Once, over a decade ago, I dismayed a group of women friends who were discussing their aspirations for relationships and marriage partners by saying that what I wanted was to find someone I could more or less bear to live with and start a family with them. They assumed I was being flippant, and when I told them I wasn’t demanded to know why I set my standards so low. What about love, what about passionate romantic feeling? Oh, I said, there’ll always be more than enough of that to go round. I want someone I can share a bit of peace and quiet with; post-coitally as may be. The idea that one might regard sexual excitement as a bother, and desire sex primarily for its calming effects, scandalised them further. But, again, it’s not difficult to get turned on. Distracting, certainly, and sometimes in a good way - it can rescue you from introspection, abruptly change the register of a situation, liven up a bus journey no end. But it’s just part of life, part of our animal existence; there’s nothing all that special about it.

Some people have a mental model of erotic life as excitement, adventure and self-realisation; other people feature in this model as sources of stimulus and objects of pursuit, or occasionally as partners in crime (this being the intersubjective configuration in which two people collaborate in objectifying everyone else). Others regard it as a search for contentment, and emphasise compatibility, care and affection. For the former, “the one” is the person who fills life with excitement and stimulates you into becoming everything you always wished you could be; for the latter, it’s the person you “fit” with better than any other - the person whom it is least like being around another person to be around. It’s not obvious that these are identical goals, but what they do have in common is that in either case the other person essentially disappears. The person who “completes” me by enabling me to become the joyful achiever I always wanted to be must never obstruct, object or criticize, but affirm everything I do unconditionally. The person who cushions my uncomfortable relationship with the world, soothing my cares and relieving my burdens, must never confront me with cares of her own (that I am not myself immediately able to soothe) or present any sharp corners of her own.

What I was getting at by saying that I wanted someone I could more or less bear to live with was that I wanted an endurable level of friction, contrariness and mutual insolence: someone who’d get in my way a bit, someone I’d know was there. This wasn’t (to my mind) settling for less, but identifying the real content of the relationship, the turbulent process enveloped by the romantic mise-en-scene. Of course there’s a problem with trying to identify the real in this way - one might end up valorising unpleasantness for its own sake, stirring things up in order to keep the relationship “interesting”. But as a refusal of the teleology of “the one” it was a good move to kick off with, and I’ve never regretted (for long) choosing to see things that way.