COLUMNIST — MAX WALLIS
Facebook love
Your mother might not tell you this, but love starts with a declined invite on Facebook.
It’s 2011, and I’m waiting outside Covent Garden’s Apple store for my ( pre- Tinder) blind date. I wonder if I should dart off to my cousin’s to save myself the embarrassment. It’s a willed ignorance, a refusal of doubt. Rain lashes the pavements as people hurry past, oblivious. Then I see the tall, handsome journalist gambolling towards me and watch his face dart between silhouettes.
This is how I met Sam, the person I moved in with three days after meeting. I’d turned down a birthday invite on Facebook, saying, “Oh, I’d love to, but I am living in Manchester and can’t really come down.” Sam had seen my post, clicked through my photos, saw I had not long had a book out and, he says, both hated me and wanted to meet me. Solomon, our mutual friend, arranged it. We sit and drink and, four hours later, we’re in a pub in East London which is set to close.
Love doesn’t come fully formed. I almost ran off , but I was intrigued. I’d told this stranger more about my life than my parents and friends I’d known for years. What was a curiosity became a conversation, then a compulsion. I liked him. I liked the cut of his jib, his face, his charisma, the way he gesticulated with his hands while twirling a cigarette like a baton, how he dressed, the smell of him, his voice, the glint of the devil in his eyes, like two little stars that don’t go out. I wanted to know more about him and listen to more of the endless stories that seemed to fall from his mouth. Love, proper love, was not even a speck on the horizon. But I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to go where he was going and have what he was having. We went back to his fl at in East London, didn’t quite sleep, and in the morning he called in sick. Two mornings later, he asked me to move in with him. We both knew this was ridiculous, an outrage against sane, sober decision- making, but why live conventionally? Of course, I knew I could move back to Manchester if things didn’t work out, and he could have thrown me out on my ear. But as it happens we grew around each other, like two trees whose branches become entangled.
We had to deal with the grunts of a morning hangover, the horror of my friend dying, the friction of arguments when you can’t retreat elsewhere.
And so love takes form; after days of wanting to be around him, it became weeks, then months, then years, and each time, each new day, something even now makes me go, “Oh, I do like him.” He can be infuriating, but I love him. Love’s not without its hurdles and mean- faced little confl icts. It is the work of an age, a miniature battle. An “OK, we did it.” So far. It doesn’t begin with a firework, or a bang, but an accident and a willingness to explore. So call in sick. Decline an event on Facebook and see what happens.
“Love, proper love, was not even a speck on the horizon. But I didn’t
want to go home”