Synchro

So many of the great love stories are about the pursuit rather than the capture. They don’t often explain what happened after the Happily-Ever-After. I think this must mean that for many people the journey is more exciting than the destination. Fairy tales always end not start with the first kiss, have you noticed? Perhaps this is why they say that anticipation is nine-tenths of the pleasure.

I always thought that was ridiculous.

It’s not that I don’t like the hunt. There is a thrill in the meeting of an eye, the first words, the feeling of a lock tumbling into its combination as common ground, common views, common passions are discovered and shared. There’s the excitement of the first kiss, the first touch, the first orgasm even.

I’ve always felt that part is the pre-amble, the introduction. It’s like an overture to an opera, with tantalising tastes of all the moments to come, the themes that will weave together to create the main story. The complicated route to that first kiss should not be rushed, no. It should be savoured, lingered over, sostenuto.

For me that kiss is not an end in itself. That moment when you realise the answer is Yes, for me that’s opening the gate to the garden of wonders.

The worry is that for all the things you might have in common with someone, if you don’t share their view on the ratios of anticipation and pleasure, it isn’t going to come right. Thinking mathematically, I’m probably of the view that it’s about 1:9 and not the other way around. This might pose problems for me.

For instance, I’ve known a few people who have spent years holding their breath. A man who waited years and years until after marriage to have sex with his wife, but left her later for a mistress with whom he stayed with for a short while before becoming bored and moving on again. A man who relentlessly pursued someone else’s wife every hour of the day and night, using every charm in his not inconsiderable arsenal to get her to leave and move in with him; at which point he found her too easily won and withheld all aforementioned charms forthwith. A man who assiduously wined and dined for several years a woman he thought might one day sleep with him, whilst fantasising daily about a particular scenario. He met a different woman who willingly, thrillingly brought his fantasies to life in the flesh but soon decided that perhaps variety was the spice of life after all. The patience to engage in a lengthy preamble is it seems no reliable pre-indicator of an ability to see things through on a similar timescale.

Open your kimono too early, welcome them into your arms and that very instant is for those people the pinnacle, the zenith, the very most exciting moment. Sometimes after that, all you can do is drop suddenly from cloud nine as you realise that you’re completely of our synch. Wave and smile perhaps, as you pass them going downhill the other way.

I realise now, it would be useful to identify right at the start into which camp your object of desire falls. Will they approach you like the maze at Hampton Court – a puzzle to be solved, get to the middle then everyone can go home? Or do they want to take your hand and go exploring together?

A significant amount of heartache could perhaps in this way be avoided.