Singled Out

KARACHI: As a kid growing up in the 90s, I had a dream. I had a dream that one day I would find the perfect woman, fall hopelessly in love (charm her into falling hopelessly in love with me-you know, the ‘real deal’) and live happily ever after.

Obviously all this dreaming displayed a lot of confidence and positivity for an average inhibited weakling like me who, well … grew up, eventually. The woman I set out looking for more than a decade ago is still nowhere in sight and I doubt there are any serious takers in my current state of being either (I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed, wearing pajamas, laptop on my pillow in front of me, eating Coco Pops and writing an article on the lack of love in my life!)

With such a square, one-woman oriented mentality, you’d expect me to be a die-hard romantic who waits eagerly for February 14 every year to vent the romance in me, but no, the bitter truth is I kind of hate Valentine’s Day — it’s unimaginative, consumerist in nature but still remains an arbitrary, manipulative and shallow interpretation of love.

Truth be told, I think the day is a brutal reality check for all the singletons out there; a conspiracy created by happy couples everywhere to show us that they’re better than us, if in nothing else, at least in maintaining romantic relationships. And it works! This may sound like a cliché, but it royally irritates me that there are 364 other days to show how much you love someone, yet they’re ignored like in terms of not being good enough.

Who needs stupid head-over-feet couples and heart-carrying teddy-bear manufacturers and soppy greeting card poetry writers to make us feel worse than we already do? What’s worse is the appalling trend that has crept into our confused and sheltered society over the last few years and caused a car-crash of emotions, pressurizing the ‘burqa-clad’ women to sneak out of their houses on the 14 of every February to buy Tweety Bird cards for their phone pals and sought out boyfriends.

What a cynic you must think I am, right? But I have a perfectly valid reason for all this indignation: I’ve never fallen in love. There, I said it! I really don’t get what the fuss is all about. I wanted to know what it felt like, this love; so revered, so wonderful, but it never really happened.

Still, I’ll be honest and admit that I do sometimes think something went horribly wrong in God’s office while I was in gestation and He forgot to install in me the cocky, smooth-talking seducer gene that all the girls seem to have a thing for these days.

So now, after a long, futile wait for someone to walk into my life and make my days as blissful as my friends tell me they become once the fat, naked kid with a bow and arrow strikes, because I couldn’t thank God enough for dragging me through my teen years and my early twenties without falling in this thing we mistakenly call love.

Maybe one day the right woman will find me and show me what I’ve been missing. Until then, I refuse to be just another besotted boy falling for women like a brain-dead domino. No sir that simply isn’t my style.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 13^th, 2011.