end of the line


After a very difficult week, this weekend has been one of introspection and self-analysis. It has been a good weekend and I feel strong and happy to be alive and to be single. I love to meet many different people and to have the freedom to talk to them as and when I like and to be able to consider any option that is available… not in a sexual or relationship sense, but in a sense that I can go out at any time to any place, I can travel anywhere and go with whom I please. I am a natural flirt and it can get me into trouble. Therefore, being single, it is pleasing to be able to flirt freely and not worry about it.
            It’s simply pathetic to continue pining for the one who already has a family and is terrified of disturbing that. I change from being an exciting bond to being a terrifying threat within a period of weeks. This threat is love. Fortunately I do realise that love is transient and that relationships are sterile. I long for the incredible excitement of the first six months but I fear that terrible banality of three years and beyond. To suffer ennui once more is something that I prefer not to do.
            And so I awake to this blustery autumnal day and know that in a few hours I will walk or cycle into the centre of Guildford to meet a friend for drinks and lunch and I feel excited about the casual freedom of it… the potential. In each day of freedom there is potential. Many may call me selfish but often those people are envious of my adventures as they sit within the confines of white pickets and white lies with their unloving partners and demanding children. Their children are the light of their lives, and I understand this completely, but they are also a link to a person often no longer wanted or needed. I don’t see why it is selfish to remain single and to not have children. It is as if we believe that we owe life to… to what? To our sperm cells and ovarian eggs? We owe a life? It is our duty to create life? Duty to whom? The world is full… over-full, it does not require more and more people flooding into it with only one certainty… the certainty that the future will be competitive and difficult. We have children for ourselves. We have children because we vainly want to see a miniature of ourselves. Why not just enjoy your one and only life. Love and live and travel and drink and eat and read and explore and discover. You don’t have to do what your grandparents did and everyone who ever came before them. Someone said to me ‘but my family name will die.’ My answer is ‘so what?’
            Live and stop worrying about traditions. There is no God and you are not a failure if you don’t have children and if you don’t buy a house. I consider you a failure if you have not spent enough time alone to ask yourself questions and to question structures and conventions in order to understand your own unique and individual position within those and then to challenge them.


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