Love is...

...at best a balm to sooth the open wound we call ‘life’ and at worst a horrific, malicious practical joke. But what do I know? Let’s think about some descriptions of love from history and hopefully we‘ll get to the bottom of it.

So some people think love is a ‘good thing’.

The Roman poet Virgil said ‘omnia vincit amor’, love conquers all. This is ridiculous for a start. No, it doesn’t. H1N1 conquers all. The Beatles claimed that it was ‘all you need’. Utter madness. Beyond the obvious, food and water and all that, we also need to not be subjected to the cod-philosophy of Scouse hippies. The actual philosopher Bertrand Russell said that love is a condition of ‘absolute value’ rather than ‘relative value’. Not a fucking clue, mate.

Margaret Atwood said that we should have as many words for love in English as the Eskimos have for snow. That’s 52, Margaret. Fifty-two. We just don’t have time for that. I'm busy. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed love was the ‘beginning of everything’ (but he was an alcoholic, so…), Vincent van Gogh claimed love was eternal (self-mutilating alcoholic, so…) and Frank Sinatra crooned that love meant more than money (rich alcoholic, so…). And so on to the depressing end.

But not everyone has been so bleedin’ chipper.

Jean Baudrillard said to love someone is to ‘isolate them from the world’. This isn’t a nice thing to do. Is it? No. Our own womany Poet Laureate, Cazza Ann Duffy, decided she’d give her lover an onion instead of a rose. Onions make you cry. Crying is a bad thing. Bad onion, not happy rose. Sadness ensues. Boohoo. Philip Roth called love’ bullshit’. Charlie Brown said that love ruined the taste of peanut butter. And Plato denounced the whole shebang as a ‘grave mental disease’.

Yep. I am none the wiser.

But who cares what these people think. The point is, how can Match.com define love? How do I know if I can get my money back or not? Is there a test?

No. There’s a ‘Love Guarantee’ which is worded so cleverly that they basically guarantee you’ll get the thing that is guaranteed (which is guaranteed) or your money back. In a nutshell, if you show me someone who has ever successfully managed to get a free 6 months out of Match.com then I’ll show you a man who thinks you’re lying for no good reason. Why would you lie? Don’t lie. Stop it.

Anyway - love. Wahizzit? The poet and novelist Charles Bukowski described love as ‘a piece of paper torn to bits’ He also wrote ‘what counts now is one more tight pussy before the light tilts out’. But. We’ll stick with it.