Another Valentine's Day and still happily single.  Or at least single-ish.  Good enough, eh?

You know what the best part of being single is?  The thing partnered people secretly envy singles for every day of the year but this one?  The thing that makes it so hard to give it up?  When you're single hope never dies.

I had coffee with a friend the other night who's always banging on about The One.  He must be on his hundredth One by now (I was #83 if I recall).  They're basically chosen at random.  It's a little like the lottery.  And everyone feels like a sweepstakes winner even if it ends up being a five dollar scratch-off prize.  Because it's really not about the prize, it's about winning it. 

And why not?  Like the charming old Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash classic "Foolish Heart" says: "Love shouldn't be serious, should it?"

Ah, but love can get pretty serious, can't it?  I mean, we call them serious relationships for a reason.  "She's in a serious relationship," we hiss, as if she's just been diagnosed with cancer.

Is it because of the risk?  Not least of dismemberment?

For better or worse, one view of love that sticks with me from the days of my youth came from another young man I met in Florence when our paths crossed as we trekked across Europe in opposite directions. John, a dashing South African, was hosteling with his Tasmanian girlfriend Elizabeth.  We kicked around a couple of days while they waited for their French visas. 

In the evenings we would break out the chess board, crack open a bottle of wine, and John and I would play while discoursing with Elizabeth on matters great and small.  Their disagreements — barely vocalized — on insignificant things served as proof their intimacy had reached its terminal stage. Nothing like a third party to bring out the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in a long-unhappy couple deeply in love.

Elizabeth made it a point to agree with me whenever I disagreed with John, and if he persisted in his folly, made it her duty to patiently explain to him how sensible my opinions were. You could say I was her pawn in the endless chess game they were playing. Hers was a kind of false flirtation, the intimation of infidelity in an innocent but insidious assertion of free-thinking. 

It was all all about John, though. And after Elizabeth had grown bored of using me, mostly unsuccessfully, to taunt him, she would leave the two of us to our chess game, and John would regale me with tales of his rural childhood.  How his brother was chased by baboons, how his father shot and crucified one in order to ward off others.  About poisonous snakes hanging from the trees, large flying ants that tasted like peanut butter, and so on.

There was an air of gloom about them that lifted immediately once Elizabeth left the room.  But John seemed  duty-bound to love her despite the obvious burden of her love for him.  I will never forget him leaning over the chess board to confide: "you love someone, but it halves you."

Mmm.  Psychological torture and dismemberment.  Isn't love grand?

Of course, it doesn't have to be that way.  And, hey, life itself whittles away at you somehow or another, doesn't it?  Right down to nothing in the end.   

But then I guess as you grow older you learn that you, yourself, are not for the keeping.  You are for the giving away.  And if you're lucky, when you give your hand, you get one in return.  Yes you'll eventually resemble a Frankenstein's monster, but everything evens out in the end.  If you're lucky.

I heard from John not long ago, and he's married (not to Elizabeth) with two children.   So it seems he's been essentially drawn-and-quartered.  And happily.

Lucky bastard.