Horribly Ever After

I’ve just finished watching an episode of ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’ on BBC3. I clicked it on merely for some background noise while I was pissing about on the net, then I got sucked in by the potential for a bride vs. groom bust-up; he picked a plain dress and it turned out she wanted something more chavvy. However, by the end of it I had a little tear in my eye. Not because I had any particular affection for the over-tanned bottle blonde bride or her slightly effeminate-looking dented David Beckham-esque groom, no it’s merely because I’d been thinking about weddings a little recently, what with friends who are soon to marry, friends who’ve been married while I’ve been away and one friend who just celebrated her 9th wedding anniversary!

And though I can look at these friends and seen obviously, plainly that their marriages work, and that they work so well together, for me, it’s like watching life occurring on another planet. I KNOW they are happy and I KNOW they are all made for each other but despite this glaring evidence in favour of the institution of marriage my subconscious refuses to believe it works. It’s like when I try to explain to my mother that no one can see her through the toilet window unless A) they are on a ladder one floor up and peering in deliberately or B) what Mr. Stelling taught me in physics was completely wrong and light can in fact bend round corners.

But it makes no difference, she still pees with the light off and I still, when seeing people in happy relationships fail to register that this is reality. Over and over I can witness these relationships working but the message that speeds from my eyes seems to make no impact on the section of my brain marked ‘Love, Relationships and Happiness Therein’. That section is occupied by lots of skinny, black-clad chain smokers, who have desultory hate-sex with each other while ‘Closer’ plays on a continuous loop in the background. If a fluffy bunny hops in with good news from the outside world they bludgeon it.

And on those wedding programmes, they’re always crying at the appropriate moments, sappy music tinkling away in the background. And so comes the pressure to make real life the same, as though everyone lives in some frigging rom-com. Well movie moments don’t work for me. As I’ve learnt this year, the moments you should cry, you won’t cry. The moments you should feel, you won’t feel. And why feel anything if it’s just going to set you up for a fall? Because the second you start believing in that sort of shit is the second it starts creeping up behind you to bite you on the ass.

I know, I’m a cynic. A black-hearted, mean, dead-on-the-inside cynic. But you know what really, really pisses cynics off? When some arsehole, some total, unoriginal, dickweed bumwipe simpers “Oh, when you meet that right man, you’ll fall in love and then you’ll feel different”

NO! No, I will not Pollyanna! This is all my own mental fuck-up, thank you very much. I am the one who needs to sort myself out, via dating, or therapy or by smacking my head repeatedly in a car door. It’s not about meeting some Prince Charming who can suddenly blast away my cynicism and melt my cruel, cold heart. He’d need a nuclear fucking bomb, not a diamond ring.

I’m a free woman on a great adventure and therefore in control of my own destiny. So I’m the one who has to sort things out, and risk getting hurt and yadda yadda yadda. A usually unwise suitor of mine once said that, with relationships, it’s better to risk getting hurt than to never know. He may have had a point on that one. But damn, doesn’t that sound like it sucks?