All You Need is Love

Late last month, I got the idea to post a "love" poem every day in February. Thinking about it, I realised that 95% of my poems that could arguably be considered a poem about love aren't romantic. I just don't write romantic love poems all that often. I think I've written maybe three, ever, and I don't know where two of them are. (One of them ended up in Poetry Against Cancer.)

This, I decided, was perfect.

I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day. I find the idea of giving someone a five euro card and a box of chocolates or flowers and rushing out to an expensive restaurant to prove to other couples that you're in love a bit...odd. Especially since Valentine's Day seems to be some "romantic" competition. Everyone in a relationship has to do something on Valentine's Day, or no one will believe they're in love, or in a relationship, or whatever the heck sort of excuses people use to go out on Valentine's Day.

Frankly, it bewilders me. I don't think I'll ever celebrate it in the typical way. I don't think I'll buy someone a card produced en masse by a company who says it's romantic. I'd prefer write a poem that says how I feel.

Still, I think 28 poems on the theme of love is a suitable substitute. Even if they do cover a lot of the issues in a relationship that aren't necessarily romantic, like not talking to each other, struggling to understand each other, breaking up, trying to get back together, and not really fitting together.

Why am I posting them, then, if they're not romantic? Because they're real. I'm not about to write 28 poems that you could find inside a Hallmark card. Most of these poems only make perfect sense when you've lived my life. But they're about love. They're about the love I've felt, love that hurt, love that wasn't fair, love that still bothers me and love that fills me with joy.

I'm not Adele. I'm not putting these poems out there to make someone look bad, because the reality is they tell a story about relationships, from the bad separations right up to making up again. The first dozen poems or so cover an interesting arc in my life, and they'll continue on like that, taking snippets from my life when things hurt a little too much to celebrating moments when life just felt wonderful.

These aren't poems about me being in love. These are poems about how I experience it. Some will read angrily. Some will read pleasantly. Some will be sad, and some will be happy.

The Beatles once said "All you need is love." In a sense, that's true. But it doesn't have to come from a Hallmark card. It doesn't have to be limited to the person you share a bed with. Love isn't romance. Love isn't perfect. But, I think, if you really want to experience life, you need to recognise that you love someone. Love someone who hurts you sometimes. Love someone despite their flaws - because you stop noticing them. Love someone because they make you happy. Love someone who makes you feel confident.

And if you're feeling brave, tell them how you feel.

Guest Post, by Gabriel Fitzpatrick: Falling for a Professional Liar

Today on the blog, finishing up on his Literary+ Blog Tour, we have Gabriel Fitzpatrick. He's been busy this past week and a half on tour, promoting his new book Rmnce. With that wee intro out of the way, I'll hand you over to Gabriel.

Falling for a Professional Liar

There are those who say that dating people who lie for a living is a loaded prospect. It’s a mindset which is not hard to fathom, since trust forms such a core part of most people’s conception of romantic love, and a large part of the cynical side of trust is in the ability to detect when the other person is lying. The more a person lies, as the reasoning goes, the better they get at it, and the harder it becomes to separate fact from fiction.

This last collocation, fact from fiction, is fortuitous since it leads us to the particular breed of professional liar which is relevant to my world: That is, fiction writers. While actors, poker players, and politicians are experienced in the practical side of lying, being practiced in telling lies, writers exist on the other side of the coin, being practiced in inventing lies. We spend our days and nights sitting at computers lying to empty pages, wracking our brains to come up with plausible falsehoods which can be woven together into a grand narrative of abject fiction.

So, the question becomes, how can one be expected to trust such a person? A professional liar must surely have a greater propensity to dissemblance than one who only lies casually, a hobbyist liar if you will. Yet this is a question which acts on presumptions which need not be true.

The most interesting of these is that it is always assumed that the truth, honesty as a practice, is the ideal to be striven for in a romantic relationship. One could, I hope, certainly imagine a relationship which might go quite beautifully built on a foundation of lies, provided the liar could maintain them as if they were the truth without any cracks forming (and who better to create a rock-solid foundation for such an arrangement than a writer?) and crafted them in such a way as to serve a desired purpose.

Most people who claim to want the truth want, instead, the sensation of being told the truth in conjunction with the pleasantness of a lifestyle without strife. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. Thus, from a purely utilitarian standpoint, the standpoint of the maximization of subjective happiness, a benevolent, well-intentioned professional liar is perhaps the best possible partner. Capable of building for their lover a beautiful world, a beautiful fiction in which they may both live happily, a professional liar can bear the burden of reality unilaterally; two professional liars in conjunction can very nearly escape the fundaments of relationship reality entirely, a state which seems quite pleasant to contemplate.

Gabriel’s new book, Rmnce, hit digital shelves October 1st! Find it on Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords.

Rmnce series is a love story told in 4 parts. It follows a couple from the first drunkenly passionate days of their college romance all the way through a life together, often tumultuous, always overwhelming, and overridingly disquieting as only true love can be.

Rmnce is not, however, your traditional love story. Or perhaps more accurately, it does not appear to be your traditional love story. It is written entirely through the communications of the couple. Text messages, emails, and even a few old-fashioned letters make up the entirety of a story, what one early reader termed "A story not so much written as formed organically in the negative space."

It is, in short, a commentary on love in the digital age, a tribute to the great love affairs of the digital generation, romance not lost in the sea of text-speak and instant gratification, but merely obscured from the prying eyes of those too far removed from its cultural roots.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Smashwords