What has the English speaking world been doing all of these
years? Poets have been dilly dallying around, writers
have been
lazy, lyricists have been procrastinating, colloquialism hasn’t even
produced a satisfying result. I am speaking of the middle ground
between like and love. As a regular visistor to these lands I have
often found myself lost for words when it comes to explain to others
or to myself my feelings regarding certain females. As a man, I am
therefore subject to the rules of male friendship, one of which is the
immediate sound of derisive laughter that erupts around the pub
table when the ‘L’ word is mentioned. Sometimes it is acceptable,
mabe if you happened to be married or extremely drunk, but in
general the word is to be avoided at all costs when adopting your
public persona. So, you are left with the word ‘like’, an extremely
unromantic word, one that seems best left to the school
playground and under 18 disco nights (we all remember the pain
of having a beautiful girl approach us in a school disco, obviously
attractedc by the scent of your Dads aftershave which has been
applied with the upmost liberalism, only to have her say ‘my mate
likes you, willl you dance with her?’) So like too, is off the menu. The problem with the word love is that we have attributed too
much sentimentality to it. After all, if we are to be cynical and
scientific on the matter, the chocolate high of love is simply an
abundance of certain
chemicals inducing the unpleasant and
confused state we all seem to lust after. A woman that I do not
know well may trigger all of this, but I do not, in societys
perception, actually ‘love her’. Yet this is the owrd that will spring
to mind when attempting to explain to cynical friends my feelings
for her. I will cringe as I feel the word forming on my toungue, I will
apologise immediately after its usage, and then I will attempt to
justify myself by blaming the English language. How is it possible
that after all these years, with perhaps every single person
experiencing these feelings, that no word has been spawned that
can sit comfortably between ‘like’ and ‘love’? The reason, I think,
is because we all love an excuse. When we are ‘in love’ we are
excused to act like, let it be said, a bit of a prat. In the case of
unrequited love (a form that I am regrettably more familiar with) we
allow ourselves to adopt a ‘woe is me’ attitude, and we justify it by
believing we are in love. After all, love with all its connotations is a
powerful thing, one that we have no control over, we simply let it
wash over us in all its glory. In other words we are excused for our
petulant
behaviour as it is not our fault. And the behaviour of a
man (or woman) who is in the unfortunate situation of unrequited
love is highly petulant. When we consider agin that it is simply
chemicals being released, we see that this sulky behaviour is on a
par with the child in the supermarket who has a tantrum because
his mother refused to buy him the chocalate he wanted. But as
adults, we don’t wish to view our behaviour in such a way, and so
we have concucted a brilliant excuse for our childish antics, the
romanticised view of love.