Granny Lost The Plot

Now that I’m back down to earth after my little adventure, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about love and life and the meaning of life.

Grandad wrote me a very sweet blog on the occasion of our 32nd anniversary. In it, he said

The couple are no longer in love. They have gone much deeper than that. And they don’t talk much, because they know what each other is thinking. They are completely at peace with life.

Fortunately we have gone into that lovely stage of being completely at ease with each other. It has not all been ‘roses around the cottage door’. We had our bad times too.

I don’t know where he ends and I begin. He is the better half, not prone to histrionics. I am inclined to over-dramatise things.

The ‘in love’ phase is a dangerous place to be. Did you know that when you are ‘in love’ you are actually in a state of madness, hence we say ’she is madly in love’. Our pupils dilate and the brain chemicals are going berserk. We become totally obsessed with the object of our desire. Our brains are making massive amounts of serotonin, the happy hormone, stronger than Prozac or Ecstacy.

All the advice given in the self-help book “How to Keep You Man Happy” is forgotten. You sit waiting for the phone call. After a few days, you are foaming at the mouth.

He takes you out to dinner and you sit there, dumbstruck, pushing food around your plate and pretending to eat.

You forget that you are supposed to ask him about himself; to hang on his every word and to ask pertinent questions about every aspect of his life. I have never met a man yet who doesn’t like the sound of his own voice!

You are so preoccupied with how you are coming across that you are reduced to a quivering jelly. Is me bra strap showing? Is me bra clean? Is the skirt too short? Do I look like a slapper? Is he sitting with his knees directed towards me?

Whatever you do, don’t run off and marry him while you are in this state of lunacy. Do not watch “The Brides of Franc” on RTE. By all means, go and live with him after a decent interval (at least two weeks, or a fortnight), but be careful about making even this leap of faith. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not advisable.

Find out what he is like first thing in the morning. When you have the flu, does he make you an omelette and a hot drink or does he run home to his Mammy until your nose stops running.

Is he a man’s man, the life and soul of the party, always buying rounds for the lads and complete strangers after a rugby match? He may still be buying rounds for the lads while you are at home with six snotty nosed kids pulling at your skirts!

Do NOT think he will change miraculously after the wedding or that you can house train him. He won’t and you can’t.

As Byron says

Man’s love is of man’s life a part; it is a woman’s whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.