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What I know about love

In honour of the impending Day O’Romance tomorrow, I have decided to tell you about the most romantic couple I know: my parents, Fiona and Bill:

2007 was their thirtieth anniversary. They are maybe an unlikely pair: they met in 1976 while living in bedsits in the same sandstone brick building in Glasgow’s West End. Dad was doing a post-doc in physics at the university; Mum was an educational psychologist, pootling around the city’s worst council estates in her orange Mini. Dad was Jewish, from Chicago’s North Shore; Mum had grown up a Scottish Presbyterian in a small town called Dumfries, on the West coast of Scotland. They were thirty and thirty-two when they got married, so a bit on the old side for people of their generation getting married for the first time. It was all, I do believe, mildly astonishing for the era.

And thirty years later they are still very much together. I am sure that they have had some terrible times during their marriage. Indeed I know that I have been responsible for some of those times. But my parents have been models of patience and perserverance and cooperation. And look at them! They’re still so much in love.

There’s been a lot of debate on the blogs this week about this Atlantic Monthly article by Lori Gottlieb, in which she argues that women shouldn’t be picky, that we should settle for mediocre men rather than be alone:

“My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year.”

Having grown up with the example of my parents, I suspect that finding a life partner is a combination of sheer luck and hard work. Maybe I will find one; maybe I’m living in the wrong apartment building and I won’t. But thanks to the example set by lovely Bill and Fiona, settling is, to me, inconceivable. As is disillusionment. Some people might think I’m unrealistic about love: I prefer to regard my views as well-grounded in optimism.