Don’t you just love Love? As a concept it is unbeatable; it’s up there with language, the wheel and the flush toilet as humanity’s greatest invention. “I love you” sounds more poetic than “I biological imperative you”; less selfish than “My genes regard you as the finest available vehicle for their propagation and survival”; so much more flattering than “I am tired of being alone so I have decided to settle for whoever I happen to be with at this moment and that’s you”; less materialistic than “Let’s merge our assets and spawn heirs to inherit the works”; and more charming than “We must act now to head off any speculation about our respective sexual orientations; my mother is particularly nosy.”
Awww, am I spoiling your Valentine’s buzz? That is exactly my intention. Allow me to be the paper cut from your rhyming Valentine’s card, the prick from the one thorn the florist missed on the bouquet of roses, the nut allergy from the box of gourmet chocolate, the bit of cork just big enough to choke on that fell into the champagne, and the massive traffic jam on the way to your dinner date.
Before we continue I must save you from conventional thinking. I am not a cynic; I happen to love Love. It is probably my all-time favorite emotion. Love throws a warm glow over the immediate surroundings so that everything looks wonderful and all problems seem minor and surmountable. Your skin looks great, you lose weight because you have little appetite, you smile involuntarily, and the dark circles around your eyes make you look not like a distressed panda but a romantic figure. You are inspired to do great things.
And there is my problem with love. Love may inspire you to attempt feats of literary and artistic derring-do, but it almost certainly guarantees that you will fail. Have you ever tried writing something when you are in the grip of a romantic delirium? Assuming that you can stop thinking of the object of your passion long enough to type out a paragraph that is not about the aforementioned, eight times out of 10 that paragraph will be unpublishable. Let’s not be coy: it will be crap. It will either be bloodcurdling sentimental drivel unfit for the poetry section of a high school newspaper, or a demonstration of scattershot, distracted thinking that makes readers long for the symmetry and discipline of a telephone directory.
One point nine times out of 10 it will be publishable, but the effort of not writing about the beloved will make it sound flat and mechanical. One percent of the time it will be a work of genius, which means you will have to write tons of drivel before you can squeeze out that bit. Assuming that you haven’t quit writing out of shame by then.
It’s no accident that in tennis — which would’ve been my topic this week had I not spotted the calendar — love means “zero.” My treatise on Rafael Nadal and his invisible wedgie will have to wait until the annual February insanity passes.
He may not have had the tempestuous love life of his fellow Romantic poet Lord Byron, but when William Wordsworth declared that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility,” he knew exactly what he was saying. “Tranquility” means “When your brain is functioning again.” The best time to write is when love has expired, turned sour, crashed and burned. It is when the mere thought of the former beloved makes you want to disinfect your nerve endings; when the memory of the things you said motivates you to work out the kinks in General Relativity so you can invent a time machine and prevent him from being born. Yes, I mean the “What the hell was I thinking?!” period.
When love — which is not to be confused with “relationship,” those are two separate things — goes kaput, the shades fall from your eyes faster than those knockoff Chanel sunglasses you bought from a sidewalk vendor and suddenly everything is clear to you. You were possessed by the demon of silliness and are now exorcised. You may have been a complete idiot, but you have a chance to recover your faculties, analyze your stupid behavior, laugh at yourself and regain your self-respect. (You can even wreak vengeance, but that’s another story.)
You can write about it.
Unfortunately, before you can get to the clear-eyed analytical part, you have to go through the bloodcurdling bits. If someone could figure out how to skip the “Deranged with love” part and go straight to “What the hell was I thinking?!” the writing would be so much easier.