{"id":256,"date":"2013-06-09T10:47:48","date_gmt":"2013-06-09T09:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/?p=256"},"modified":"2013-06-09T10:47:48","modified_gmt":"2013-06-09T09:47:48","slug":"couples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/2013\/06\/couples\/","title":{"rendered":"Couples"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been awake for hours and so I decided not to languish in bed but rather to get up and get on with some writing.\u00a0 I wasn&#8217;t terribly inspired but I did get some done, which is pleasing, but as I came to a natural pause, i.e. the end of a day on the Singles&#8217; In India tour, I thought I&#8217;d make a coffee and update the Journal.<\/p>\n<p>I made the mistake of watching the Britain&#8217;s Got Talent final last night.\u00a0 I only tuned in because I was certain that Jack Carroll would be the winner.\u00a0 He&#8217;s such a natural comedian and his observational humour is light-years older than his fourteen years.\u00a0 I loved the way he put in the ad-lib after the silly girl lobbed the eggs.\u00a0 Although, given the result she should have lobbed them at the Great British Public and not the judges.\u00a0 I started to get wound up when Attraction were top of the bill again, just\u00a0as they were\u00a0in their semi-final. (MANIPULATION, PEOPLE. MANIPULATION!)\u00a0 Their act, which is like something you&#8217;d have seen at the end of the pier forty years ago, was a cheesy as it was brown-nosed.\u00a0 Yet, they won.\u00a0 In a grotesque parody of the present state of our country, the talented fourteen-year-old British boy, whose quality of life could be so improved by winning \u00a3250,000, lost out to a group of Hungarians who had already been chucked out of talent shows in three other European countries.\u00a0 Only in Britain!\u00a0 Only in Britain!\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Good luck to Jack!\u00a0 I hope Cowell pulls some strings and gets him on the Royal Variety Show anyway, because that&#8217;s where he deserves to be.<\/p>\n<p>The observant among you will have seen that I&#8217;ve entitled this journal-entry COUPLES.\u00a0 Now that&#8217;s not a word you often\u00a0see me use, is it?\u00a0 It&#8217;s usually SINGLES.\u00a0 But the two funerals the Sister and I attended this week got me thinking about couples.\u00a0 Both women who had died had been in long, loving marriages with devoted husbands.\u00a0 My cousin gave his wife&#8217;s eulogy and spoke very movingly and lovingly about their love for each other and their life together.\u00a0 A few weeks ago I was at my friend M&#8217;s wedding and saw her parents who have been married for 72 years; she&#8217;s 93 and he&#8217;s 96.\u00a0 I couldn&#8217;t help wondering what they find to talk about.\u00a0 And yesterday I\u00a0met up with my lovely friend K and her husband C, who\u00a0have been married for nine years and are clearly besotted with each other.\u00a0 They actually met on a singles&#8217; holiday!\u00a0 It&#8217;s no secret that as a double-divorcee I&#8217;m very cynical about marriage.\u00a0 In most marriages &#8211; behind closed doors and in some cases even out in public view &#8211; one gives far more than the other.\u00a0 And the one doing that is usually the woman.\u00a0And while it works for lots of people it&#8217;s not for everyone.\u00a0 The unhappiest times of my life were when I was married.\u00a0 And it&#8217;s not that I&#8217;ve never fallen hopelessly in love!\u00a0 I have!\u00a0 Just not with the men I married. (Full dirty, depressing details will not be revealed in this Journal; you&#8217;ll have to wait for the autobiography!).\u00a0 When I&#8217;ve looked at women who married their first boyfriend and stayed with them, I&#8217;ve always felt sort of sorry for them.\u00a0 I mean, imagine only ever having had sex with just one person!\u00a0 And if you&#8217;re going to play around then why get married in the first place?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve always felt that marriage wasn&#8217;t for me &#8211; and I still do.\u00a0\u00a0 Men talk about finding their soulmate, when really what they mean is they&#8217;ve found a woman who does what they want.\u00a0\u00a0The problem for me has always been that I&#8217;ve yet to find a man who didn&#8217;t want to tell me what to do.\u00a0 And I don&#8217;t like being told what to do.\u00a0 One of the reasons that it&#8217;s lasted so long with the Fella Who&#8217;s Far Away (seven years!)\u00a0is contained\u00a0in the words <em>Far Away<\/em>.\u00a0 Okay, at the moment we&#8217;re apart far more than either of us want or like, but over the last seven years we&#8217;d have driven each other nuts if we&#8217;d been together all the time, I&#8217;m sure.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I love living alone.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve always enjoyed being single.\u00a0 FACT.<\/p>\n<p>But after my observations of couples lately I&#8217;m wondering if the concept of a soulmate does exist.\u00a0 Perhaps there was someone out there for me all the time and I just never met him&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been awake for hours and so I decided not to languish in bed but rather to get up and get on with some writing.\u00a0 I wasn&#8217;t terribly inspired but I did get some done, which is pleasing, but as &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/2013\/06\/couples\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[195,194,55],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-britains-got-talent","tag-jack-carroll","tag-singles-in-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elainespires.co.uk\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}