I don’t think I have ever truly loved anybody. Despite rattling on about what good relationship is, and how most are in general incapable of it, I am as incapable as anyone. I think this is the case because I’ve never really tried hard enough to get to know a person in the way I crave to be known myself. I’ve been able to manipulate, getting others to like me and basked in the success of that, consistently. But I consider it to have been manipulation at best. I think most of these people probably loved me more than I loved them actually.

I wonder if there’s any wisdom in the idea that until you learn to love properly you can’t have someone love you back. Or is that just another romantic meme? Probably. Relationships, like every other damned thing, just either happen or they don’t.

I don’t know whether I retain any romantic notions about love anymore. The bog-standard, ultra-realist view is compelling - the view that there is no fated thing, soulmate is a dumb notion, romantic tosh; that existence is gritty, messy, largely and purely about basic stuff. Anything more lofty in one’s thoughts is asking for disappointment. Yet I still can’t swallow all that down. I can take in most of the reductionist cynicism that goes around about human behaviour and work in accordance. But love relationships still have some hallowed territory for me that I’m not ready to give up yet.

That I liked Richard Curtis’s cute little film and got meaning from it suggests the stupid romantic is still alive in me yet with some way to go. It provided the simplest of all the answers to the what’s it all about question: love actually!