4. "60% of couples are not in love, but merely addicted to each other" - my flatmate, last night. Discuss.

Tee hee. You’re asking ME about coupledom? Moi, who is counting down the days to the fifth (count ‘em – five years!) anniversary of my last relationship ending. And that one only lasted a month! Am I even allowed to have an opinion on this? Oh, okay then. Thank you for giving me an excuse to expose the bitterness I have managed to keep suppressed for this long. Seriously though, I can only comment on what I see and hear around me, and I think there’s a lot of truth in what your flatmate says. I wouldn’t go as far as putting a figure on it though. I see, in fact I know, many couples who make me think ‘why are you together?’ Conversely, if I exclude the older generations, I can only think of two couples that I know, of any sexuality, who I think are actually in love with each other. Moving down from this, I think the ones your flatmate mentions; the couples who are actually addicted to each other, they’re the next luckiest. I see many couples who are just dependent on each other – a far cry from even being addicted, let alone being in love. The only reason they’re together is because they’re too frightened to be on their own again. I really value my independence. I gave up the yearnings for a boyfriend at about 30, when I bought my first house, which may or may not be a coincidence. Now I just can’t imagine sharing a house with anyone else. I could never move into someone else’s home, and if anyone moved into mine, I would drive them mad within a week.

My cynicism about relationships has risen sharply in the last year, since moving jobs. I have never before worked in such a male, working class, heterosexual environment, and I have experienced all of the horrors that I had fooled myself into believing didn’t exist any more, after years of working in a young, vibrant, multi-racial, multi-sexuality, mainly graduate, gender-balanced company. Apart from the racism, religious ignorance and political naïveté I’ve encountered, I am constantly horrified by the way I hear heterosexual men at work moan about (a) women in general and (b) their own female partners. One day, when I know I’m leaving, I will say what goes through my head the next time I hear them moaning about ‘the missus’. (Yes, they really do say that – there are partners whose names I don’t even know, because they’ve never been mentioned. It betrays such a basic lack of respect.) One of them has just got married, but hardly talked about it, because everyone in the office knows he didn’t want to get hitched. I’m not sure he even likes his wife. Another one moans so much that I feel like saying, ‘Why don’t you just fuck off and leave her? She’d probably be a lot happier without you.’

My cynicism, if you want the Freudian analysis, probably stems from having parents who stayed together for too long ‘for the sake of the children’. They finally split up when I was 18, when it should have been much earlier, for the sake of everyone involved.

I don’t believe that many human beings are genetically programmed to stay with the same partner for life. Once you accept that, you can be a lot happier, and I’ve always stayed with someone for as long as we’re both happy with it. When we’re not, it has ended. Maybe I’m just crap at working on relationships; that’s probably true, but I just don’t see the point in being together if one or both partners is unhappy. It seems that simple to me.
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