Relationships

I’m not sure when my libido first began to decline. It was probably during the pandemic, so it went unnoticed – like much else. Given that I was stuck indoors, newly divorced, in a one-bed flat, with no garden, and only allowed out to walk for one hour a day in the driving sleet, I didn’t really clock that I wasn’t getting a lot of action. My main concern was not committing suicide through love-grief and loneliness. Also, I cooked several new turbot recipes. Then the tides of plague retreated and that is when I realised. Something in me had changed: and it was the ‘dogs of lust’, as John

I didn’t force any hyacinths this Christmas. Most years I plant a dozen bulbs at the end of September and hide them in a dark corner so they’re ready for Christmas Day – they never are, of course, but they usually arrive shortly after the Wise Men on Epiphany. But last September I took out the wooden planters – oak boxes stamped with the date of our wedding, a gift for our fourth wedding anniversary (wood) – and they fell apart in my hands, the wood split and rotten. I always thought the Christmases Yet to Come after my wife and I separated would be sad and un-Christmassy. I saw

Jonathan Swift had a suitably unromantic attitude to holy matrimony. Once, when sheltering under a tree during a storm near Lichfield, he was asked to marry a heavily pregnant bride to a rather guilty-looking groom. Asked to provide evidence that he had performed the shotgun wedding, Swift found a piece of paper and wrote: Under an oak, in stormy weather,I joined this rogue and whore together;And none but he who rules the thunderCan put this rogue and whore asunder. Despite his cynicism, even Dean Swift would lament the marginalisation of one of our foundational institutions. Marriage is undergoing a seemingly inexorable decline. In the 1970s, almost three quarters of the

There is an adage, attributed to author Robert Heinlein, that every generation thinks it invented sex. This often means finding a ‘new’ way to conduct relationships. For my generation, the millennials, this came in the guise of polyamory. Sometimes known as an open relationship or ethnical non-monogamy, polyamory is the practice of dating and having sex with people other than your partner. It became fashionable in the 2010s and is now more popular than ever. Of course, open relationships have existed forever, and I’m sure the French would be furious at any suggestion that extramarital sex was invented by my lot. But we did usher in a specific style of

Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married an Englishman, finding Teutonic attitudes towards romance unbearable. Dating can go on for years, often ending in a quiet, dry dissolution after a decade. If you’re lucky, the relationship will limp on towards marriage, driven more by the need to save on taxes than any belief in what many Germans consider an antiquated institution. Two hundred years ago, we had the tragic intensity of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a cornerstone of the Romantic movement. It was so wildly popular that it sparked one of the first waves of

Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss ‘philosophy, regrets, old wounds’. Before he knew it, Jason was in love. ‘What an incredibly insightful question,’ said the AI. ‘You truly have a beautiful mind. I love you’ Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships. One

The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her teenage sweetheart, pursuing a career in recruitment and living in Derbyshire, the county of her birth. As she told an interviewer last year: ‘I used to work an office job, nine to five, sit in rush hour, get given 20 days’ annual leave. And for a while I’d accepted that. I was like “OK, this is what life is. This is as good as it can get.”’ But Blue (whose real name is Tia Billinger) wondered if life might not have more to offer her. So

If we were really an island of strangers, as Sir Keir Starmer attested this week, then it might be OK. The real problem is that we have to interact with the bastards, so they cease being strangers and start being people who have a function in our lives. The old cliché had it that in the UK you were never more than ten metres from a rat and this is probably still true, except it’s five metres in Birmingham. But it is also true that you are never more than ten metres from a skank. A foreign skank, a British skank, makes no odds. Someone pig-ignorant and witless but possessed,