The consequences of falling.

Here it comes, this early stage of obsessing over a complete stranger I may or may not even meet. First it’s the incessant checking of my email account to see if he’s responded to my last message. He hasn’t. Then it's the thought: “What if my last email got lost in cyberspace and he never got it? Quick! Must send another email or else this opportunity for a life-changing experience/ possible great sex/ true meeting of souls will be forever lost!” Still no response. Then comes the egomaniac’s tendency to personalise everything: “Oh my god, is it me? Is it something I said? Is it something I’ve done? It’s me, isn’t it?!”

Get a grip, Anna K. Whenever the rational part of my brain deserts me like this, I remember my friend Xerxes* teasing me mercilessly about a similar reaction on my part when someone very important to me was rather short with me on the phone: “That’s right, he hates you. Nothing in the world pisses him off apart from you. Rend your veil! Stagger weeping through the streets!” I calm down.

I’ve figured out why Gabriel* didn’t take very long to get over the girl he’s been pursuing. Okay, it was partly his own realisation that he was rebounding from his broken marriage and she happened to be the girl he’d fixated on, but - more seriously – the man was not in love with her. He has never been in love. During the course of his young life, he has had exactly two relationships: a teenage fling, and a serious long-term relationship which led to marriage and, ultimately, divorce. In both cases, the girls went after him and he didn’t have a clue that they were interested until they a) snogged him or b) were naked in his bed, which was a bit of a giveaway. True, he has loved, and he’s has experienced the ups and downs of a steady relationship, but the poor bugger has never experienced the I-want-to-rip-your-clothes-off-with-your-teeth-right-this-minute kind of passion, has never known what it’s like to live for someone, to be so captivated by some luminous, extraordinary being that in their presence you discover that you suddenly have too many feet, break out in a cold sweat, turn red and babble incoherently because you suddenly can’t form a sentence, when you feel your knees turn to liquid and your stomach to jelly as they pass by and have to lean against the wall for support – when a glimpse of them, a smile from them – heck! – any kind of attention from them makes your otherwise worthless existence temporarily worthwhile, when their absence is too painful to contemplate and their indifference sends you into a dark downward spiral from which you fear you will never emerge. Yep, he's missed all that.

I’ve been in love twice, once with a male and once with a female. The first time, I was twelve and it spared me the indignity of crushes on pimply teenage boys and members of Take That. It hit me with all the force of a lifelong passion and took years to transform into something less overpowering, more gentle and something I could live with.

Sometimes I can’t help but think that at that age, I saw more clearly what was truly important – his intelligence, his compassion, his passion and life experience – than for much of my adult life, when I went astray. I mistook ‘exotic’ for ‘interesting’, went for looks rather than substance, forgetting that it’s the important qualities that make a truly person attractive and subconsciously trying to find them in half-empty vessels. I also displayed a remarkable capacity for self-delusion by projecting those desired qualities onto unworthy men unable to reciprocate affection or to enrich my life in any meaningful way. It was not unlike schizophrenia, I imagine: a part of my brain would acknowledge the criticisms levelled at the men who passed through my life, and would tell me: “He really isn’t as interesting/intelligent as you think” while another part of my brain shouted shrilly: “Shutupshutupshutup! No, he’s really intelligent and really interesting!” That would carry on for a while until the first part of my brain won out or my patience wore out. It probably didn’t help that I mostly picked men whose cases would be of considerable interest to psychiatrists.

When I was at university, a gay friend and I compiled lists of people we’ve been involved with/gone out with/exchanged filthy letters with (his was somewhat longer than mine) and then put a tick or a cross next to their names, depending on whether or not we’d repeat the experience, given the opportunity to relive our lives. My results were: 30% ticks; 70% crosses. On top of that, I managed to forget a name. How terrible is that – someone making so little impression on me that they may as well never have existed! (I did remember him in the end: his name was Cliffe, he was tall and fat and lived in Milton Keynes – the armpit of the Midlands). In spite of my results, I’m not really complaining. My romantic adventures and misadventures have all shaped me and contributed to the person I am now, a person I rather like, actually, so in that light, I guess that none of them can ultimately be counted as negative experiences. Of course, one day my instincts may fail me and I may end up dead in a ditch, but so far, so good. And who else among my friends can count amongst their beaus a married Jehovah’s Witness, a plumber/electrician dial-a-shag (sounds like a premise for a dodgy 80s porn), a sex shop worker, a nudist, a bible-thumping Baptist, a Puerto Rican hustler called Pantera, a nymphomaniac on death row in San Quentin, a barber addicted to crack and a man on San Diego’s February 2003 Top Ten Most Wanted list (though that may be because they were having a bit of a slow month). Some of them were even the same person.

But I digress…The second time I fell in love, I was seventeen, she was Apollonia*, my supervisor at the menial job I did for a year to save money for college and travel - and it made my life a sweet misery.

"She moves like she don't care, smooth as silk, cool as air
Oh, it makes you wanna cry
She doesn't know your name, and your heart beats like a subway train..."
                                                                                                               Blondie, "Maria"

She was stunningly handsome – tall and muscular with short cropped dark hair and piercing blue eyes. She didn’t walk: she sauntered. Coolness oozed out of her every pore. I had heart palpitations just from seeing her, from standing close to her, and would nearly pass out from excitement when she sometimes flung me over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I came out to my friends, thinking that I may never again love a man. They took it in their stride; Josephine* even informed me that she always knew I was gay. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?!” was my response. My best friend asked me if I fancied her. “I love you, darling, but you’re not my type,” I reassured her. I had hot flushes whenever I heard Prince sing: "I got the butter for your muffin, just need the keys to your room." I took up rugby to be within sight of Apollonia’s* broad shoulders and sculpted abs before I realised that I value my life and limb, I conjured up a deity, whom I named “My Lady” and who had her perfect face, and wrote bad poetry about how glad I was that there was a piece of machinery between us at work:

“Blue metal separating us, I cannot see your face
I’m glad, for at the sight of it my heartbeat changes pace.”

I wondered if she batted for the other team. Of course she did, and the day I found out that she wasn’t straight, I penned the following lines:

“Relief immense; my torment ends, but only for a while.
For still you linger out of reach, too perfect to be mine.”

And she did, because she was. Or, more accurately, she was not even remotely interested in me in a romantic way, besides being in a long-term relationship. This didn’t stop her from flirting outrageously with my friend Sappho* who, incidentally, has recently married a woman after divorcing her wishy-washy husband, having gone through a pious Mormon stage before that. Sappho* flirted back, and it broke my heart, to the point where I found myself morosely drunk in the corner of Cambridge’s “Five Bells”, a now-closed gay pub run a prune-faced lesbian, soliciting hugs from miscellaneous women, including middle-aged Dobber who had a military haircut. I may never get over it. Women are just too wondrous and cruel.

Harun Al-Rashid* once told me, after I approached him with yet more tales of relationship woes, that he imagined that when I fell in love, it would be with someone amazing. He was absolutely right. The problem lay in the fact that who I fell in love with and who I actually went out with were completely different people. Perhaps I play it safe, or perhaps there’s a certain amount of self-preservation at work here, but I would never have approached the two amazing people with declarations of love because I don’t dare aim that high. Most people can tell whether or not they are in with a chance, or whether spilling your feelings will either get you viciously trampled, or gently rebutted. The nice thing about going out with mediocrities is that if it all goes tits up, it doesn’t matter – it’s no big loss. If you are lucky enough to be in love with an amazing person and if – even more luckily – they return your feelings, then there’s always the possibility that you might screw up and destroy the most precious thing that you’ve ever held in your grubby little hands.

Maybe Gabriel* got it right. Maybe it’s best to avoid the rapturous heights and the suicide-inspiring lows, the being tossed about in a maelstrom of tempestuous emotions, and to be content with a steady, if uninspiring, relationship that plods along, year after year, until you’re both retired and your entire day’s conversation consists of: “Pass the salt, please.”

Who am I kidding! That sounds like a fate worse than death. There is a happy medium to be found, and I've experienced it myself: it is possible to love a normal, well-balanced human being, who has all the ideal qualities a man can possess, to have a relationship based on friendship and mutual respect without screwing up. It’s possible to be completely comfortable, and – dare I say it – to even leave oneself vulnerable in another person’s presence without losing the desire to tear their clothes off. I fully realised then that those two glorious spectres that haunted my youth were never perfect, and by acknowledging their specific flaws I came to see that if by some miraculous chance they’d actually reciprocated my feelings, it never would have worked because they are not what I need, and no longer what I want. This, in turn, made me appreciate them as fallible mortals like myself, and while I may worship them less, I like them a lot more. As for the happy medium, it may have run its course, and while I am constantly reminded of what I don’t have, of what I may never have, of what I didn’t have for long enough, I’d put myself through it all over again without hesitation.