On single men.

Especially for Matt Kowalczyk,
happy birthday.
-26th of January

On single men.

(…) How little it takes to fall in love. Or at least to fall into the kind of heightened enthusiasm for another person that might be called love, but also crush, sickness or emotion, depending on temperament. By the time the train is past Newcastle, I have thought of marriage, a house in a cherry-tree-lined street, Sunday evenings where she will lay her head beside me and my head will comb her chestnut strands and we will quietly digest the middle-eastern something-or-other that she made and I will at long last, and for ever more and with indefinite gratitude, feel that I have a place in the world.

Such moments punctuate the life of the single male, unfolding without any outward sign, in the presence of faces glimpsed on the Edinburgh train, the lunchtime sandwich line or airport concourse. Pathetic, no doubt, but vital to the institution of the couple. Women should be grateful for the despair of unattached men, for it is the foundation of future loyalty and selflessness –another reason, perhaps, to be suspicious of the romantically successful types, whose charms have left them unacquainted with the tragicomic process of aching for days for a woman they were too shy to address and who stepped of at the next station leaving behind a carton of apple juice and plans for marriage.

Alain de Botton, On seeing and noticing,
Penguin Pockets 2005

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