
I find it hard to think it through,
the possibility of me loving you.
Where it comes from I don't know,
will it stay or will it go?
I think about her all the time:
her eyes, her smile constrict my mind.
I feel pain like no other before,
she put me down yet I want more.
Wondering if it is all over;
it can't be, she's my four leaf clover.
The distance here is far to great,
yet I stay up at night and I wait.
There is something for us I trust,
but is it love or teenage lust?
The words of a genius child ladies and gentlemen. Or was it just that I was feeling the same thing as everyone else around me at the time and I'm the only one who actually kept a pen beside me when I was 15? Anyway it articulates perfectly that one does not know was love is even if they think they do. Love at a young age is reserved exclusively for the people that care for you. Speaking from experience, young people generally don't care for each other (in that way) ergo young love is love for family and friends, not for a girl/boyfriend. Call me cynical but remember I'm speaking at an age when I'm just coming out the back of the years that so many song writers and poets call 'teenage angst'.
So where does all of this come from then? You would hardly go as far as to call me 'damaged'; I'm pretty undamaged in the grand scheme of things. I'm a thinker and I always have been. From the first moment that I realised that I had cognitive function (subconsciously of course) I was thinking, looking, listening etc. Sadly when it got to girls I never seemed to think all that much and here I am today, happy in my solitude. If you've read enough of my stuff you will know that I've made a few errors of judgment in this area in recent months which have served to confirm my contentment with my relationship status.
The above poem is one of a sizeable back-catalogue of soppy, sickly and downright absurd bits of verse that I scribbled down when I going out with or no longer going out with a girl. I even used to give bits of poetry to the ones that I liked the most with the most memorable endings included: 'I have lost myself, I have found myself, with you' and 'now just one last thing, I have fallen for you'. I know what happened to those two poems (and they are also stuck in my head in full) but I'm not going to tell you - I'll let you decide what you think happened to them. Without such an outlet at that age I don't think I would be who I am today and whether or not that is a bad thing I'm not sure. I guess that I was in a minority of teenage boys who would write poetry for 'fun' but it's something that I'm not ashamed of (see above!) and in many ways proud of.
So love then, what does it all mean to me? It boils down to this at the moment. I would only ever admit to loving one group of people and that is my family, both past and present. I would only ever admit to loving one type of sport - football of course. I would only ever admit to loving a girl if I really thought that I did. A phrase that has almost defined my crushes and 'relationships' over the years is that 'I loved the idea of it, just not the thing itself'. Think of that what you will but I believe I'm in a healthy place right now and that, when the time is right, I'm capable of loving someone more that she could ever know.
Thanks for reading.
Martin
