Posts Tagged ‘love’

The importance of Valentine’s Day

Saturday, February 14th, 2015 | Thoughts

I think Valentine’s Day is important.

At this point, you may well be thinking “I don’t need some stupid excuse to show my partner I love them; I show them all the time. I don’t need posts like this to make me feel bad because I ignored a Hallmark-created fake holiday”. If so, it’s important to remember that I haven’t said that I haven’t said that – that’s just your guilty conscience making excuses for itself.

It it not a holiday invented by Hallmark. Hallmark is 105 years old, and Valentine’s Day is 2,000. There is a whole history of it on Wikipedia. Even the Lutheran’s feast on Valentine’s Day. The Lutherans! These are the only people who hate fun more than the Presbyterians.

But even if it was made up by Hallmark, that’s not important. Obviously somebody made it up anyway.

In Religion For Atheists, Alain de Botton talks about the importance of ritual and ceremony. He talks about religious feasts. It is important to have one night of debauchery every now and then, to keep people in line the rest of the time. It keeps things on a regular, dependable cycle that stops things from getting forgotten.

Take presents for example. I could buy Elina a present any time of year. Sometimes I do. However, mostly I buy her big presents on her birthday, and at Christmas. I could buy her presents randomly at all times. But that would probably be annoying for both of us. The nature of random is that she might get three presents in one week, and then none for years, depending on frequency. That would be rubbish. I would then have to have a system of deciding how to handle the random frequency – humans are not very good random. Do I write a computer programme to do it? How do I balance a finite budget with the frequency and value of items?

Even if you do just randomly buy your partner presents, do you go to the same detail you would during the holiday season, or at a birthday? Do you wrap it? And how about everyone else, do you randomly buy presents for all your family to? I don’t. I buy as specifically ritualised times – birthdays, Christmas, when I am on holiday, etc. Having a ritualised system means that I regularly buy presents for my family without having to spend my entire life designing a complex system to track prepared spontaneity (which as we all know is the best kind of spontaneity).

Returning to Valentine’s Day. I am sure that you, like me, regularly choose to show your love to your partner in a variety of surprising and novel ways. Super, and I hope that continues for a long time.

However, we know that a) it becomes more difficult the longer a relationship goes on. If you are a friend of mine, that means that if you are married (you probably aren’t) you have probably been married less than 5 years. That means you are in the easiest part of your marriage, because that is when the romance is strongest. About the five year mark is when divorces peak.

divorce-rate

I don’t know why this is, but there are a couple of reasons that seem to spring to mind. Firstly, in Rip It Up! Richard Wiseman talks about passion in relationships which is strongest at the start of a relationship and then goes into terminal decline for the rest of the time. If you haven’t built a strong and lasting relationship by the time it wears off, you’re fucked.

Secondly, it could be that after five years there is a good chance you have had children, which is a very stressful experience and can often break couples apart.

My point is that if you are in the early days of a relationship (and by early days I mean the first five years) that passion that drives you to show your partner you love them might not be there at a later date. There is no point denying this to ourselves, despite how bleak it may seem, that is what the studies show. Or it may well be that you are so busy raising children that you simply don’t have time to think about that stuff, because you are too busy trying to work out how exactly Chris Junior could even physically get his head through a gate like that, let alone how you are going to get him out. And how do his hands get that sticky? He hasn’t had any jam!

Hopefully, of course, you manage to keep the passion alive. However, Valentine’s Day provides a safety net. It provides a ritual that makes sure that you don’t forget to have a least one day of affection each year.

I, like you no doubt, hope to have many more a year. I hope to show my affection every day. However, not everyone does. And in a historical context, which is of course where Valentine’s Day evolved, romantic love taking the lead is a somewhat modern concept.

I don’t go out on Valentine’s Day because all the restaurants are full. Much better to take Elina out to restaurants on weekdays when it is easy to get a table. Tonight, we’ll be staying at home, I’ll be cooking, and we’ll be spending time together. Because it’s Valentine’s Day. Surely that can only be a positive thing?

Engagement

Thursday, September 25th, 2014 | News

elina-chris

I’m pleased to announce that Elina and I are now engaged. We have not made any plans yet. I am very pleased obviously, but to be honest, I don’t really see it as a big deal. I already knew I loved Elina, and I knew that she loved me. The engagement is really just a way to lock that in in case I get some kind of horrible disease or something.

I proposed after a moonlit serenade of The Church’s “Under The Milky Way Tonight”. I have a video of it, though I am not planning to put it online.

As you probably know, it’s tradition that when a Finnish woman gets married, her friends shower her with thousands of euros of gifts per person. I know that none of you will want to be culturally insensitive…

Happy Valentine’s Day

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 | Family & Parenting

Rakastan sinua, Elina.

Valentine’s Day

Saturday, February 11th, 2012 | Thoughts

One of my friends recently retweeted a message saying “Valentine’s Day is for people who lack the imagination to be romantic during the rest of the year.” That put me onto an interesting thought process about the origins of the holiday.

Because, if you think about it, Valentine’s Day is almost certainly a holiday created by men, for men.

I mean, imagine if we had to be romantic all year round! There is simply no time for that, we have far too much watching sport and eating pizza to do. Designating one romantic day per year, effectively manages the expectations of the fairer sex so that we don’t have to worry about it for the other 364 days. Genius.

Elina is back

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 | Life

Hurray :D.

The trouble with women

Monday, October 10th, 2011 | Life

On December 24th, 1995, I was a 9-year-old child. Much younger than the soon to be middle-aged man that now sits writing this. I had already figured out that there was an international conspiracy among adults to perpetrate the hoax that a magical being called Santa existed, but being the materialist child I’m sure most of us once were, it didn’t make it any less magical – who cares who delivers the presents as long as you get them, right?

I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Even if I could have, it wouldn’t have been that helpful as even if I had achieved multiple winks, that would still not have been enough time to reach REM sleep, because a wink is such a short period of time.

So, in my excitement, I decided to take out the cover inserts from every single cassette I owned (remember cassettes?) and inside them I wrote “Chris Worfolk. Happy Christmas 1995!” so that I could remember that moment, and how excited I felt, forever.

To this day, I’ve never recaptured such a strong feeling of excitement. Until now. The reason is the impending return of this young woman…

After parting at the end of August, she will be returning to see me in a mere ten days, and I can only describe the feeling as synonymous with how I felt as a child, counting down to Christmas.

The problem is that I have a lot of other things to think about, and laying awake a night feeling excited isn’t helping my already significant sleep problems.

God help you, FinnAir, if that flight doesn’t arrive on time. You simply can’t imagine how disgruntled a letter you would receive should it be significantly delayed…

Row One’s anniversary

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 | Friends

Last Wednesday, myself and Jason, collectively known at Buzz as Row One, celebrated our second anniversary. Despite his recent engagement to Sarah, our bond remains as strong as ever as as such we celebrated by going for a romantic meal at West End House. Accompanied by JB, Ian and Average Matt.

The L Word

Sunday, January 30th, 2011 | Tech, Thoughts

I’m what you might call a fan of swearing. I don’t swear more than anyone else on average, but I support the concept of swearing – why shouldn’t we be able to use these words in public, they are just words after all. If I use the word fuck in conversation, it isn’t offensive, it’s just language. It only becomes offensive if I am it at some one – calling someone a “fucking idiot” for example, which is hurtful, but no more hurtful then calling someone a “stupid idiot” – the offence is in the personal insult and the malice rather than the word itself. We should be able to swear in public without fear of offending silly people, and to be honest, I imagine we will be able to in 20-30 years time when the current older generation are gone.

Given this view on words then, it is strange that I, as many people do, still choose to place so much value on the L word. You know, love.

But then, it really is a big deal. It’s a bomb shell when you drop it. Perhaps for good reason, to say you are falling madly in love is a big claim to make. Certainly, not a claim to be made likely. I’ve always thought less of those who nievely through out such a claim early in a relationship – you really need to put the time in before you can see you’re in love.

But time makes fools of us all, and recently I’ve found myself in this exact situation.

I confess. I did it. I used the L word.

As many of you know, I’ve recently begun what I consider to be a new chapter in my life. It’s amazing; it’s everything I hoped for. It’s magical and it feels like such a rush, I never want this feeling to go away.

The reason I said it, it plain and simple. I genuinely am in love. I kind of always dreamed I would feel this way but to actually experience it, first hand is an amazing feeling. I feel like I have been waiting so long for this, indeed I’m sure I have been waiting years for this moment and it does not disappoint.

Everything about this is perfect. The speed and elegance, the front facing camera, the Retina display. I love you, iPhone 4.