A FRIEND ONCE asked me if I could imagine the man he’d end up with. It stumped me a little, not least because he was then cavorting from one disastrously inappropriate fellow to the next. I don’t suppose he’d have asked if he wasn’t. My initial thought was ‘the opposite of the last five and the exact opposite of the five before that’. They’d really started to stack up. I bit my tongue, eventually saying ‘someone who you love and who loves you back.’ It is the only reasonable answer to this kind of insane life conjecture.
I was thinking about this conversation when reading Graham Norton’s recent musings on being perennially single. In his early 50s, Mr Norton has started to wear his singleness and stop imagining someone who is going to come along that will alter his life forever. It shouldn’t be, but it felt like a brave thing to say publicly. The preeminence of couple-ship and that Sex and the City-ish idea of ‘The One’ seem to have inevitably sharpened in the gay conversation post-same sex marriage. The presumption that everyone wants to be in a couple has extended far beyond its heteronormative nucleus.