Jon Richardson - It’s Not Me, It’s You

I can’t shake off my feeling that the only inevitable result of a long-term relationship is that you will see somebody else’s weaknesses and they will see yours. Eventually you will lose respect for one another and either break up or find yourselves locked into a loveless future. Am I right? Of course not! Can I change? I sincerely hope so because, as it stands, it is clearly me who is the loser, desperately looking for a keeper.

* * *

Friends warned me against being so honest in my writing, but since my life is not one of tremendous interest or victory over incredible hardship, honesty is just about all I have to offer. Too much detail not withstanding, the response to the article was fantastic and I received a number of letters and emails from people who had read it and wanted to tell me that they felt the same way as I did and suffered similarly with a desire not to be alone, unfortunately coupled with an intolerance of others. I also received a number of very kind, somewhat romantic offers from women who told me that they would be happy to step into the breach, as it were, and end my relationship drought. It would have been cynical of me to say the least to have written an article with the sole intention of using it to secure sexual conquests and, if anything, I felt almost annoyed that anyone reading the article would misinterpret my tale of being trapped in my solitude as a call to my arms. Through the various responses I gained confidence in the knowledge that I was not alone in what I was feeling and was pleased to note that I may have helped others who feel the same way. It seems the world is full of people who do not, in spite of what we see in sitcom and in film, go on multiple dates with people they meet in bars and coffee shops and who do not seem to know exactly what it is they are looking for, let alone how and where to find it. I therefore decided to write in more detail about what I see as the truth about relationships and how my brain works, and the result of that work is the book you hold in your hands.

If you are reading these words then let me thank you for not only finding the book but also making room for it in your life. I am loathe to spend too much time so early in our relationship telling you what you are not about to read, since that game could easily go on for ever, but there are a couple of things I would like to point out at the outset.

The first thing is that this book is not an autobiography. I make no apologies for the fact that I will not be writing about where I went to school, who my best friend was when I was five years old or when I first ate a kumquat (though the omission of the latter owes more to the fact that I’m still not entirely sure what a kumquat is, much less whether or not I have ingested one).

Where a childhood memory helps explain something of how I became the man I am today, it has been included, but this is not the tale of how a child from the cold wastelands of t’north of t’England worked his way up the ladder from being the guy in the kitchen who puts the little salads on the side of baguettes to fulfilling his dream of becoming a full-time stand-up comic. That is not a story I intend to write until I am sat at a scruffy old desk in a battered little potting shed somewhere in the Lake District with a dog curled up at my feet, confident that the most interesting parts of my life have been lived and any of the people I might upset or insult are not around any more. The year of publication of this book will be my twenty-eighth on the planet, so I do not consider for one second that I have had a bio worth graphing about, auto matically or otherwise.

Rather than being a chronological journey across my years, it is the tale of another journey – the most important journey on which I find myself – my quest for perfection. Perfection is what drives me in everything I do; be it finding the perfect partner, living the perfect day or simply constructing and consuming the perfect sandwich.

When speaking of the perfect day, people tend to imagine one spectacular event, the beauty of which overshadows any minor shortcoming which might have occurred up to that point – walking along a beach at sunset, drinking red wine on a shagpile rug by the glowing embers of a fire in a French chateau or, for a lucky few, making love at dawn on the top of Mount Everest. As special as those individual events may be, that’s not what I’m talking about at all; that’s not how perfect days work in my book. The perfect day is not a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, it is something that can happen every day if you’re willing to put in the effort. A perfect day exists independently from the tasks that need to be completed on that day and concerns only how efficiently they have been carried out. It begins well before the perfect cup of tea, it starts the moment you open your eyes – or, for the real hardcore, the moment you finish your ‘To Do’ list the night before, rewriting if necessary to eliminate spelling mistakes and ensure even word spacing and neat handwriting. So fragile is it, that it can be undone by so little as a stubbed toe or an odd sock. A perfect day is one without mistakes and they are to be utterly cherished.

I do not subscribe to the view that mistakes are a part of life; they are not. This is not to say that more cannot be learned from a mistake than anything else; that is true, but that is not an excuse for making them. Mistakes are caused, in the main, by a failure to plan properly, try hard enough or pay enough attention to detail. If you are willing to take personal responsibility for each failure, however small, then you can strive to eliminate errors altogether. I am of the belief that the ‘point of life’ is not a question, but a noun; an actual point-scoring system that rewards perfect execution of a task on a measurable scale:

* Made someone smile? Gain two life points.

* Made someone cry? Lose five life points.

* Dropped a spoon? Lose one life point.

* Cheated on your wife and children by sleeping with the ex-partner of an ex-teammate because you are a multi-millionaire Premier League footballer and you are arrogant enough to think you can get away with anything? Lose a million life points.

And so on.

It gives me satisfaction to think that not only is there such a thing as right and wrong in this world, but there is a way of measuring exactly how right and wrong something might be. People would like to think that the decisions we make in our lives are ephemeral and impossible to quantify but they aren’t really. Most of the things we do that will hurt other people are known to us before we carry them out, and rather than discover afterwards that there were hidden consequences to our actions, in truth we simply make a value judgement on whether or not what we stand to gain by upsetting someone else justifies the decision for ourselves.

The ultimate goal of my point-scoring system is, of course, to allow someone to become the Ultimate Human on Earth. I do not believe in a god, but I would like to think somebody somewhere is keeping score for us. New players are constantly being added to the worldwide league, international transfers are being made each and every day, regardless of whether the window is open or closed and, as is always the case in life as well as sport, the up-and-coming talent seems to lack some of the grit and honesty of the generation that came before it.

After each day’s play I go to bed at night, acutely aware of whether or not I won the day, took a battering away from home or whether the world and I ground out a well-fought draw. The commentator in my head goes on trotting out his clichés like sheep jumping over a fence to send me off to sleep, or keeping me awake if further match analysis is needed.