I have always been a romantic. I’m unsure why, because the first truly romantic thing that ever happened to me was immediately proceeded by the immortal lines ‘they’re like someone threw up in a puddle’. I was 15, at my friend Harry's 16th birthday party and the boy I thought about every day on the train home from town was looking deeply into my eyes after kissing me for the very first time. I can’t even remember the kiss - all I remember was that my eyes were blue with specks of yellow - ‘like someone threw up in a puddle’.
It’s objectively not a romantic thing to say, but all 15 year old me heard was a simile. A boy had thought up a simile about my eyes. These old, rose-tinted things.
So this is either a piece about being a romantic, or a fantasist, and the truth is, as always, somewhere in the middle.
As is definitely true of many things that seem unhinged and to not make sense, Mark was begot in the pandemic. I say ‘begot’ because I don’t want to insinuate that he was born in the year 2021 and accidentally manifest my soulmate to be twenty-two years younger than me. Now, I have to warn you that this is the kind of Tiktok, Urban Outfitters, pseudo-astrology thinking that I have come to love, and if you hate that, well then you might as well stop reading - or, you can accept that we all have our differences, cope in different ways, and go and buy yourself a large citrine crystal for understanding.
So, we get to the crux of the matter. During the lockdown I was talking to my flatmate about how I’d sometimes fantasise about the type of person my soulmate might be. These things ranged from the music he might like to very niche and specific things like the fact that he would have good hand-eye coordination and be well-versed at travelling on the London Underground.
Saph, my flatmate, enjoyed this very much. She’d point things out throughout the day, ‘your soulmate would like this’. Or, much to my annoyance ‘your soulmate would have found that funny,’ when I didn’t laugh at her jokes. Saph, by the way, is brilliant. Her curly hair bounces when she walks, in a small joyous way that has always seemed to me to be the opening act for the large joy that is her presence at any event.
These quiet observations about my soulmate would have been a nice and mundane place to leave the daydreaming, but we had all the time in the world to kill between writing dissertations and exciting excursions to the ‘Big Sainsbury’s’ and so we gave my mystery man a name. All the better to manifest him with. And the name was Mark.
I’d return home from dates,
‘How was it?’
‘Yeah good, he was nice but -‘
‘But he wasn’t Mark?’
‘…he wasn’t Mark.’
Or,
‘Saph listen to this,’
‘This is nice. Who’s this one by? Mark would like this. Mark would be dancing to this’.
Or,
‘Come out!’
‘I’m knackered,’
‘I’ve got a feeling Mark might be there,’
‘Let me borrow the red shirt with the hole on the sleeve again and I’ll meet you.’
The ghost of my un-met lover, haunted me. His phantom beckoned me to the doors of events I was too tired for, and to dates with friends of friends (whose judgement upon lovers I had no good reason to trust). I saw flickers of him all around me and collected little oddities to fashion him with. Features from people I passed on the street, old friends, the man with his head leant against the window on the tram, students three pages away pinned on zoom lectures. Strange specifics - like having crow’s feet, for example.
I love crow’s feet, especially on people ‘too young’ to have them. My first boyfriend had crow’s feet by the time we met in sixth form and I always thought he looked so joyful. Like he’d already managed to fit a lifetime of laughter into just seventeen short years. Those little folds at the corner of his eyes giving a real and genuine insight into him, about how he chooses to live, and how happy he is.
And then, I took other more practical and serious ideas. Like how he should have an older sister or, at the very least, a female cousin that he’s close to. All of my close male friends have older sisters (except one, but I think he must be the exception that proves the rule) and I have found that this makes for men who can communicate; who know when to not push their luck; and who aren’t embarrassed to buy tampons.
During the peak of lockdown I began making a list of ‘Mark Things’ and it went as follows:
He will have crow’s feet and will read a lot, and tan well in the Summer. He will wear threadbare jumpers in Winter and get excited at the prospect of seeing me naked all year round. He will have long, piano-playing fingers and be known for being especially kind (and not just for a man, but for a human being). He will smell incredible. He will be one of those people that has a scent and is known for it. A stranger might walk past you years after meeting Mark, and you’ll think ‘Oh my God they smell just like Mark,’ and then you’ll smile to yourself because thinking of Mark brings back fond memories and really, really, you should get back in touch with him. He will wink more than is appropriate, maintain strong eye contact, and have extraordinarily loud sneezes. He will like having his hair played with and lie his head on my lap whilst I’m trying to write. He will have great and niche music tastes and love to dance (even if he is not the best at it). Mark will be patient and good at time keeping to make up for the fact that I am inpatient and bad at timekeeping.
He will be able to chop vegetables quickly and understand completely the need to escape and breathe a different kind of air for a while. He’ll be close to his mother and she’ll be eccentric and witty and passionate about some kind of creative hobby- like bottling jam or life-drawing. He’ll have a firm, hairy chest, and place his hand on the back of my seat when he’s reversing, and let me do the gears for him on long drives to visit friends. He’ll wear rings and be clever about the things that I am not clever about - Maths and Physics, Ukraine and Russia. We’ll stay up late and do everything in the wrong place and at the wrong time - eat in bed, talk cross-legged on the kitchen counter, kiss in the doorway, have sex against the window. We’ll swap shirts the morning after: him, vibrant in my faded T-shirts. Me, donning an open button-up and boxers, mug in hand, big hair partially subdued in a bun like Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza. We will become who the Maccabees wrote ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ about. I will inevitably catch myself smiling when I think about him, and he’ll make a good first impression upon all of my friends. Except for Maisie. But that’s fine because she has awful taste in men and quite frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So as you can see, I’ve got an inventory of all the little quirks and kinks I imagine Mark might have, and a sneaking suspicion he’ll end up being completely different, and the occasional nagging feeling that he might not ever materialise.
But imagining Mark is fun because - and I know that Saph would wisely say that this because I’m a Libra - because I have a lot of love to give. And it’s cliché and it's wet, but sometimes walking around with all that energy, all that emotion, is draining. It is so much lovelier to feel it, hold the weight of it, relish the heavy potential of him and then forget it for the rest of the day. Content in the knowledge that he’s elsewhere: making playlists; getting good in bed with other people; discovering his favourite books; and becoming the person that I will one day love. Whilst I, in the meantime, become the person deserving of that love. Because God knows, I’ve got work to do and other things to experience first. And besides not being ready, there’s a lot to be said about living your life in the knowledge that love will inevitably come to you.
About living life in a way that is open to possibility but rigid about standards.
This small moment of projecting love for my future self also feels a lot more rewarding than frantically displacing these feelings onto men that are so far removed from Mark. Because, trust me, I’ve done it. I’ve romanticised boys with poor communication skills into living-in-the-moment, flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants Indiana Jones type adventurers. I’ve forged rockstars out of house- party DJs and charming, irresistible casanovas out of men who just liked to sleep around.
I was once in a boy’s bedroom listening to him conject about the various ambiguous Chinese Art posters on his wall and I thought ‘I could be anyone else right now. You just want an audience. I could say anything and it would not matter. Anything at all and it would not disrupt the flow of you talking.’ And me, having romanticised him into some broken victim who was afraid of intimacy and could be fixed if I just loved him hard enough, left feeling genuinely happy that at least I got to see the show. That man would go on to say numerous other disastrous things to me, my favourite of which including the sentence, ‘I’m a feminist - I always watch the porn with the women with pubes.’
But the point is, I’ve weighed myself up against tens of other women, always coming last. And always in the knowledge that for every early twenty-something man that can dress decently and is confident, there are ten beautiful women who study medicine, or paint, or speak French, or can do the splits, picking themselves apart. All thinking that they come last in this bizarre race for the approval of what? Potential? Nice teeth, a handful of records, and some Skepta Airwings? No more.
The creation of Mark was an important tool to remind me daily of all the real-life tools I’ve encountered and to not accidentally fall in love with them. The danger with romanticism comes when it is confused with real life. No more placing men on high pedestals and feeling disappointed, or worse heartbroken, when I hear them inevitably clatter to the floor (usually with some god-awful comment like ‘you’re not normally my type, but I’ll make an exception for funny’ or ‘I always forget I’m supposed to ask questions back’).
And, as I look for characteristics for Mark, I fall in love with the little things about myself and the people around me.
Within the idea that I could love a man for his crow’s feet is the fact that I can love myself for my peach fuzz. For the fact that my left ear is beginning to look like a spiral-bound notebook with all its pierced little hoops. For the two teeth I chipped whilst trying to open a bottle of Strawberry and Lime Kopperberg at Maddy Southall’s eighteenth birthday party. The fact that my back, neck, wrists, fingers all crack when I wake up in the morning and then intermittently throughout the day as though my skeleton is attempting to communicate secret messages to me via morse code. That I will never adjust to being a morning person. That I can only ever seem to remember the phonetic alphabet in sequence which is actually, really fucking useless. That I am usually late, and almost always lost, and shower a minimum of twice a day.
And it reminds me to notice and fall in love with all the little things about my friends too. Like how quick Saph is, and her even sharper cheekbones. How well she reads people; how she celebrates her friends’ achievements loudly; how she always calls back to the inside joke. But most importantly, that she genuinely thought the continents of the world were as follows (in descending order of how insane they are): South America, North America, Asia, Africa, Europe, Central America, Russia, The Middle East, Euthanasia.
And then inexplicably, the whole world opens up to you when you begin looking for the stories. And for the little, genuine things to fall in love with.