‘I wonder if another reason it’s hard to tell a love story is not so much that it’s hard to describe a first or subsequent love experience, but that it’s difficult to listen to that experience. Maybe people have some sort of unconscious bias against hearing other peoples’ stories of how they fell in love, and how this was wonderful and transcendent and the details of that wonder and transcendence, even though it seems pretty clear that this is something people should want to hear a lot about.’
‘Q.’
‘Almost as if we worry – or indeed we know – that it’s in our nature to want things that we don’t have or that we didn’t have, and so if I hear about your being in love and listen to anything but the most basic and superficial details (which, as abovementioned, are likely to be extremely tedious and banal, or deploy vapid blighted hyperbole, or both) then I risk hearing in your experience something that sounds deeper or more special or poignant than my own love experience, which becomes, as a result, somehow less important or special.’
‘Q.’
‘I realize this runs sort of contrary to what I said a minute ago, about how the experience of being in love is hugely subjective and abstract, which means it’s almost by definition impossible for your experience of being in love to somehow trump or exceed my experience. It’s like even though we can talk about our experiences of love and how and why we think we felt the way we did, and other people can understand what we are saying, at least in part by reference to their own experience, nevertheless any two experiences of love are going to remain fundamentally distinct. I just can’t walk that mile in your shoes, as it were, so I’m not really missing anything because I didn’t.
‘…’
‘Which that’s another thing that’s maybe relevant, the fact that a big part of what makes a love story interesting and coherent is the potentially long and convoluted and in no way clearly relevant lead-up to the actual start of the relationship. In other words, the reasons why two particular people happened to be open to meeting someone at the time they happened to cross paths, and then subsequently had the time and interest to devote to a relationship with each other.
‘Q.’
‘It’s definitely true that a lot what at least starts a relationship is coincidence or serendipity, but I think it’s often overlooked that any two people in love have huge and intricate back-stories that precede the relationship, which stories go a long way toward explaining why these two people might be getting along as well as they do, and behaving the way that they are, and so on. And so the point is that another reason it might be really difficult to talk about being in love is that the story requires a not insubstantial preface, at least the details of your own pre-relationship life, to give a listener or reader some idea of why you were primed for getting into a serious and in-love relationship, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.
‘Q.’
‘But then the problem with this, of course, is that such a preface involves a level of navel gazing so prolix and extreme that either people just don’t want to go there, in which case their love story is going to seem fated and unrealistic, or they do go there, in which case the story is now doubly or maybe even triply tedious.’
‘Q.’
‘Almost as if we worry – or indeed we know – that it’s in our nature to want things that we don’t have or that we didn’t have, and so if I hear about your being in love and listen to anything but the most basic and superficial details (which, as abovementioned, are likely to be extremely tedious and banal, or deploy vapid blighted hyperbole, or both) then I risk hearing in your experience something that sounds deeper or more special or poignant than my own love experience, which becomes, as a result, somehow less important or special.’
‘Q.’
‘I realize this runs sort of contrary to what I said a minute ago, about how the experience of being in love is hugely subjective and abstract, which means it’s almost by definition impossible for your experience of being in love to somehow trump or exceed my experience. It’s like even though we can talk about our experiences of love and how and why we think we felt the way we did, and other people can understand what we are saying, at least in part by reference to their own experience, nevertheless any two experiences of love are going to remain fundamentally distinct. I just can’t walk that mile in your shoes, as it were, so I’m not really missing anything because I didn’t.
‘…’
‘Which that’s another thing that’s maybe relevant, the fact that a big part of what makes a love story interesting and coherent is the potentially long and convoluted and in no way clearly relevant lead-up to the actual start of the relationship. In other words, the reasons why two particular people happened to be open to meeting someone at the time they happened to cross paths, and then subsequently had the time and interest to devote to a relationship with each other.
‘Q.’
‘It’s definitely true that a lot what at least starts a relationship is coincidence or serendipity, but I think it’s often overlooked that any two people in love have huge and intricate back-stories that precede the relationship, which stories go a long way toward explaining why these two people might be getting along as well as they do, and behaving the way that they are, and so on. And so the point is that another reason it might be really difficult to talk about being in love is that the story requires a not insubstantial preface, at least the details of your own pre-relationship life, to give a listener or reader some idea of why you were primed for getting into a serious and in-love relationship, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.
‘Q.’
‘But then the problem with this, of course, is that such a preface involves a level of navel gazing so prolix and extreme that either people just don’t want to go there, in which case their love story is going to seem fated and unrealistic, or they do go there, in which case the story is now doubly or maybe even triply tedious.’
‘…’
*****
It’s interesting to think how what Fench is experiencing might be the inverse of what his maximally beautiful girlfriend experiences when she thinks about whether a guy she meets is really interested in her or just wants to score with a smoking hot bird. At first she can just play a bit of the waiting game to see whether the guy will stick around through a few dates without scoring, or whether he quickly gets tired and moves on. The problem with this approach is that A--- is so stupendously gorgeous that most guys would give their left arm for a chance to score with her, and so are willing to wait an inordinately long time, and invest in dinners and drinks and Sunday afternoons in the park and even like walk her dogs for her while she’s off teaching yoga and so on. Plus also A--- sometimes doesn’t want to wait ten or five or even three dates to score with the guy.
The other problem with this strategy is that what if the guy’s interest is genuine but he gets tired of waiting, which if you think about it is probably what’s going to happen with a genuine guy who’s made to wait as part of a kind of trial period. The fact that he’s hanging around for reasons other than A---’s epic beauty means that once he realizes he’s being made to wait per A---’s S.O.P., and has thus been demeaned in a similar way to how A--- is concerned about being demeaned, well any guy with any kind of integrity is going to take his custom elsewhere.
Of course, A--- could just score with the guy and then see if he sticks around, assuming she wants to score with the guy in the first place, but all else equal it’s just easier to break things off before rather than after there's been scoring.
Then of course there's the problem of a guy like Fench, who even as he’s falling in love with you remains uncertain about whether he’s really falling in love with you or more like the effect of you, [FN12] or at least enough of the latter that he can’t really say he’s in love with you in the ordinary sense without any strange or unusual qualifying language. In which case he’s not really being himself when he’s around you, even when you first meet and both of you seem to just say all this ridiculous stuff to each other, [FN13] but neither of you call the other out on it for fear of marring the beauty of an unguarded exchange, which for reasons you don’t quite understand or even realize at the time both of you seem to be open to and interested in just this kind of exchange, [FN14] and to enjoying the exquisitely beautiful feeling of floating away from the world with this other person, even in the totally lame and utilitarian surroundings of the LATX studio’s multi-purpose room, which person finds your authentic and unmediated self just absolutely perfect for them, and vice versa.
And in fact the more Fench thinks about this initial meeting and all the subsequent time he has spent with his ludicrously beautiful girlfriend, all of which time feels consistently good and safe and uncomplicated, he starts to realize that it’s only after-the-fact and alone that he is able to parse these moments to the point of the moments’ being even potentially fraught, and that it takes increasing amounts of time to think his way through the relationship to the point where he can start to even think about worrying. It’s hard for Fench to say just why this is, and whether it is a sign of how perfectly and utterly beguiled he has become that the only way to express even to himself how he feels pretty much all the time now is it’s like the sun is shining just for Fench, and whether that’s something that should give him pause. All Fench can really say is at the moment he and his girlfriend are walking through the park in a light drizzle to get some groceries for tonight’s dinner and whatever is on Fench’s mind is certainly not how impressed the grocery clerk is going to be when Fench shows up arm-in-arm with this vision, whose very aura of beauty seems to keep the rain from touching either of them as they walk aimlessly along, or at least Fench doesn’t notice that it’s raining, or at least not in the way he usually notices ordinary standard-issue life stuff like that.
And in fact the more Fench thinks about this initial meeting and all the subsequent time he has spent with his ludicrously beautiful girlfriend, all of which time feels consistently good and safe and uncomplicated, he starts to realize that it’s only after-the-fact and alone that he is able to parse these moments to the point of the moments’ being even potentially fraught, and that it takes increasing amounts of time to think his way through the relationship to the point where he can start to even think about worrying. It’s hard for Fench to say just why this is, and whether it is a sign of how perfectly and utterly beguiled he has become that the only way to express even to himself how he feels pretty much all the time now is it’s like the sun is shining just for Fench, and whether that’s something that should give him pause. All Fench can really say is at the moment he and his girlfriend are walking through the park in a light drizzle to get some groceries for tonight’s dinner and whatever is on Fench’s mind is certainly not how impressed the grocery clerk is going to be when Fench shows up arm-in-arm with this vision, whose very aura of beauty seems to keep the rain from touching either of them as they walk aimlessly along, or at least Fench doesn’t notice that it’s raining, or at least not in the way he usually notices ordinary standard-issue life stuff like that.
*****
[FN12] Maybe the reason centre-of-the-sun hot girls like A--- more often than not end up with guys who are themselves extremely attractive (although not in any way comparable to the way a girl is attractive), is that these sorts of guys are already accustomed to being the centre of attention (both M and F), in which case there is no effect for the guy to find novel and appealing and so possibly confuse or let distract him from his actual feelings for the C-O-T-S hot girl. It’s sort of like how celebrities or athletes or even really serious and busy professionals (like lawyers or doctors) tend to date each other by dint of always finding themselves in each other’s company.
[FN13] Including especially when this average looking guy at your friend’s birthday party introduces himself as ‘Fenchurch Baume, but everybody calls me Fench’ and smiles at you in a totally uncalculating way – if anything he looks kind of tired – and since it was your friend’s party and nobody else would really talk to you (which always happens when you try to go to ‘regular’ events with ‘regular’ people who aren’t used to Hall of Fame good looks and so totally clam-up or get hyper-territorial and bitchy in your presence, M/F respectively, which always makes you feel complexly sad and lonely because to be honest you’re pretty intimidated yourself by uber-attractive people and anyway have a terrible time figuring out what it even means for someone to like you for you and whether it’s just too awful or conceited to impute to another person some non-genuine or dishonorable motive) that you maybe come off a little too eager to hear the story behind the name and feel kind of silly for asking so earnestly but then you’re glad you asked because the story turns out to be replete with humour and pathos. To wit: Fench’s parents’ were Swiss immigrants who upon arrival to a small town in Ohio (don’t ask, he said) in the late 1970s bought a small storefront and together built a pharmacy business from scratch, his mother even making her own perfumes in the old fashioned way for sale to the more fashionable ladies in this small Ohio town. These perfumes were eventually taken outside the town and the state and even the country by several of these more fashionable ladies, which when the out-of-town, -state and -country fashionable ladies got a whiff of these perfumes the demand was immediate and seemingly insatiable and a lucrative mail-order cosmetics business was born. This business accumulated for the young couple a substantial fortune, largely administered by Fench’s mother, whilst his father toiled away in the successful but comparatively small potatoes pharmacy business and nursed a slow-burning jealously at his wife’s success and the shadow being cast upon him thereby. This shadow chilled the husband to his very bones, which is why he had such frequent recourse to cheap grain alcohol and prescription narcotics, the latter being obviously his wheelhouse but both of which simultaneously fueled his feelings of self-pity and emasculation and humiliation, which as a pharmacist he really should have seen coming. These feelings eventually became so great that the husband one night in the warm Ohio spring actually set fire to the pharmacy in a drunken and self-medicated rage and then set fire to his own house (his wife being away at the time on one of her frequent business trips), which dual conflagrations caused such widespread damage to other businesses and homes and property in the town, including the deaths of three people living in apartments above the storefronts adjacent to the pharmacy, that the collective legal defense costs and settlement payments in two dozen lawsuits actually bankrupted the husband and wife. Subsequently the husband agreed to seek treatment in a facility upstate (which was required by the plea agreement that kept the husband out of prison on a triple count of criminally negligent homicide), and after the husband emerged from treatment in much improved physical and psychological health the husband and wife together built a new mail-order cosmetics business. It was about this time that Fench was conceived and subsequently born. He was given the name Fenchurch after the name of the street on which the new mail-order cosmetics business was located. In fact, the name was mostly the husband’s way of honoring his wife’s commitment and love for him (the husband) to give him the second chance he knew he didn’t really deserve, and to serve as a symbol of the beautiful and happy new life he and his wife were looking forward to building, together, of which Fench was considered to be a pretty darn good start, as his father liked to put it.
[FN14] It had been almost two years since Fench’s last serious relationship, which had ended, tragically, when his then-girlfriend had fallen overboard a cruise ship after leaning out over the railing of her and Fench’s Premium Standard Class room’s balcony to get a picture of what looked like (and even more tragically) turned out to be a shark swimming off the ship’s starboard side. (There ended up being two sharks, Fench subsequently explained to the ship’s crew, which crew was initially quite skeptical of this claim, which skepticism you will understand if you know anything about sharks and their status as apex predators ensconced at the top of their food chain; except of course Fench was then able to provide photographic evidence because his then-girlfriend’s camera’s strap had actually gotten caught on the railing as she fell overboard and Fench thought he should at least save something.) In the wake of the relationship’s gruesome and farcical end Fench had been taking it easy, relationship-wise, basically waiting for something to fall into his lap, which is how things seem to go for average looking guys that are more than a little self-conscious.
Speaking of which, the reason Fench’s brain didn’t just implode when he realized who he’d bumped into at the drinks table was that that afternoon’s broadcast had featured back-to-back-to-back interviews, with especially ornery callers to all three interviews, the screening of which Fench found exhausting and stressful because if you think the callers who get through are ornery just imagine how offensive and belligerent must have been those whom Fench had to screen.
A---’s back-story is that she had moved from a certain East Coast city to the decidedly more low key East Coast city in the suburbs of which Fench lives as a way to literally move-on after the end of her previous relationship, which had its origins in what for A--- was a tortuous year on that certain East Coast city’s Beautiful People Circuit, which experience left her so beaten-down and bereft that she hadn’t been really sure she even liked her then-boyfriend but was instead just looking for a ticket off the Circuit. To deal with her conflicted feelings A--- started doing yoga pretty heavily, which eventually lead her to a sufficiently calm and centred space inside herself where she could decide that she needed a change including of personnel. When she broke things off with the guy she felt just terrible, especially after she told him that she really only went out with him as a way to get off the Circuit, which her yoga friends all told her she had to do, i.e. hurt the guy with this fairly brutal disclosure, because thinking you were saving his feelings was really just a way to let yourself off honesty’s sometimes sharp hook. As a way of coping with the subsequent discomfort and self-loathing A--- threw herself into starting a freelance yoga business here in Fench’s town, also her new home, with unusual enthusiasm and alacrity and hadn’t really thought seriously about or even missed dating for almost a year. At which point her business started to go well enough that she allowed herself a few dates, which were OK but nothing special. The guys she initially dated were almost universally awkward and seemingly emotionally ablated, which was starting to get her down again (because while these guys were OK-looking they were definitely not even close to being in A---’s league and to a man were visibly discomfited by all the gratuitous attention A--- received even while on a date, which discomfiture was the main reason she had gone on the BPC in the certain East Coast city in the first place) and she was feeling a bit of this sadness at her friend’s birthday when she bumped into Fench.
