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Thoughts on St Valentine’s Day 2023

St Valentine’s Day is here. It’s time to get those cards, chocolates and roses ready.

You can read more about the Saints Valentine and how the day’s traditions developed in these vintage posts of mine:

A bit of history about Valentine’s Day  (2015)

More history about Valentine’s Day (2016)

Last year’s post was about the experts’ scientific search for love: ‘Reflections on Valentine’s Day’. Then there was St Valentine’s Day 2017: ‘Valentine’s Day “shameful” to totalitarians’, meaning to people on the Left and to those of a certain religious persuasion. Both groups find the idea of a private, romantic, mutually-honouring Love repulsive, which is tragic.

Picking up on that theme, on February 2, 2023, a Guardian columnist wrote ‘I am happier than ever to be single, so why are love and romance all I can think about?’

I feel sorry for that woman because she contradicts herself throughout (emphases mine):

“Come to this party,” I texted a friend last week. “There will be men there.”

This rallying cry – one that carries the promise of romantic intrigue – is one I find myself invoking frequently and unthinkingly nowadays. Going to the pub? Might be men there. Perhaps I should put on a better slobby jumper for the two-minute trek to the shop, in case there are men there. Sitting in a GP’s waiting room – men? There? For me?

What’s baffling about this particular strand of recurrent romantic fretting is, in practice, I don’t give a toss if there are men there or not. I’ve never been happier being single. For the first time in my life, my singlehood offers peace; there’s no great longing to experience a life-changing romantic love – I’ve done that.

Similarly, this period isn’t marked by a drastic vow of celibacy driven by hurt and bitterness, as I have undertaken in the past. Being single is just one of many banal identifiers that make up my person, along with being 5ft 1in and having curly hair. It is, frankly, one of the least interesting aspects about me.

Yet since a breakup last year, it has become jarringly obvious just how deeply I have internalised the cultural messaging that, when single, my primary focus should be the pursuit of romance (not sex; an important difference). This is expressed via a variety of intrusive thoughts (see: “there will be men there”) such as devoting chunks of time to dissecting the behaviour of some mediocre romantic prospect, only to realise I don’t actually care, either about the person in question or the conclusions derived from hours spent poring over their actions. Yet when talking to others, I keep finding myself slipping into the register of the desperate singleton on the prowl, before coming to with a start.

At previous points in my life, it would have been impossible to extricate this performance of thirsty singlehood from how I actually felt. But this time round I am older, wiser, happier and equipped with the tools of self-interrogation. These days, when I automatically say yes to attending an event because “there will be men there”, I catch myself. No, I think, you don’t want to trek across London on a Thursday night in search of some romantic holy grail …

That yearning voice, the one that wants me to travel an hour from my home to the party, is not mine. It is a parasitic entity, contracted after a lifetime of being force-fed a cultural diet that focuses obsessively on the figure of the unattached woman

In the comments following the article, a few people said that the lady doth protest too much. I agree.

On December 30, 2022, she described her most recent break-up: ‘In 2022, I walked away from the greatest love of my life so far. This is why I did it’.

She says:

… In the pub the other day, my friend Stan and I started counting the long-term couples (which we defined as relationships of two years or more) in our immediate friend groups who had separated over the course of the year. Including ourselves, there were 12. This, said Stan, seemed a lot. Later I recounted the exercise to others, who offered more anecdotes about the recent dissolution of long-term partnerships. Suddenly it felt like everyone was breaking up around us …

I cannot speak for my former partner, but I believe objectively we had mileage left in our relationship. There were cracks, yes, but at other points in time, these may have been surmountable. Broadly, we were happy enough – but in 2022, that itself became a faultline for us.

As the months slipped by, I was gnawed by the sense that this “happy enough” relationship was actually shortchanging us. So much of our existence as young people feels decided by forces beyond our control, from the pandemic to the housing market and the government’s shredding of public services. Surely in this rare space where my partner and I had basic agency, we had to demand more than simply being “happy enough” for a while longer, and consider individually what would make us feel alive right now? Could romantic love alone bear the weight of those ambitions?

No, it was concluded. Dreams previously compromised, or shelved permanently in favour of preserving a serious relationship, could no longer be put off. With tenderness, we let each other go. I had walked away from the great romantic love of my life thus far, a man who looked like a movie star and read Angela Davis. He was everything I’d been told would complete me. Theoretically, I knew this wasn’t true, but realising it materially was truly emancipating.

Discussing long-term breakups on social media recently, one respondent suggested to me a host of negative reasons – including the possibility of Covid-19-induced “neurological damage” – that may have pushed relationships apart. Some were interpreting these splits as the departure of love from our lives, while I was viewing them as a rejection of the idea that romantic love alone is enough to fulfil us when a multitude of other desires go unmet.

Who is to say if I am right? All I know is I have never loved harder since my breakup, nor dreamed bigger. This is no reflection on my relationship, but rather the freedom engendered by busting open your horizons. Here’s to 2022, a year of big breakups. Losing love has never felt so liberating.

How pathetic. If he’s the love of her life, why did they not decide to pursue complementary dreams together?

On the other hand, a February 3 Guardian article by a different journalist tells us that romcoms are back:

Romcom is the vibe the world needs right now, and here’s why. The story of every romcom is that two adorable people meet, but somehow, in the frantic chaos of modern life, then spend the following 90 minutes of screen time narrowly missing getting together. Or (mistakenly as it will turn out) think that they hate each other. Or both, before realising that happy ever after is there for the taking if they just stop bickering and get Married already.

The classic romantic comedy tropes reflect back at us the speeded-up fractiousness of our era – our dating apps, our culture wars, a vague sense that the future has been derailed and isn’t going to plan – but wrap it up with a promise that deep down we all love each other really and that everything will be all right in the end. This is why, after two decades in the cinematic wilderness, the romcom is back.

Indeed. Romcoms will always be with us because they appeal to the atavistic notion of mutual attraction.

Personally, I believe God hard-wired us that way.

Last Sunday’s Gospel reading for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany (Year A) was from Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus discussed Marriage, divorce and adultery.

I cited excerpts from one of John MacArthur’s sermons on the passage. MacArthur spoke of marriage and God’s plan:

Marriage is a symbol of the relation between Christ and His church. Marriage is not an end in itself. Now listen to this one: Marriage was not designed primarily for your happiness, it was not designed primarily for my happiness, marriage was designed primarily to be an illustration on a human level of a divine relationship. And when you lose that sense of priority in marriage and you make marriage a mundane thing that belongs only in the carnal world of the expression of personal preference, you have denuded marriage of its divine priority.

We can’t expect the world to understand this, but for God’s sake, we can expect the church to understand it. And when in one week I find four couples who claim to be Christians divorcing, then I begin to question whether Christianity has really understood its calling. And somebody even with a secular viewpoint like the writer I quoted tonight seems to have a higher standard than some of us

Marriage was never designed by God to establish or promote human happiness. Now listen to me. Human happiness – now get this – is found in a right relationship with whom? With God. And when that is right, you will be rightly related to anybody, and any marriage could work. Get that? Marriage is not the key to human happiness, God is the key to human happiness. If you’re right with God, then you can make a relationship work. Both partners, obviously, have to cooperate. But marriage was designed to illustrate God’s relationship with His church, God’s relationship in the Old Testament with His people, Israel. It is a living illustration of how a person is joined together in an unbreakable union with the living God

Therefore, it behoves us to make the right choices in love, unlike the woman who wrote an anonymous first-person account of her boyfriend for The Telegraph — ‘I fell in love with a psychopath’. I won’t excerpt it in detail, but it’s an essential read. Red flags popped up from the moment they met. Thank goodness he allowed her to leave the relationship.

Interestingly, dating experts say that women need to listen to what men say in their initial conversations, because they are revealing their inner truths. This one was no different:

Before I begin, I should prefix this with the fact that he never called himself a psychopath. He used the word only once. It was quite early on, we were at his old flat, making tofu curry, and for some reason we were discussing the narcissism spectrum, and that’s when he said it: ‘Psychopaths are entirely misunderstood. It’s a defamatory word for successful men, mostly CEOs.’

I laughed. ‘Exactly what a psychopath would say.’ I waited for him to laugh too but he looked away. He was silent for a very long time, then he started dishing up the rice. ‘We should eat this before it gets cold.’

We never spoke of it again

Then there’s the guy who created a video game as a way of finding his ideal partner. Wojciech named it after his nickname, Voy.

Dissatisfied with his apparent lack of success on Tinder, he thought the game would locate his special someone. The Telegraph‘s Imogen Mellor chatted to him online and wrote about her experience on February 6, ‘How one man’s novel approach to Tinder took me by surprise’:

… one match shook me out of my daze. “I decided to try to do things a bit differently, and made a tiny dating game,” it said in his profile. Intriguing.

Sheepishly, I clicked on the link. I expected to be startled by nude pictures or a dodgy website. But, instead, I was taken to a screen that showed a retro-style video game called “Date Voy” …

… impressed with his novel approach to dating, I got in touch with Voy. He replied almost immediately and was happy to chat.

Born in Poland, 35-year-old Voy’s real name is Wojciech Czarnecki and he lives in London. Why did he design the game? It all came down to targeting the right “audience”, he said

He could have saved himself a lot of time by putting most of the following highlighted text into his Tinder profile:

It was absolutely essential that any future partner had an interest in gaming, it turned out.

“I asked myself this question: ‘What is the core thing about me that has not changed throughout the years?’ In other words, what has been consistently a part of me and could therefore realistically still be in the future? And apart from some obvious facts like being human and having Slavic heritage, there are two other constants: science and gaming.

“Sharing these passions is something that I need in a partner.”

The journalist gave Voy her opinion of the game:

For an hour or so we chatted about the game. I told him that the questionnaire felt too much like a job application. Further conversation revealed that after sharing the game on social media for 11 months, and 800 people playing it, no-one had “reached out” (which is why he had decided to add it to his Tinder profile).

No surprise there:

We discussed where he might be going wrong. I understood Voy was a man of data, and even if the questionnaire wasn’t a regular way of finding love for the majority of people, it was his way. So I tried to soften the severity of some of the questions. He thanked me for my “extra data”.

This man’s problem is that he is looking for the ever-elusive ‘type’ rather than relax and allow love into his life from somewhere else.

A Telegraph article from February 11 looked at British marital statistics and positive views of marriage. Mick Brown’s ‘Why marriage is still important’ adds useful insights:

Marriage, my father used to say, is an institution, usually pausing for a moment before adding his little joke – “and who the hell wants to live in an institution?” Well, apparently he did. He was married to my mother for more than 40 years until his early death, and as far as I could tell very happily, despite the inevitable ups and downs.

Perhaps it was my parents’ example – and love, of course – that encouraged me to marry at the age of 23. We have remained married for the past 48 years, with no regrets, nowhere near the length of time necessary to receive the murmurs of approval and congratulation that often come on television programmes when elderly couples reveal a union of 60 or more years. This week I attended a 100th birthday lunch for a friend who had been married for 70 years until the death of his wife – lots of murmurs of approval and congratulations there

Why do people get married? Because they fall in love is the obvious answer. Beyond that, for security, to raise children, to honour a formal commitment made in the presence of family, friends, community and, in some cases, whatever God you may happen to believe in. But until now, not many of us would have put reducing our likelihood to get diabetes at the top of the list.

However, that is the conclusion of the report published this week by researchers at the universities of Ottawa in Canada and Luxembourg, which suggests that even an unhappy marriage may help prevent heart disease and type 2 diabetes

The study concluded that the quality of the marriage did not make a massive amount of difference to the average levels of blood glucose; it was simply being in a marriage that appeared to have a protective effect against type 2 diabetes, preventing people’s blood sugar rising dangerously.

So even if the rows about loading the dishwasher or squeezing the toothpaste in the middle might drive you to distraction, don’t even think about walking out. The report joins the growing body of evidence that testifies to the health benefits of marriage. Figures released last year by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that married men and women of all ages consistently had the lowest mortality rates between 2010 and 2019, and a lower premature death rate than those who are single, divorced or widowed

According to the ONS, the rate of marriages between men and women fell to a record low three years ago. A total of 213,122 heterosexual couples tied the knot in 2019, which is down 50 per cent from the peak in 1972 and the lowest number since 1888. And fewer people are choosing to marry in a church; not even 20 per cent walking down an aisle that same year (a separate ONS survey shows that nearly a quarter of all couples who live together are not married or in a civil partnership). While the rate of marriages is in decline, so too is the rate of divorce. Divorce rates began to rise through the 1960s, as the social pressures to remain in an unhappy marriage began to fall away, peaked in the 1990s and have fallen consistently since then.

So while more people have chosen not to marry, those who do have a better chance of the union surviving than in their parent’s generation. Nearly a quarter of a million weddings took place in 2001; 63 per cent of those couples are still married 20 years later.

This may have something to do with people making the decision to marry later in life. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the average age for marriage stood at just under 25 years, but by 2019 this age had hit 32.8 – the highest on record. For a man born in the 1940s, there was an 80 per cent chance they’d be married by 30. For someone born in 1990, this figure drops below 20 per cent.

Thinking of my own contemporaries, by today’s standards, I would guess that most married in their 20s; some ended in early divorce – call it a trial run – but they are now in second marriages that have lasted 30 to 40 years. Evidently it was just a question of finding the right institution to live in.

Personal finances are a big factor in deciding whether to get married today:

Harry Benson, the research director of the Marriage Foundation, cites four reasons why income might be a major factor in this. The first, he believes, is the fear of divorce, “particularly in the lower income groups with the fear of poverty that it brings with it.”

This is probably the biggest reason for a drop in marriages. As has been true in the United States for around the past 50 years, the UK is also adopting welfare policies in which a woman marries the government, rather than the love of her life. It is noticeable that Conservative MPs, who should be supporting the family structure, say very little about it either in or out of Parliament:

… what Benson calls “public messaging” and government policy that has long ceased to provide direct encouragement and support for married families, or even separate being married from living together – this, he says “despite the fact that 83 per cent of the current cabinet are married, and 93 per cent have been married or are married now.

“The political class marry in their droves and yet insist that it doesn’t really matter, because people don’t want to judge, which is fair enough. But they are overlooking the benefits. The gap in outcome for society between married and cohabiting families is huge, in terms of stability, unwanted lone parenthood, poverty and all sorts of things.”

But the biggest factor driving the fall in marriages among the less well-off, the foundation claims, is a benefits system that includes a “couple penalty”. “Everyone on benefits knows this,” Benson says, “but no politician will talk about it. The way welfare is calculated is based on household income, so if someone moves in with you, your tax credits and universal credit go down; therefore there is a massive incentive for welfare couples either to lie or to pretend that they’re living apart, or just not to live together in order to get more universal credit.”

Benson says that he came from a single-parent household. Despite that, he is bullish on marriage:

While staying together, no matter how unhappily, may be good for your health, there is powerful evidence to say it’s a better thing where children are involved, and a better thing for society

“My interest in this is to help more couples stay together and I think this is the point of marriage, that it helps more couples stay together, so you avoid the heroism required to be a lone parent in providing all the resources of love and time and money on your own” …

For Benson, marriage is where commitment is most assured.

“The psychology behind marriage is incredibly compelling. When people decide to do something and make a commitment they have an attitude and intent behind it.

“What you really want to make the relationship work is dedication – the desire to be a couple with a long-term future,” he says …

“While it’s an unpopular view today, I suspect many people deep down still think it, if you want to bring up a child in a two-parent family, your best chance of doing that is by committing to marriage in the first place. But, on the whole, couples don’t commit as seriously, as intentionally, as they used to and therefore there is a lot more family breakdown.”

Benson speaks from personal experience. He has been married for 36 years and represents an organisation whose declared mission is to “advocate the advantages of marriage” and “demonstrate that marriage is both modern and the best arrangement for all couples”.

Ammanda Major, the head of clinical research at Relate, and a therapist dealing with relationships for 30 years, also supports marriage:

“There are people who do not wish to enter into a marriage or civil partnership because they do not feel that is something that’s important to them,” Major adds, “and that’s fine. But just because people start off in a certain way not looking for exclusivity, that doesn’t mean that further down the line that is something they want to go forward with.”

The feeling of being cared for and connected to someone, she says, can have a significant impact on someone’s wellbeing. “There are people who would take a very different view on that – that’s just those people who are happy in relationships. But 30 years of therapy doesn’t lie. I appreciate people are coming to see me and my colleagues because there are problems.

“But people will talk about how they feel more content, more at one with themselves, when they feel they are in a relationship where someone is there for them, supportive of them, and where they can feel vulnerable in that relationship – and are not going to be taken advantage of” …

In conclusion:

… married or not, the old adage still applies, a perfect relationship is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other. But nobody ever said it was easy.

This, I believe, is the problem. We want everything to be easy and perfect, with instant satisfaction on our own terms. Life isn’t like that, nor will it ever be.

I wish all my readers a very happy St Valentine’s Day.

For those who are still single, don’t give up on your dream of that special someone. Love finds a way.



This post first appeared on Churchmouse Campanologist | Ringing The Bells For, please read the originial post: here

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