In pursuit of love and Lindt
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 1, 2012
Section: Opinion

Who’s not a sucker for limerence? – that electrifying but dangerously unpredictable state of being in love.  The term limerence might be unfamiliar, for good reason, because it only arrived in the dictionary in 1979. Before that we just talked about infatuation, or having acrush. No matter, because I’ve always lived for its heart palpitations (and sudden weight loss) having realized that being in love is the most exquisite yet fleeting phase of the human condition.

My pursuit of limerence has taken up a quite considerable chunk of my life. In my 20’s, finding a mate was about being in the right place at the right time (any pub on a Friday night) and spotting someone who had that indefinable ‘something’ (usually a bourbon and coke and a packet of Benson & Hedges.)

Go back a few more years and my girlfriends and I were ‘getting the hots’ and hanging around at the bus stop aged 16 hoping the boys we liked hadn’t decided to ride their bikes to school. As one of our nannas used to remind us – boys are like buses – there’ll always be another one along in a minute. On weekends, we’d go to a ‘show’ at someone’s house, and if we were lucky, we’d ‘get lucky’ on the front lawn. (I never did Mum, I’m just generalizing.)

A decade before I was born, lovers would be necking in their Hillman Hunters and Morris 1100’s all over Kings Park on a Saturday night. If a boy was sweet on a girl and ‘had it real bad,’ he’d get down on one knee, they’d get hitched, settle down and raise a couple of nippers. (‘Sprogs’ if they were accidents.)

Now, I’m discovering via my friend’s teenagers, or anyone too young to remember the drive-ins,  that the internet has changed dating forever. The home phone is obsolete now that you ‘hook up’ with people on Facebook, and break up with them via text (I was shamefully way ahead of my time on that one.)

What next? Breeding for the baby bonus? Whatever happened to flirting in person? Or making eyes at someone? Or being (pretend) shy and coquettish?  Or laughing at a boy’s dumb jokes because ‘he’s a God,’ as we used to say, and all of God’s jokes are hilarious. Especially the withdrawal method.  And the wonder bra.

How many hours did I spend hogging the phone with girlfriends dissecting the subtle nuances of the 20-second call I’d had with my teenage heartthrob, Andy, who’d rung to say: ‘Hello?’  followed by ‘Will you go round with me? followed by ‘Great. Bye.’

At 16 I would sit on the beach all afternoon watching him surf. He was always so far out I couldn’t tell which one was him – sometimes I wondered if he’d caught a wave in behind the groyne and gone home. I wasn’t even that interested in boys’ groins then, I just wanted the adrenalin-fuelled charge of being smitten.

At university, a lovely Greek boy would pass me little notes in the library and take me to candlelit dinners in restaurants where surf ‘n turf was new fangled and cool. (Now it’s even more hip and they call it reef ‘n’ beef.) I used to write him gushing love letters on perfumed paper and post them with those sticky little squares we used to know as stamps.

Later on, in another time warp, I wrote poetry and swooned over my French tutor, until I discovered he wasn’t really Parisien but the enfant terrible of Midland. No more kissing frogs, but I remained a sucker for an accent, so I took up with a Norwegian one, thinking I knew it all, age 23.

These days science tells us the smell of our armpits, the symmetry of our faces, and the distance between our waists and our hips all factor in our unconscious attraction to certain members of the opposite sex.

I’m a big believer in Schopenhauer’s theory of attraction. He was the 19thcentury philosopher who believed we unwittingly seek out our ‘physical’ complement, because, in evolutionary terms, the search for a mate is really about the continuation of our particular gene pool. Unconsciously, we are drawn to that individual who might balance out our shortcomings  in the next generation –  the one person whose long legs might cancel out our stumpy ones, or whose petite ears might be given precedence over a set of wingnuts.

Unfortunately Schopenhauer’s theory ends bleakly, because he then tells us, invariably, our most suitable physical complement is not usually our most suitable life-long complement. Long term happiness and creating robust children are like two radical, but mutually exclusive science projects . I wonder if that’s what happened in my first marriage, because the product of it has been a (mostly) delightful child, while his father and I became a disaster. I blame Schopenhauer. And Norwegian accents.

Second time round, I’ve gone for the one bloke who makes my heart thump but who clearly has my short legs and no hope of cancelling out my histrionic gene with his calm, rational one. He is without accent, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of war history, in case I ever need it, and is quite a dab hand at writing a love letter, though come to think of it, I haven’t seen one of those in a while. He can also shoot a dugite with one bullet from a shotgun, at point blank range, and has ironed every shirt he’s ever worn, since telling me in 2005 I was doing it wrong, and you have to start with the sleeves first.

I get the feeling romance is no longer a high priority in our house because only once in the last six months has that lovely man I live with remembered his (loose) commitment to affairs of the heart. Last week he announced: ‘I’m ready for date night, blossom – but let’s have it at home – I’ve rented Downfall, that great Hitler movie’.

No wonder speed dating is held in such high esteem these days. Weed out the dud candidates in two minutes and you’re left with a pool of genuine romantic possibility. I just wonder if hunting in the wild is a more dependable outcome, even if it takes the best part of your mating season to find who you’re looking for. Those matchmakers are in a rut – packaging and controlling the rules of attraction takes half the fun out too. I’d rather drop a line in the ocean and hope some buck-wild specimen chooses my bait, than cast out in an artificial lake full of pre-selected exhibits. I’m not after small fry, I want Moby Dick.

My lifetime lothario knows a thing or two about hosing down my romantic tendencies, seeing he brings home a box of my favourite Lindt balls on a Friday night, and then eats all the blue and red ones. I don’t much like the white ones, but I appreciate that he leaves me any at all. Then he makes me a cup of tea and we settle in on ‘date night’ to watch Hitler’s last days in his bunker. I’m already looking forward to next date night. I think he’s pencilled it in for September 2013.