Love and advert

"I wanna be adored", sang Ian Brown of the Stone Roses. Well I don't. Not anymore. For as Oscar Wilde said: I was adored once (or twice), and it didn't lead to anything good.

It's all a matter of advertising. You put an ad for yourself and one girl bites the hook. At first you feel grateful to her, she's your first customer. "Your ad was nice" she says, "I now want to know more". So you show her to your room, "here's a picture of me when I was 8", you say, beginning to undress her with one finger standing on the verge of erection. Then you show her to your friends, introducing her as Vickie, Lise, Helen or whatever her name may be. "Your friends are nice", she says, "and so are you."

Then you flirt for a while, voluntarily limiting your meetings to twice or three times a week, cooking your burgeoning love over a gentle heat. "This girl is sweet", you think. I know her but I don't own her, I screw her but she's not my girlfriend, I take pleasure but I take no order. I could hurt her feelings but i don't want to, she could hurt mine and that keeps me sharp.

Months after that you have a nickname and she has one. She forgot your ad and looks at the product straight in the eyes. She's part of the company now, she has her say. There are things she likes, and some she doesn't. Marketing isn't part of the show anylonger.
You devoted yourself to your one customer, and considering the price you paid for the ad - years of maturing, building your personnality, moulding your sex-appeal, piano skills and cultural references - you start to feel angry with that.

Some girl takes interest with you in a trendy bar of the riverside, the one you have skipped away from ages ago, and your best friend comes to interrupt: "Sorry, love, he's not available. But I am." You go home brooding on your pride, fighting against your own nature and trying to forget. "Am I an asshole?, you ask yourself, or just the typical urban greedy piece of a man whose ego and hunger for more won't leave in peace until he gets poor and old and doesn't have a choice?"

You're back home and you watch TV. Not too loud for she's asleep. Scarlet Johansson gives an interview and says she broke up with her boyfriend and found another one. "He's the one, she says. I feel it in my heart". You think "I want to be him", but then again you think twice. "Maybe I don't want to be him. I want to be him and the guy after him, or maybe him and the guy before him". But you're neither. You're in your flat and she's sleeping. On TV there's an ad about a meeting website.

Time for you to put another one.