When We All Lived in Villages…

Of course, back then, when we all lived in villages, there were some grave problems. It was hard to get around, life was narrow and judgemental, there wasn’t much to do in the evenings, the animals smelt – and so on and so forth.

But there was one enormous advantage. When it came to settling down, there were so very few options to choose from. If you were 22 and a man, there’d be three candidates, maybe four – and vice versa – and once you were paired off, the task was simple: to do your very best simply to make it work. You understood immediately that the person wasn’t perfect, that this wasn’t the end of all imaginings, but the next village was a three days walk away across the mountains and your entire mindset was consequently oriented towards hope and accommodation. Yes, they might be a bit stubborn, yes they let out an odd whistling sound when sleeping, but they were clever enough at building sluices or moulding pots – and that wasn’t nothing. Of course, they were a bit obsessive about their mother but they were charming some of the rest of the time. And perhaps they weren’t ideal looking around their chin but does one even notice after a little while and how nice their hands were at least.

Whereas now, far from those now deserted villages, not a second goes by without a mania and another glance. What about someone less… someone more… or not so…? Someone basically like what we’ve got – or had dinner with last week – but just a little bit younger, or older, or better built or without that thing about their teeth or slightly peculiar backside. And the machine doesn’t ever complain or rebuke, why would it, this malevolent slot machine surreptitiously hungering for our coins. Let’s take another lucky dip or ten or twenty. The casino is open 24 hours. Here’s someone from Sri Lanka, 39, a doctor who likes badminton and dogs. Don’t like dogs? OK, what about 32, an accountant, originally from Bremen… Not keen on Germans? What about this amazing one, a special of the week in fact, Dundee, still only 29 but so accomplished; a PhD from somewhere one doesn’t recognise but pretty spectacular in most ways.

And it isn’t – naturally – just we who are looking in this way. We are only a momentary stop on everyone’s else’s marathon. A world swiping in the bath and at the gym, on the bus and on forest walks. We too – even in the intimacy of the bedroom – when we finally think we have a refuge, remain aware that the beloved still has their phone, still in the secret hours will be looking, will be sending the odd friendly greeting back (in a tone within the bounds of deniability). It isn’t a sign of madness to be paranoid, only a folly to be anything but. We’ve killed love in an unyielding search for it.

We may explode at points: I want none of it. I’m out of the funfair. I can’t take the fickleness. I can’t bear that no one sticks at it – as a parent will with a child, who isn’t going to be sent back on bad days. I want to go home.

How much we might long for a deity to stop the dance definitively, to take away these hideous illuminated carousels from our guilty hands and simply say to us, as if from on high, in an unquestionable divine voice: this one goes with that one; that one with that one. And that’s it, I brook no opposition. Make it work or face a thousand hellfires.

We’d hate it but at the same time, how calm we’d feel, how settled would be our lives. How free we would be, at last, knowing we had no choice but to love here and nowhere else – forever without end. We’d make it work.