“I just wanted to check,” says my husband, carefully, lowering his Big Book of Naval History Volume 648 to his lap so I know to pay attention, “that our usual arrangements for the forthcoming 14 February – also known as Valentine’s Day – still stand?”
I have lowered my book too (Valerie Anand’s The Ruthless Yeoman, because historical fiction set in the Middle Ages is the only thing that is taking me far enough away from this war-torn, Trump-blighted, paedophile-billionaire-ridden world at the moment). This is important. I need to be clear. He deserves to be at ease.
“Our arrangements still stand,” I assure him. “Which is to say – there are to be absolutely none.”
“I like to reconfirm every five years or so,” he says. “Just in case hormones or some kind of genuine evolution in character has occurred and you have secretly started hankering after things that you have never hankered for before.”
“No,” I say. “Medical science has my hormones under control, and my personality hasn’t changed since the womb.”
“Good-o,” he says and we both return happily to our books.
Romance is a tricky business. To some it is roses and chocolates on officially demarcated days, public displays of commitment and affection via restaurant bookings and champagne in ice buckets and other such socially sanctioned and recognised means.
For others, it is not. For others it is the sweet, sweet peace of mutual understanding and a five-yearly check-in that your wishes in one department or other have not changed.
But however you express it, romance is important. And I say that as the most unromantic person who has ever lived.
When you are young, public displays of romance, of affection, outward expression of a couple’s private connection are almost as important and necessary as any others. Even if they don’t come naturally.
This is how you stress test a relationship. It’s how you find out whether one of you is embarrassed to be seen with the other. It is how you find out whether you are being kept a secret from friends, family and other lovers. It can be how you find out how uncomfortable an undemonstrative person is prepared to make him/herself for you.
These are all good things to know. They help you filter out good from bad, keepers from non-keepers, investment pieces from the wear-once-and-pass-on fun, often drunken, purchases.
But for the love of God, please don’t ever mistake the ability to buy flowers or book a candlelit dinner on the right date for anything more than a good sign. And even then, only when it’s coupled with good behaviour at all other times. If it’s done to make up for bad, or make you think the bad doesn’t count, you obviously need to run fast and run far. If you feel you can’t be sure, ask your friends what they think. I assure you they have opinions and are waiting for permission to express them loudly.
The true sign of a really good relationship, one that will stand the test of time – children, illness and diametrically opposed views on how and when the dishwasher should be loaded and unloaded – is not to need anything to be done on cue. Not to have to do anything together because it is expected of you (either personally or because you are a couple at a certain stage of life or income or professionalism).
A good relationship should allow two precious things. One, it should allow you to do nothing together. There are, after all, more days and nights of nothing in life than there are of something, even for the most sociable of animals.
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You need to be with someone with whom you can sit in a room and watch a lot of telly while playing on your phone and still prefer it to being alone or with anyone else. You need to be able to look up, crack a joke or have a bit of a chat and then go back to doing nothing without it feeling like too little, or like you’ve just been hollowed out a little bit instead of buoyed up or restored in some infinitesimal but vital way.
And two, it should be the two of you against the world. Which is to say, it should be a partnership that allow you to define your own terms instead of living under the cosh of traditions that may not suit you, conventions that constrain you, family, friends or practices that simply ask too much of you.
It should facilitate the kind of mental freedom that only having another person unequivocally in your corner can provide. If you have that, then it’s a happy Valentine’s Day – and all the days after it too.
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