PERSONAL/LOVE:LOVE IS BEING LEFT IN CHARGE OF A LIBRARY BOOK

When a person has been single for a while, they start to think they’re being pursued by the biggest love imaginable. They think love is coming for them down the street like the Grim Reaper, like an unstoppable madman with an axe. It’s there. They can feel it. They wonder what it is going to taste like, but they think they know. They look into the stars and they see it. They miss their flight and suddenly it’s a sign that the biggest love imaginable will be in the airport at the end of the later flight, waiting to be bumped into at baggage reclaim.

Being single is like being left in charge of a library book that hasn’t had a date stamped in it. You don’t know when the call is going to come, just that it will come, because it has to come, this ultimate of ultimates. The single person wants to be prepared or tempt fate into letting love arrive when he’s looking the other way, all unprepared. The attached person smiles at this single person and laughs, saying, "Bless you, you’re trying too hard, why, love will come when you least expect it." The single person is irritated and sits there with a furrowed brow, furiously least expecting it and least expecting it. The single person reads all this guff about how nobody will love him until he loves himself, and so he becomes ever more determined to love himself. He loves himself with the force of a small child trying to prise the lid off a jar of peanut butter.

And then it is Valentine's Day, when the greatest love imaginable needs to hurry up and find you, ideally the week before. Urgently, you don’t care, nobody cares, it’s such balls, everybody cares.The single person waits for a love like a shiny-suited conwoman who promises to take him away from all this, even though "all this" is everything that he is.

The single person imagines that love will make him into a better man, and so he tempts fate by becoming a worse man. The single person wonders about his other half, and so he throws himself down rabbit holes, to drink from the bottle marked "Drink Me", and eat the cake marked "Eat Me", and try to reach the feeling where he has become both halves himself. The single person is powered by nervous energy, convinced that he is on the hook, and that the greatest love imaginable will get him off it. Sometimes, he wonders if a relationship will accelerate his mass to a stated velocity, the stated velocity being ALL OF THE MUSIC, ALL OF THE TIME. But this might just be the "Eat Me" and the "Drink Me" talking. It will make sense when she finds him.

Really, all you people who are actually in love should be jealous of single people. They’re having the biggest love affair imaginable. Much bigger than yours. They don’t even hear you when you complain that living together isn’t that great because it’s only been two years and already the sex has dropped off and it’s just become this sort of arrangement where your spouse isn’t so much your soulmate as just that person who passes you in the kitchen, asking why you haven’t given the cat its eyedrops. A single person can’t even hear you when you say this.

Because the longer a person is single, the more ultimate their big love becomes, the time spent alone being directly proportional to the increase in its size. Until the single person’s love grows so large that it threatens to invade small countries, print its own stamps and compose a national anthem. Single people dream of a love so big that a wrestler can’t lift it, so loud that Rammstein can’t deafen it, a love so morbidly obese that it has to be winched out through the roof, pursued by a TV documentary crew as it makes its way to the stomach-stapling operation in a jumbulance.

This love, it is the day when the rain finally stops. It is the day when somebody looks into your eyes and says "You, you, are the end of all possibility of rain."

Although, of course, single person, you could just go out with that friend of yours who you get on brilliantly with and who is so lovely and who is, as all your friends point out, completely in love with you. But that would never do.

I am searching for my future wife/soulmate. Please stop by again.