St.Valentine's Day

I talk about love quite a lot.That still feels like a somewhat odd experience as a man,especially as at 59 i still feel terminally shy.I don't want to be misunderstood when i talk about this sort of issue,for its serious and has what i can only call a gossamer quality,although i believe it is very real.

I can of course,hide behind or cover myself with my professional training and concerns,but it still feels odd for a man to talk about love.i feel it is still the case that too many of us men are socialised in this society to lose the connection with our own feelings quite young.This leads us,but does not excuse us from "dumping on" and using "our wome"as our excuse for our own inadequacies but which are never admitted to be inadequacies but simply downgraded in a hierarchy of  our behaviours.

Which is precisely why i will continue to talk about love as an attemt to change that way of being.

But at the risk of contradictoring myself,i am not a romantic.I'm afraid i reject that twee notion of love in which love is spoken of too easily and it seems to consist of sugary images of what love might be about.

For me,the height of this is Valentine's day,which it seems to me is  reduced to a commercial excuse in which some,predominantly young people exchange cards,which seem to become bigger and more sugary decorative but increasingly meaningless.The exchange is vaguely supposed to be anonymous.

I find it sickening and i don't think this response is reducible as a shy and probably ugly boy/youth. It just represents all the worst aspects of love for me which reduce it vaguries without meaning,significance or consequence.It certainly had negative consequences for me as someone usually outside the"charmed circle".Soul mates might be meaningful for others but it never did mean much for me,except abstract and empty.

Indeed i have,i think,a very alternative vision of both how it is and how it might be.

But that is another story