Love Me Do

www.paulcoia.com

So, that’s another St Valentine’s Day over and I really hope you had a good one. I think I did all the right stuff, ordering flowers and booking an expensive dinner at a posh restaurant. I even managed to write a card and, as a sign of my growing maturity, for once it wasn’t written to myself.

I confess that I used to send Valentine’s cards to my own address a lot when I was younger so that I’d look popular at school and, to disguise my handwriting and keep up the pretence, I wrote them with my left hand. To this day I’m convinced my schoolmates believe I was dating a dyslexic with Parkinson’s.

I hope your loved one remembered to give you a card/flowers/hug/dinner this year or that you were as lucky as I was and received a huge chocolate heart. Call me a romantic, but the heart seemed very appropriate because the biggest, and longest living, love interest in my life has always been chocolate. Nothing says I Love You quite like a box of cocoa calories.

If you did have the perfect romantic day then consider yourself lucky because I’m told Valentine’s is not only a great day for love but it’s also one of the biggest days for couples looking afresh at each other and deciding enough is enough. In short, the expectation of waking up next to Brad Pitt, and the reality of seeing his brother Cess instead, makes the day that’s dedicated to love a popular one for break ups too.

Perhaps you are like me. I was always useless at having that final “we’re through” conversation and ended up too often carrying on relationships way beyond their pity and sympathy date, either hiding from the telephone or spending too much time working out where to place the “it’s not you, it’s me” line in my speech. I used to prepare these break ups for days, having once learned an important lesson after I decided that I should hold nothing back and just go with the flow. I got punched.

So I’m with Neil Sedaka - breaking up is hard to do, especially on Valentine’s Day, and I was interested in the newspaper letters pages this week where readers agreed that Valentine’s days are tough for singletons or those who want to be single again. Someone asked if it’s good manners to bin your partner in Valentine’s week or should you wait? The letters of reply suggested the latter but then moved on to the more interesting topic of what happens if you are the one being chucked. In other words, how do you get revenge?

Well, one girl had a novel approach. She used the key to her exes flat while he was at work and removed all his clothes, taking them to several dry cleaners around London and, as she travelled a lot with work, a few cities abroad too. She then posted him the receipts and left him to work out how to get his suits back. Another wrote a letter to her former boyfriend’s mother saying she would miss their talks but hoped she’d understand how expensive it had become replacing the lacy pants and bras from her underwear drawer that her perfect son had been stealing to wear to work.

Yet another handed her key back to her boyfriend only after copying it, and then waited a couple of months for him to go on holiday and sneaked in and soaked his carpets with water. Now, on its own, that’s not clever and it might seem to be simple vandalism, but what raised it above mere pettiness was that she then sprinkled watercress seed all over the top. I would have almost given up chocolate to see his face when he returned from holiday.

I guess anyone can cut the bottom off their former lover’s trousers, hack the sleeves off their blouses or write fake letters to their place of work stamped Clap Clinic Results, but to get a great feeling of revenge it seems to me there must be a bit of thought and intelligence in there.

A friend of mine was very clever at getting his own back on a girl who, if I’m honest, none of us liked. She was a snob and a lawyer but wanted everyone to treat her as a minor royal, expecting everyone to run around after her. She chucked my pal by text, leaving him distraught, but when he calmed down he remembered that he still had a key to her posh flat. He let himself in and sewed a handful of frozen prawns in to the lining of all her curtains where they would never be discovered. I can only guess at the smell after a week or two.

I have only ever taken revenge in affairs of the heart once and, after the initial hilarity, I felt disappointed in myself. I found out that my girlfriend was seeing someone else and, as the rage subsided, I got my own back by hiding her coat and bag. Teacher found me out and made me stand outside kindergarten for the whole of break.

I think that to save hurt in this whole romance thing then, perhaps we would all be better off if our attitude was the same as the young girl who sat near me on Friday. I was on the train going home when a girl of about five or six got on with her mum and they were obviously finishing a conversation about Valentine’s Day. The mum was saying something like “so then you send a card but don’t put your name in it, and perhaps send some chocolates or flowers.”

The girl looked at her as if she was mad, going very quiet while mulling it over, and then said sadly “What, no cake? No balloons? No jelly?”. With a shrug of her shoulders she said, “Is that it?”.