Romance is in the air for Monkey Pie. Not the knee wobbling, heart racing, pupil dilating kind of romance which has you tearing at your heart to stop it from filling up painfully when you don't hear from the object of affection within the acceptable time limit but rather like the easy companionship kind, where you oblige them with hand holding, you allow your proffered cheek to be peppered with kisses, you use their love like balm on your lump of a scarred heart.

The last month has seen Monkey Pie let V back into her life, as he gratefully laps up all the time he has with me. I'm humbled by his confessions of love, of being his best friend, of this being his happiest month. I must agree that it has been spectacularly easy to go along with it, to meet up, to lie entwined in a mockery of intimacy. To pretend to be jealous if another girl wants to see him.. Truth be told, I'm not in love, to any degree. If "deeply fond of" is allowed, that'll be what I'll label my feeling. I do not miss him, I'm even a little glad to be away. What, I realised finally, had made this last month so easy, is that it also coincided with a month's silence from my usual torture of checking M's blog. He'd not written in ages so I stopped checking and it did me good.. today, I checked my facebook and he popped up on my newsfeed with a new photo- he's looking delightfully rough with his 20 day beard and sun tan... I checked his blog, assuming (correctly) that he'd update both at once. Everything came flooding back and I enviously digested his prose..

V is like sweetener for a sugar addict.. the taste is similar but the high is nonexistant. And it doesn't linger in your system for so long afterwards. Lionel Shriver wrote that as soon as a woman denounces a man as being 'sweet' it puts him off the radar of sexually attractive. She has a point.. Women want their men to be rugged, manly etc.. sensitive, sure- but not at the expense of manliness. V is very sweet. Partly from being extraordinarily clumsy and a questionable dancer. We went to a ceilidh last week and he was so preoccupied with looking at me that he missed all his steps. I ended up having to physically manoeuvre him into place and do my steps simultaneously.
He talks about when we'll be married. Which, frankly, makes me smile, only because I remember these talks with my first boyfriends and actually believing that the world works like that: you meet, you marry, you always love equally. Now, with the bitterness of ill gained wisdom, I know that love manifests itself differently- eros has many facets, all as real but none identical. I know in my heart of hearts I cannot fall in love with a man I feel I have to look after so much. I was brought up to be independent, to work as a team, to be a mother to my children, not to my partner. I know in my soul that I need a musician, an artist as well as a scientist.. they exist- I've met a few in my life.

I've decided to make him a project. As I say, I'm fond of him. A definite lack of fireworks does not necessarily equate to repugnance. So I will mould him into a good looking, well groomed and more confident version of himself. I will make him a competent and understanding man, tolerant of bad days and more at ease with the flakey whimsicality of women and teach him that when it comes to affection, sometimes, less is more.
I don't think I'm acting cruelly... although, obviously my feelings are dubious- I can never love someone who seeks complete ownership of the other- to be able to say "you are mine" is not a notion I'm interested in. I'm good at meeting people in the middle but not at crossing over completely to meet their greedy self esteems. He needs this; so while I simulate being in love- he learns a valuable lesson. Not too harshly because I am, ultimately, kind and uninterested in breaking him and he is therefore happy. In exchange for the adoration I felt for M, I get someone who adores me- who scrutinizes, what I perceive as prematurely wrinkling eyes, dodgy tan lines and too often neglected leg hair, and declares me "panemorphi" or "all-beautiful". I'm building him up for a fall by serving him thoughtfully made greek food, helping him improve his skin with products I searched for him, meeting his friends and laughing politely as they tell me I should call them when I'm tired of him.. Happy to live theatrical love if just to keep him happy and to stop me feeling the inherited guilt of too little jilts.

He admitted he wanted to get something off his chest and confessed about how he'd had a girlfriend aged 9 who showed him her pants in return for him showing her his. The pathetic nature of his worry was quite adorable.. I laughed at his concern only because his worry was surely a joke?! No one actually feels guilty about things they did aged 9? He then confessed to only having kissed 3 girls and probed me, subtley but probing nonetheless, as to the figure of boyfriends I'd had. I laughed it off and told him it wasn't important and in the end with his cajoling he teased out a confession of only 4 others. I wasn't going to counter 3 kisses with the 50 odd I've kissed... let alone number of boyfriends. WIth his little experience, I'm maybe wrongly assuming that he won't understand the extremes women go to to feel loved and the willingness of less scrupled men to exploit these women. In any case, I don't want him to slot himself after a long list of men as they are certainly not all equal. I've only loved a small number of them, and felt fond of maybe a third of them. My feeling for him is unique if a little patronising; hence my minimising of the truth.

The fact of the matter is he's just not M. But no one ever will be. M's memory is tainting my future. I fear our fragile friendship is impossible to maintain- he'll sour all my romances and make a mockery of all the good men who can never be as amazing as him. The question is, how much should I remember or should I forget the whole thing? I don't think M understands the force of my regard for him so he politely tries to keep our friendship alive which, despite the certainty of an exclusively platonic future, I pathetically cling onto in the hope that it might bring some more interesting fruit. I think I should forget the whole thing, it causes too much turmoil within me- even a photo or a few words which I know are from him are enough to send me back into a gloomy pit of reminiscence. A pointless fantasy with only one, desperately sad conclusion which contradicts the whole point of friendship. Maybe keeping him in my life is brutal self-flagellation and I fear it's too much for my body to bear when, for the moment, I only have the non nourishing kind of sugar substitute for my tea.
Perhaps I'll let him back in when I've found something greater yet.. which I hope to whichever Supreme Being has control, does exist because I miss his company...