Sunday 18 October 2009

Unnecessarily unsentimental

Last week I commented on Bambi's post about the things he's learned in twenty-five years, to suggest that I agreed with one of his points, with a slight alteration. His point was this:

No matter how settled into the idea of being perpetually single you ever become, you will never be able to predict how much more wonderful meeting the person who you fall in love with will be.
and my suggested alteration was this:
No matter how settled into the idea of being perpetually single you ever become, you will never be able to predict how much more wonderful meeting a person who you fall in love with will be.
So far, so gloriously saccharine. But was my correction hideously unromantic, as has been suggested to me?

Is it dreadful to refer to the person with whom you are currently in love as just that, "the person with whom you are currently in love", allowing for the potential temporality of the situation, or is it acceptably practical, given the possibility of any particular relationship breaking down?

Perhaps it is bad form to specifically draw attention to the fact that nothing is certain, and everything must end, but is it a good idea to pretend that the current situation (however good it is) is necessarily the situation that will persist for as long as all involved live?

On reading the phrase that Bambi used, and which I have quoted above, I was niggled by the use of "the person who you fall in love with", which seemed (and still seems) to assign a uniqueness to the subject, implying (in my mind) that there will only be one such person, and that the author will not fall in love with anyone else.

Assuming that someone doesn't believe that the first, admittedly more romantic, statement is necessarily true, is it enough to use it while hoping that it is true, for the sake of poetics, or is that misleading if the person doesn't actually believe it?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

1 comment:

happylittlecynic said...

Personally, I mostly agree with you. Having already fallen in love (for some definition) with one person and now being single, I'd rather like to think it might happen again. Having said that, it might just be that both of us have spent too long categorising relationships into "1:1", "1:many" and "many:many" for our own good ;)