I am still here, I just have very little to report.
It was my 36th Birthday yesterday and I was having a really good, enjoyable day with all the family till about half five when I suddenly felt drained and weak and had a tickly throat. I've had a chest infection this last week - nothing serious but enough to warrant a course of antibiotics - and I've now got a wee cold on top of it. It meant I had to pass up going out for my birthday meal with a bundle of friends. We've been doing that on my birthday since we left school and it's rare for me to miss one but if I don't feel great there's no point pushing it and then spending Christmas day miserable. I knew this morning that I had made the right decision as I feel a bit worse today. I do hope it passes quickly. I have plans for the weekend that I definitely don't want de-railed.
So in lieu of there being anything to talk about from my life I'm gonna vaguely talk about the more neglected part of my blog title, the love aspect, specifically something that I've noted over the past couple of years. Anyone over a certain age will have gone through a period in your mid 20's to early 30's where there are just weddings everywhere and monotonously regular. Well now, 7 or 8 years later some of these marriages appear to be breaking down. It got to me to wondering if there is such a thing as the 7 year itch. Are some relationships just designed to wear out? Now let me qualify that by saying nearly all my married friends are still happily so but in the last 2 years I can count 8 break ups amongst the married couples I know, and 2 on top of that who called off their wedding very close to the actual day. I hold special admiration for them because it can be the easiest thing to just carry on regardless with the wedding plans and then realise it was the wrong decision at their leisure. It takes real guts to stop a wedding train in motion. From what I see of those two it was the best decision they each ever made as they seem to be thriving having made it.
The reason I'm mentioning any of this at all is that each one of them has shocked me quite badly. They were all relationships that I thought of as absolutely concrete, which just goes to show how little any outsider knows about the inner workings of anyone else's relationships.
One of them recently told me that they now don't believe that they can prosper in long term relationships. To them I repeated my mantra that you should always 'sing like nobody's listening, dance like nobody's watching and love like you've never had your heart broken' which is a terribly easy thing to say but I truly believe that it might actually be self fulfilling if you have a defeatist attitude. Your relationships wont work because you won't let them.
There are no answers to any of this but it's been fermenting in my brain for weeks so I thought I'd put it down, hopefully without betraying anyone's confidence.
Right, I'm signing off until the New Year so I hope everyone of you have a lovely time over the Christmas festivities. I know I will.
P
