If movie style love isn't real

In the words of Lisa Loeb, (ultimate early 90's fave since that smashing number, ‘Stay') - "the time between meeting and finally leaving is sometimes called falling in love."

You're right, it sounds cheesy but read it again. Sometimes it is. We've all been there, right? We've floated our way home after a brief encounter with a billion butterflies flipping somersaults inside our stomachs. We've felt kisses linger so long on our lips that we've battled hunger pangs for fear of losing the taste. Those brief spells of infatuation might well be called love if we've nothing greater to compare them to, but... I think it's safe to say that most of us like to believe that once we meet our real true ‘love', we will never let it go.

The problem with this is, that pretty soon people like us become so afraid of winding up with the wrong ‘one', that we end up with no one. And it's not very practical really, is it. Not when everyone else seems to be in lurve. We want a slice of it. Alone equals boring when there's nothing good on telly and it's so hot or cold outside that we can't even move from the sofa. We should be snuggled up between the cushions, whispering sweet nothings into one another's ears and bickering with jokey fondness over who should make a cup of tea.

Of course we never say all this out loud. We rarely let others in on the secret.

We single folk swear that we like ‘girl's nights out', even though they're really just small gatherings of people who more often than not, don't have a better half to save them from another stinking cesspool of men in another smoky meat-market. We swear that we're happier alone, that we don't stare forlornly at couples in restaurants, grinning their way through three courses with their feet entwined beneath the table. We swear we don't care, heading home alone, secretly feeling as ‘left on the shelf' as the can of lamb trotters in brine we bought in LIFCO by mistake, thinking it was tuna.

We're vocally adamant in our happiness for the friends who've found their soul mates but somehow lost their souls, ‘cause they never want to go out like they used to. We promise we don't even think about a single life as being a ‘half' life, but we do. We DO think about it. All the time. So much so that it consumes us sometimes, actually. We can see our see ourselves in full Bridget Jones mode if we really think enough - dying alone, getting eaten by Alsatians. We can picture every other girl we know walking past us down the aisle - even Alice who smells bad, Mary who's got six toes and Claudia who once had gangrene and now needs an entire mobile clinic to help her put her socks on.

And it's not as if we're unhappy, either. Not really. I mean, we've all got jobs, careers even. We've got no real responsibilities short of a few (thousand) loan repayments and a regular hair wash. No. We're not unhappy at all. We just know that we could be happier.

It's all about love, you see. When you don't have it, it seems to be all there is. And we want it. Us women want that nerve-shattering, all-encompassing, ground-breaking love that takes our breath away, while giving us a reason to breathe. We want to wake up next to someone and wonder if we're still asleep because the person of our dreams is beside us. Disgusting, really, isn't it. It probably doesn't exist. It's every OC/Dawson's Creek/James Bond storyline ever written and it's not even real, but it doesn't stop us all wanting it anyway.

The cold hard truth about love is that it finds us when we don't expect it... even though we spend the whole time doing nothing but expecting it.

And when our movie-style Prince sneaks up on us, taps us on the shoulder and sets our heart on fire, we forget the way we scowled at other couples in bitter scorn. We embrace the way it's now us, smiling into our computer screens, littering emails with kisses and stalking his facebook page to make sure his relationship status doesn't read as ‘single'. We love how it's our turn to scribble love hearts on notebooks in meetings, cook chicken dinners for two and book holidays for two, and make dinner reservations for two. We don't look down at the unmarried and unbetrothed as unworthy, because we remember how it was to be one of them.

We're just really glad we're not one of them anymore.