I WENT to a lovely dinner party last week at my next-door neighbour’s. Whether it was the warmth, the night or the Oyster Bay I just came right out with it.
“I think I’m in love,” I told the man next to me. This seemed to have a delightful effect on him and he congratulated me so warmly that I felt I had just passed an exam. Why we should be amazed when our friends are happy for us, I don’t know, but, emboldened by his response, I pressed on and announced my in-love state to the hostess, now returning to the table with a mound of creamed broad beans. She looked as pleased as if she had won a raffle. Telling became quite a buzz. Last week on the cycle bridge over the river I met my friend Kate with Vita her dalmatian. “I’m in love,” I informed her and she looked hugely chuffed and told me to “stay with it”.
The odd thing is that I hadn’t, and so far haven’t, actually told the beloved. And as if being in love were not the most marvellous fun in itself, not telling is utterly wonderful. It combines a kind of breathless excitement with anticipation to form a hyped-up state of pleasure-wired sensitivity. Anything might happen. It might just spill out. It’s like being on a constant edge of caffeine overload with none of the side-effects. The only problem is that I don’t know how much longer I can go on with it: it takes a huge effort of will. But while I have the restraint and strength, I just have to keep it going.
What’s the attraction in not just blurting out the whole thing? For a start, it’s new. I haven’t been in love very often, but the feeling has always been so amazingly overwhelming that I could never wait to announce it directly to the lucky man (or girl, in the case of Madeleine Birtwhistle in the fourth form) who had so bewitched me. But once it’s out there you have passed some fevered pitch of misty anticipation and stepped into the sunny uplands of frank and full disclosure (in Madeleine’s case these were a bit over-illuminated). Things are then never the same.
Undeclared love is altogether more contained and explosive. The confession is eternally on the brink of your lips, or wherever these fabulous feelings live, only to be swallowed for another day, another opportunity. And once you have stifled the impulse to confess, the practice of containment turns into a real challenge and you get rather adept at it. With this constant practice of decorous restraint, you begin to celebrate the containment. Le moment juste turns into l’esprit de l’escalier and I find myself wishing I had used this perfect meal or that wonderful view to turn and just say it. But there always seems to be a better time.
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Or, more truthfully, I just daren’t. Telling means facing up to some scary realities. There is some good, safe fun to be had in the sealed world of discreet silence. In stories and films and plays, the moment someone says “I love you” things tumble into place and “The End” scrolls up. “What more needs to be explained?” thinks our collective culture once we break the tension of the unresolved. It urges you to go from the hurly- burly of the unstated chaise longue to the deep peace of queen-size certainty. Society likes, even demands, resolution, completion, satisfaction.
Yet outside fairy stories, grown-ups know it isn’t quite like that. The happily-ever-afters are more complex. Who has wondered what happened to Elizabeth and Darcy once they were wed? Or Bridget Jones and the Colin Firth person? Alongside love comes loyalty — a tougher beast. And tolerance, selflessness, forbearance — all challenging, all the realistic progeny of more whimsical love.
Anyway, you don’t have to tell to be completely in love. It can be a highly pleasurable personal and private experience, I find. I have recently returned from a five-day half-term jaunt in Rome with my 17-year-old. At one level I was engaging her earnestly in the personal life of Vespasian and pointing out the glories of Rococo pilasters, and all the time I was mentally drawing parallels between any number of archangels’ legs and those of the loved one. When the angelic paradigm fell away I switched to seeing him as Marcus Aurelius and once, in the Castelo San Angelo after a glass of champagne, the god Mars.
Being abroad definitely fosters a love declaration. The skiing trip was a big temptation. “I must be quite mad,” I thought to myself, booking myself into an alien — no, a dangerous, situation with a strange man. And I can’t ski. But it turns out that there is nothing quite so heart-warming, so melting, as real, patient, consistent kindness. As I plunged headlong into snowdrifts, he clambered laboriously up the slope to help me untangle my limbs. A 15-minute run down the mountain generally took two hours. On one occasion I finished my manoeuvre spreadeagled upside down on the slope, gazing at the inverted pine trees while posses of elegant Swiss skiers slalomed neatly round me. When he finally struggled back to get me, crying “You are doing so well!” with every appearance of sincerity, I practically melted.
He was the only person, I observed, in the whole resort carrying two pairs of skis up the mountain. On one dark day I was expelled from the glamorous blond Siegmar’s classes and relegated to a class for the terminally hopeless. I felt quite demoralised when I collapsed in the locker room. He, by contrast, was returning from a bracing afternoon and it all became too much. Despite having forsworn tears for life, I crumpled into a sobbing heap against his anorak. “I’m a f-f-failure,” I wailed. “And I tried so h-h-hard.” And of course, once you start you can’t stop.
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I think that I could have said it then, simply out of gratitude for the fact that he didn’t laugh at me. But I didn’t. He fixed a private lesson and at least I could stay upright by the time we came home.
I do not reproach myself for my reticence to tell all. You do have to clear the ground for a new relationship. When you are no longer an independent operator but live among friends and family and your life is staked out in many ways already, bringing someone else into it can be tough. It’s nothing like the same as the seamless presentation of a new love in your twenties, when society’s wheels are oiled for the smooth transition from friendship to fiancé. Young people are all about founding a family, putting down roots, participating in evolutionary dynamics. Later in life, a new liaison can be a bumpy ride. Single friends so loyal in solitary days suddenly find you irritatingly unavailable. Children who have seen you through the agonies of separation and divorce might mutiny at the prospect of Mother launched again on the road to potential heartbreak. No wonder any declarations are hesitant. If all adults have baggage, older adults have waiting rooms packed with the stuff. And the older you are, the more people you have to account to for what you are doing.
Of course, it is easy to err on the side of indifference when reporting to others, giving them the opportunity to voice their unwelcome views. Yet saying nothing to those closest to you is not an option. It is misleading and confusing for them. You need to run up a few flags about how you feel. Neutrality gives the wrong signals, and I think it is my duty to convey that this is something volcanic, exciting and passionate. Ultimately, not telling is what they now call risk-averse: afraid of the consequences or the knockback or the future, or all three. But things must change. “No coward soul is mine,” as Emily Brontë wrote, undoubtedly referring to the same problem. So I am definitely going to remedy it. One of these days. Soon.