Given it’s perfectly possible that you have not yet seen the movie One Day, or read the bestseller on which it’s based, let me enlighten you.
The story follows two lead characters - dowdy Emma, who abandons acting and working in a cheap restaurant to become a teacher, and Dexter, a handsome, privileged man who finds fame on television.
These two spend the night together - just once - after graduation, and we revisit them once a year for the following 20 years. They are best friends. They make each other laugh. They flirt, and reach out for each other when life kicks them in the teeth and they are lonely.
You and I are supposed to think that they are meant for each other, but pride, fear, circumstance, other people and geography get in the way.
I don’t want to spoil the denouement if you have yet to read the book or see the film, but let’s just say it doesn’t end well. I saw the movie and have the puffy eyes and swollen throat to prove it.
But the reason I was so upset is not just because of the tear-jerker of a plot. It’s because the idea that there is The One out there somewhere is surely patent nonsense.
The whole premise of the book by David Nicholls - which is, nonetheless, funny, touching and insightful - is that there is, for all of us, a Great Love. It’s just a case of finding him or her.
This is what we, as women, have been force-fed since early girlhood.
Women are peddled romance from the cradle and I’ve started to wonder why. Maybe it’s nothing more complicated than the fact that life is hard and we wouldn’t get through it without this gloopy Vaseline over the lens, this delusion.
But what’s wrong with believing in true love, I hear you ask. Isn’t it heartening to think there is a Dexter out there for all of us?
Unfortunately, two things happen to women as we sail through our 20s, thinking that the landmark of 30 will simply never arrive, that we have all the time in the world.
The first thing is that the perfect man does not exist. Put simply, we are disappointed in our 20s, time and again, because post-feminist women - raised as they were to expect the best, and to be able to get their talons into anything they want - set the bar too high.
As twentysomethings became more independent, they refused to settle, to compromise. It’s rare these days that anyone marries their childhood sweetheart, or the person they met at university.
Second, work gets in the way. To get married young is seen as a bit common; to have children in your early 20s is positively feral.
Even if we have found the love of our lives early on, it feels too soon; we want him to bugger off for a decade or so while we make our mark, stand on our own two feet, and experience life.
When women suddenly wake up in their late 30s, as I did, and discover they are still on their own, their ovaries rapidly desiccating alongside their empty wombs, panic sets in. You can see it in our eyes: they become beady, focused.
We might have the house, the car, and the expense account - but what we don’t have is a man.
And this is exactly when it happens. That awful word: compromise. Aware that time is passing us by at a fearsome rate, we pretend we have found the love of our life. But the truth is that we haven’t found “The One” at all. No, in desperation, we’ve simply settled for “Anyone”.
Which is exactly what I did at the age of 41. I married a man 14 years younger simply because he seemed keen and didn’t make me gag.
We weren’t suited in any way: in our class, race, age bracket, attitude to work, religion. But we married, despite everything. The reason? He happened to be there.
I have seen this happen time and time again. Five of my eight best girlfriends have got married in their late 30s, while two have married in their early 40s.
One, in her 40s, who is gorgeous and kind, ended up with a man who turned out to be an alcoholic. Another married a man who was clearly gay. Another married a big lump who bores the hell out of her.
The same thing happens to Emma in One Day - only what’s worse is that she settles not once, but twice.
Before her story with Dexter reaches its natural conclusion, she ends up with a dreadful bore, Ian, whom she knows she despises on their first date. She hates his jokes, his clothes, the hair on his back, the fact he belches into his fist.
So, what does she do? She BUYS A FLAT WITH HIM! Why? Because any man is better than no man’s land.
There is no great love where such women are concerned, merely a great lurch towards the finishing tape of fertility.
I had thought I was a nice person, but, like Emma, merely “picky”. But to marry a man because you are 40 and he happened to bob his head above the choppy waters of commitment is just cruel, and unforgivable.
If you have a teenage son, warn him now: women are ruthless when it comes to mapping out their perfect life. They will trick you, and by this I don’t mean by merely dyeing their hair and extending their eyelashes and dropping their passport in the pool so their date of birth develops a smudge (guilty as charged).
At the age of 42, a friend of mine embarked on a relationship with a man who had expressly stated that he didn’t want children. She, however, was eager for a family, so what did she do?
She facilitated an “accident”.
The 11-year-old daughter who resulted is now an innocent pawn in their great big game of hate. Not exactly the plot of Love Story, is it?
I believe women are only really capable of great love, free from the distortion of procreation and a detached house, when they are either very young or very old. There is no desperation at either end of the life-cycle.
When I was in my 20s, and unfettered by the pressure to procreate, I fell madly in love with someone whom I met precisely twice.
He was unattainable (actually, I think on both occasions he was married to someone else), but more significant was the fact that I was so lacking in self-esteem that, like Emma, I didn’t think any man would want me, but especially not him.
He was a man who, like Dexter, was gorgeous and famous and surrounded by groupies and Scandinavian models. How could he possibly love me?
As Dexter writes to Emma, stuck in a dead-end job in a Mexican restaurant while he backpacks around the world: “If I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.”
I’ve lived my life with plenty of scented candles, but without a shred of confidence.
That is something that only comes with time, and which is why I think so many women make so many mistakes, misjudging their true worth, and, when push comes to shove, settling for anyone who asks. - Daily Mail