BIG BANG LOVE

True love, once experienced, becomes a fundamental part of our DNA and allows us to see the world as even more ‘ fabulous’.

True love, once experienced, allows us to see the world as even more fabulous.

Dr Fabulous and I are lunching at our usual café. At a nearby table, a young couple draw smiles and stares for their loud declarations of undying love.

“I don’t know if I’m jealous,” says Dr Fabulous, regarding them. “Or relieved that it’s not me.” “Definitely jealous,” I chime in. He shakes his head. “If love were a disease, you’d have been quarantined years ago.”

He’s right. I’ve been lovesick to the point of delirium many times. In fact, so many times that I should have developed an immunity to it. But love (unlike infectious diseases) doesn’t tend to work that way. However, like infectious diseases, not all loves are the same.

There are some loves you forget as quickly as a hangover. The morning the lover leaves, so does the feeling, disappearing with neither trace nor reminiscence, intense but brief and soon forgotten, like a ’90s pop song.

Other loves linger. For the entire summer or a long semester. Or the length of a European vacation – every piazza a reminder of that desperate final kiss in a cobblestoned courtyard.

These loves effervesce like lemonade left out in the sun. Sweet for a time, then the fizz fizzles, even in recollection.

But then comes your first, true love. The first time you share tears between the sheets, the first time a pink plus sign only 98 per cent freaks you out, the first time you cry listening to Ed Sheeran because now you really understand him.

This type of love is the ink that dyes your waters, impossible to extract. It colours you with a permanent luminescence, at times a stain when the love hurts badly, other times a brilliance behind that spark in your eye, the glow in your cheeks and the nuclear reactor in your loins.

Prior to this, love was a plaything. Sure, it was real, real as puppy dogs and school crushes (but tell me that at the time and I would have cursed your cold-heartedness). Before this love, the objects of your affection left no evidence of their existence; maybe a hint of heartache, maybe some Leonard Cohen CDs, but otherwise your DNA still coiled the same way. But this one, this true love, penetrates every single cell of your being. Then you break up.

And the next day you look in the mirror and see someone different.

You’ve changed. The world has changed. Your insides, outsides, everything, feels raw, unfamiliar, distant. Now, your tears go unshared. Now, everywhere feels lonely. Now Ed Sheeran’s lyrics really make sense.

After a time, the grief, like a thick fog, lifts. You can see love again. But this time it takes a particular form: that of the true love. And it will do so forever more.

My first true love cast an image of all my future ones, an attraction to a particular type of woman. Before my first true love there was no common thread between the women whose spell I fell under. My eyes and heart were drawn to all shapes and sizes, smiles and come-ons, perfumes and scents, kisses, temperaments, political persuasions.

Not since. Now, when I look back through the characteristics of women I’ve fallen for after that true love, there is a striking sameness: petite, brown hair, lithe, as if cast from the same dye.

But it’s not just about the physicality. I’m not going to claim that I’m blind to attractiveness – my wife is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever laid eyes on – but there is an emotional side to the equation as well. Passion, I’ve discovered, is important to me. About anything – spirituality, charity, endangered wildlife – as a driving force, a moral centre, a way of being in the world. Dr Fabulous calls it the ‘P word’ and he avoids it in partners like the Ebola virus. Indifference, coolness, the cavalier is where he finds love. For him, passion equates to emotion, and that’s something he steers well clear of. He seeks a glacial, Scandinavian type of a love – proof that one person’s idea of love is another’s idea of misery.

Intelligence, too, makes my knees weak. Not academic IQ, but a playfulness with ideas, a keenness to debate a point. Arguing politics or the best-movie-ever or anything really, late into the night then making love and then the same again the next day is something one only ever does with a true love. Before true love, this kind of behaviour was as foreign to me as, say, always having to hand over whatever food is in my hands – a slice of toast in the morning, a bite of a falafel at lunch, or, as we snuggle into a movie, most of my choc top. I have her to thank for giving this to me.

It is a mistake, though, to equate true love with the person with whom you first fell truly in love – to believe that she/he/they will be your only true love ever, leaving a black hole that can never be filled.

I don’t believe that.

I do believe in one true love, but the phenomenon is about the process of ‘loving’ much more than about ‘who one loves’. True love, when it’s first experienced, is a Big Bang moment. It creates a new gravitational force, one with an attraction to a particular type of person. That force remains present in us whether or not a heavenly body falls into our orbit; in and of itself it becomes a fundamental part of our nature. Once that new force has been created, like the Big Bang, there is no reversing it.

We can truly love many people over the course of our lives, and if we are extraordinarily lucky, we might find one who remains in our orbit all the way to seniors’ discounts, grandkids’ nuptials, and a final, contented, last breath. True love is about how one loves, not who.

I tell this to Dr Fabulous. “Does thinking about this kind of stuff make you a better partner?” he asks from behind his newspaper.

“It’s just my experience. Yours could be different.”

He puts down his paper and aims his baby-blues at me. “You know who my first, true love was?” “Yourself?”

“Besides that.” He clears his throat, “I haven’t had one yet.”

And for the first time ever, I feel something novel for my friend, a man incredibly blessed with looks, intelligence and charm ... think Bradley Cooper with a stethoscope. I feel sad for him. But I also feel envy, and not for the obvious reasons. I envy him because that sort of love, when it happens, and when it ends, will make him vulnerable, and thus, even more fabulous.

“MY EYES AND HEART WERE DRAWN TO ALL SHAPES, SIZES AND SMILES.”