No such thing as love

The publishing industry can sometimes be unexpectedly odd. I have discovered over the last couple of weeks that there doesn’t seem to be a book category called ‘love’, which struck me as very extraordinary, ‘romance’ turns up in all manner of shapes and sizes and always with the same sort of cover, a spectacularly beautiful ‘poor’ girl gazing into the eyes of an impossibly handsome prince/hero/rich man. So you can have a book classified as ‘true romance’, ‘eighteenth century romance’, ‘a romance in the Tudor court’, ‘historical romance’, ‘wartime romance’ and so on and so on.

So what happened to love? Which as my old darling told me very early on in our relationship was a totally different thing to romance, which was in his eyes shallow, corny and usually a fantasy and totally untrue. In those early days, I was still at school and used to spend a lot of my time when I wasn’t in lessons, studying in the school hall which was used for exactly that purpose and was always quiet and studious. He used to send me a message most days, which was delivered by one or other of his two sisters, who were both at the same school, and found me when I was in the hall. On one occasion when I was having rather a rough time at home and was feeling very down, his message simply contained three words ‘Read sonnet 116’. I left the work I was supposed to be doing, went to the library at once and found the sonnet. I have loved it ever since because it says so much about the complicated trustworthiness of real affection. I know it by heart and here it is:

Sonnet 116 – William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

You can’t be bettered William – and neither could my old darling. His entire life with me was an example of how love pervades everything you do. Precious beyond words.