Good Ginger Day to you. You can settle a ‘discussion’ I had with my oldest and most hormonal friend ( yeah, I went there, she’s pregnant, so logic and reason are… well, they’re the same as they always were actually) on romance. Apparently – as charged– I haven’t a romantic bone in my body, and as far as I can see she has no bones in her body at all and she’s being held together by whimsy.
Apparently some girl proposed to her boyfriend at some sporting event or other during the week. I didn’t see it, I care nothing at all about it, but both she and Ivan Yates seem determined to get some sort of response out of me.
‘Yeah,’ sez I, ‘Feckin’ eegit. Could you imagine if he’d said no?”
‘Oh COME ON!’ she said. ‘That’s so romantic!’
‘It’s cringe worthy.’
‘Oh right, I’d forgotten you’re too cool for school.’
‘I’m not, I just don’t find grande gestures romantic, it’s showboating of the highest order.’
‘It’s not, it’s sweet.’
‘If you say so. I’m not going to argue with you, you outweigh me by twenty pounds.’
‘Shut up you. Are you telling me that if the paramour got on his knees in front of a crowd of thousands and proposed you’d say ‘cringe’.’
‘I’d say, ‘Will you get up you feckin’ eegit!’ Hypothetically of course as it would never happen. He wouldn’t embarrass us that way.’
And it’s true, he wouldn’t. He’d know I’d hate it, and he doesn’t DO grande gestures. What he does do is act in a way that is beyond thoughtful and considerate and that’s far more romantic to me than walking in the rain or dropping to one knee in public.
Maybe Little Miss Bucket of Hormones – who confessed to WEEPING at an advert moments later– is correct, maybe I am unromantic. I couldn’t give a monkey’s about jewels, neither of us ever recall our anniversary, or any other significant dates in our time line. I don’t find red roses once a year romantic (I like it that he buys flowers regularly, for no particular reason other than he thinks I might like them). Seriously, there was nothing funnier to me than the panicked herd of men gathered around the flower section in Superquinn on Valentine’s day.
Meh, feh, bleh. Romance is the runt of the emotional litter; treat me well all year and I’ll return the favour. And if that makes me unromantic I shall wear my badge of sourpuss with pride.
So what say you? Are you romantic? Or do you wanna join me on the cynical bench of the too cool for schoolers? ( I’ve got the good coffee and the dry eyes)
( Leap Year, where grown ass women can make eegits of themselves because of an extra day in the calendar year, hurrah or something)
