Friday 27 January 2012

Just can't win (London, UK)

My sad experience in (romantic) relationships is that once the utter fascinated besottedness is over, the fault-finding steps in.

One such experience involved the use of language.  After the honeymoon period (of my being the bee’s knees in Nick’s eyes), nothing I said was right.  If I were to say something like, “You can’t treat people in this appalling way”, e.g., when talking about human behaviour, he’d take it personally and bristle: “I don’t treat people like that!”  I then had to explain that the “you” was a generic universal reference, not to him.

After this had gone on a number of times, I decided to try something different, and switched to the universal “one”, and say, “One can’t treat people in this appalling way.”  As I was, by then, in the post-honeymoon, redundant-bee’s-knees phase, even this apparently neutral reference was deemed objectionable: “Oh!  One, eh??  So we’re now so posh that we’re speaking like the queen, are we?!?  How pretentious!”

(London, UK, 1986)

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