Every time I think about ‘what I want’ from a relationship I get confused. I think about how I’m hungry. Or how I’d quite like a puppy. Or about maybe we might have bedbugs again even though I don’t think we do but what if we do? Because that’s what I’m good at: avoiding situations until they become a big ball of fuck and then blow up in my face.
What I want is to have, as a skeazy guy once told me in a bar, ‘a good time’. But not the sly, winking way that he meant it in. No. What I love about a relationship is the unbridled sense of fun. That feeling of being in a gang or team. That me and you against the world feeling. Dashing across Hampstead Heath and laughing on a swing. While this is starting to sound like a Colgate advert, I think there is something to be said for those fizzy feelings of love and sleep deprivation that a relationship causes, especially in it’s early days. I used to think I wanted someone to hold hands and look deep into the eyes of. Now I think that I want someone to scream at while on the top of a rollercoaster.
And then I think that I already have that person in the shape of one or another of my friends. Maybe I should want someone who’s stable, who can help me live a better life by encouraging me to reach my goals. Someone who’ll run a bath for me, hold my hand at the dentist, that sort of person. Or do I want someone who’ll rock up in a drop top Cadillac, blasting music and spirit me off on a road trip for days on end. Who smokes Gauloises and wears pomade. Tattoos or none? An old soul or a silly joker?
The problems is that I want all of that. I want a tattooed dude with a scooter who likes A$AP and Ann-Margret, who wants to swing on a star, then jump off a cliff into a warm blue sea. Basically, I want the moon on a stick. Is this unreasonable? Should I be tailoring my taste to create someone in my head who might actually exist? Until recently I thought so, and then I saw him. A man on the tube platform wearing a checked 3 piece vintage suit, and covered in old school tattoos. I shuffled near him and realised he was listening to Kanye West. For a brief second I looked straight into his eyes, and then he got on the tube and disappeared. That moment made me realise that it’s ok to want someone to be the moon a stick for you. And that it’s better to want that than to settle for second best.
Illustrations by Anti-Skewl Propaganda and Lauren Gregg
5 Comments
I think a problem with finding what you really want in a partner is that we expect so much. We expect someone to be both comfortable and secure and provide a sense of safety while at the same time being independent and adventurous and making us feel passionate. I also think it’s about having to plan, and I hate having to plan. I just want my relationship to evolve naturally so I don’t need to get my hands in there and mess it up.
As an avid daydreamer I do worry that I idealise/plan out my future relationships a little too much, but I agree totally. You want this magical mystery person to be an everyman and good at everything, and not be tiring or difficult, ever.
Maybe I’ll just stick a picture of Rock Hudson on my vibrator instead?
But…. but Rock Hudson was gay! And beautiful and big, yes. I’d go for Robert Mitchum instead, that hot menacing bad bad hunk of a man.
I know he was gay! I can still dream!
A very interesting article, everybody should seek out that person who will be the ideal partner or soulmate if you like that term. That is clearly what life is all about , that search for that one person, and the personal growth that you yourself undergo as you take that journey. But sbouldn’t the area marked “Here Be Dragons” also be alluded into?
The area where “tall, irish accent, duffel coat, curly hair, likes going to gigs and football”* becomes not an ideal to be sought after but a ticklist to be used to keep on seeking. Where you never quite find the person that you are looking for because they aren’t tattooed or don’t own the scooter, so the search goes on.
Or worse, where you are using the ideal as a ‘barge pole’ to keep everybody away who doesn’t meet with the ideal, an ideal that you are not acknowledging as belonging to a previous paramour who you haven’t properly relinquished.
At what point should the ideal be softened, the ticklist reduced, to avoid the danger that you will go on seeking the dream whilst everybody around you has achieved the reality.
* This is an actual quote of a friend’s ideal person. But they have also described Lily Allen’s dad, Keith Allen as a “damn sexy man” so obviously the ideal is malleable.