Whats all that love about?

Even though we have the coldest and harshest winter since decades, I have the feeling this week some of us already caught some spring fever. There were sparks all over the place. A very flirtatious thunderstorm that blew through the streets of my beloved home town.
Maybe it was an attempt to heaten up the cold outside or just a part of the traditional "I dont want to be alone during the cold winter time and like to find me someone to cuddle with" period, which I always seem to forget or ignore.

I am not really known to be the "cuddle type". Intimacy is one think, but cuddling another. I need my freedom - also physically. The so-called "Ivo space". The mac fans may call it iSPACE.
However this week it seemed that I was the only member of iSPACE. Everyone else was flirting, cuddling, kissing and who knows what else...

For example last Friday. I was at a bar with friends and had the pleasure to experience first hand the different aspects of relationships. Two couples and plenty of singles were part of our little group. One couple is enjoying the bless of commitment since only a couple months, the other since years. As the first one was holding hands, touching and kissing each other pretty much every second, the second one had a least three tables seperating them from each other.

The lovebirds were sitting right across from me and as much as I like them, I could not stand watching the scenario any longer and started to talk to the girl to my left. She was the female part of the other couple that night. What striked me most was the fact how open she spoke about her relationship and troubled sex life. After being in a relationship for such a long time, she had the feeling that it got boring and repetitive. I did not know what to say, since I have never been in that sort of situation. My longest relationship was about 8 months long.

Somehow I felt the urge to warn the two lovebirds and tell them instead of "wasting" all their sexual energy tonight, rather spread it over the upcoming years...you never know when the last spark dissapears. But another drink later I had more fun watching the singles flirting with each other. The entire room was more like a battlefield. Singles and couples fighting for attention, territory, love and hope.

As H.L. Mencken already once said "Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence" I started to wonder: Is it all worth fighting for? What is better: being in a relationship and constantly have to work on it and fight for its survival or going out all the time and boxing its way through the dating and small talk bullshit before you can have your go and get laid or maybe find true love? Is being single and therefore by yourself the only alternative to all this fighting? Not really, since by being single you are fighting with yourself and your feelings.Is there a solution to this issue? I do not know, and I guess there can not be the same solution for each and everyone but rather a complex amount of smaller solutions and comibations were you can pick and chose from. More like finding the perfect excuse for the right solution. It is not that we do not know what would be best for us and therefore the correct solution, but that we do not want to accept the problem.

My problem that night was that I was too drunk to have the nerve to listen to any further relationship problems by others and far to drunk to pick up some girl and show her my opinion of a happily-ever-after...which lasts till breakfast.

Joan Baez found the right words in order to describe the situation perfectly: "The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one".

So off I went to grab a cab and get lost in the city of singles just to get back home and wake up alone. It felt great.