Wednesday 15^th June 2011

Contrast defines. The Heterosexual onslaught at the Bath Abbey wedding highlights the glaring splendour of the Poor Little Rich Gays, or from the point of view of the correctly dressed City men (waistcoat, blue shirt with white collar, tie, tie pin, morning coat, all laid neatly upon one another with not a crease in sight) and their tottering, near-nude women, the utter horror and wrongth.

We must face it. Not everyone, if anyone, would want to be a Poor Little Rich Gay.

I’ve such antics to report. My summer scarf was the least of it. And the Best Man’s speech, with its description of Gay Life, from that point of view! Absolutely thrilling.

But I am moved first to mediate upon the Wedding address, given in the Abbey. It was spoken by our private family Vicar, who came in especially from our own county. He did not say what I would have said, so I was not inclined to listen. Of course, it’s our subject, one about which Poor Little Rich Gays have a great deal to say – what makes an enduring relationship? And even – are enduring relationships necessary? Shall we make anew a different configuration of relationships?

Fricka, as we know, fearsome, shrieking, narrow, repressive Goddess of Marriage, is ghastly. Our personal vicar – full marks – certainly did not mention respect. I can’t bear respect. On Any Questions (Do you ever listen? It’s a radio programme of unlimited pomposity) they’re often asked: ‘What’s the secret of a happy marriage?’ ‘Respect,’ they trot and whimper. What rubbish! Couples don’t sit about respecting each other once the excitements of romance and sex have worn off. That’s not what binds.

Can you imagine the dreariness? Why not marry the Oxfam committee?

‘Don’t bore each other,’ our in-house Vicar said. That’s more like it. But how not to bore? Some of our Poor Little Rich Gays are terrific hurlers of kitchen knives, callers of the Police, but they do not part. This is more real. It would be very surprising not to find, after long intimacy, some part of a person that wasn’t completely repulsive.

A Vicar can perhaps be forgiven for not pushing this line in a wedding address. All the same, I would have made it more thunderous. Marriage, whether official or not, is a place of terror, a furnace in which we are brought to true recognition of ourselves and the other one – or not, in which case they fail.

For some, even amongst the Poor Little Rich Gays, relationships are where they hide, gambolling in delight like spring lambs. But in fact lambs are oily, wiry creatures that bite. I know, because I’ve been on Robert Nevil’s farm.

This brings in the question of happiness. ‘Marriage is a work of art,’ our Vicar said. I like this but I would have brought out more the struggle to create, the persistence required, the likely horror of our fellow human beings, the rarity of joy, which should not anyway be the goal. We hear too much about happiness. You’d have to be half-baked to be happy. Not being happy need not mean despair. The truth and making are the glories. Where there was no outfit, no decor, suddenly there is. Relationships too are our creation. At the finish, we will want to say that we wove, did not give up, knew, and made something.

This morning I discovered by chance the Tweets of dear Alain de Botton, which are aphorisms. I met him when he was 24 and already hailed. How things conjoin! There must be a design.  One was wrong: “To show ourselves ‘as we truly are’ – a terrifying treat we should spare most of humanity, especially anyone we claim to love” Another was not: “Modern romanticism: we go in search of one person who will spare us any need for other people.”

Here is an alarming other perspective altogether: perhaps no ‘marriage’ at all? Or ‘marriage’ for certain times of life but not others? Or unnatural to be glued in with only one for company, machining ‘friends’ through the diary on a six-week cycle as some of our lesser Poor Little Rich Gays do, particularly where the partner is green, has not been in the furnace, and has his claws in?

Only the whole life will tell, and probably not even then.