Mid February is a terrible time for us single people. Not only is it Valentine's Day, but there's the return of Married at First Sight to deal with as well. There are advertisements for dinners for two, for romantic weekends away. We're watching weddings nightly on the television - and yes, we know they're fake, but who can't help but get worked up by women dressed in white and judgy tattooed bridesmaids - and hoping that at least one of the couples actually finds true love.
But here's the question I ask myself, at 53, five years on, do I, if the situation was to arise, have I got any love left to give?
I watch the "more mature" couples on MAFS - and this year there's only one, Mishel and Steve, who are close to 50 - and wonder, aren't they too tired for all of this, aren't they, as Air Supply so succinctly put it, all out of love?
I sometimes wonder if I am.
Driving home with the boy on Valentine's Day I dared voice a comment about how I sometimes wonder why, when I look about the circle of friends and acquaintances who were divorced about the same time as me, why I am the only one who has not yet repartnered, whether that be after four months, or four years. What is wrong with me I dare ask.
He got kind of annoyed. It's because you're not willing to settle mum, he said. How dare you think there is something wrong with you, he said. He knows, and I know way too well, that there is plenty wrong with me. But who doesn't, at 53, have plenty of faults? But I loved the idea that he knew what settling was all about. And he was against it.
He'll learn most of us do it. Fall into relationships with people who aren't quite right, but, at the same time, are people you can't really fault. Some of us end up marrying them. Spend a lifetime with a person because we thought they'd be a good partner, that they'd support our goals and aspirations, who maybe, when the time came, might be a good parent. They were probably all of those things, but something was missing. Who knows what attributes are meant to be important in a life-long relationship. Are relationships even meant to be life long?
So many questions to be pondering in mid-February.
A few years ago I contemplated applying for Married at First Sight, but when the first few questions on the entry form were about your weight and how many social media followers you had, I knew it wasn't for me.
Just a week ago, on the recommendation of a friend, I contemplated joining a certain website that might perhaps match you with some other elite person. But how can you explain what you're really after on some data entry sheet that asks you whether you think you're ambitious, or sociable, or judgmental. Judgmental? Only of ridiculous personality quizzes.
How would I ever explain to the experts on MAFS, even after Trish had me sniffing random t-shirts in the laboratory, and John had dissected my childhood, what I might want out of a relationship that could indeed last the 30 years I might have left.
Here's what I do know. I know I'm not going to settle for middling ever again. There's a word we don't use enough. Middling. A few old people I know say it every now and again. My nan did. Fair to middling, she would say. It was never a positive thing.
I know too, and even though Ivan/Eevan said it on MAFS the other night, I want to find someone whose face brings me comfort. I have this thing. Is this a face I could wake up to every morning? How soon we end up waking up to the back of someone's head. But a face that makes you smile every time you see it, every time. A face that makes your panties tingle. A face you want to hold between two hands as you kiss it.
I know too that I want someone who is capable, able to fix the cracks in my pool as well as the cracks in me. Well not fix, but at least patch up with some strong builder's glue. Someone who can plug the parts of house and home and heart that leak through wear and tear.
Someone I can feed who won't complain about the marble of fat through a steak, who'll settle in at a table on Sunday with a bottle of wine and a roast, a serve of crispy pork crackling and fluffy potatoes. Someone who will not want gravy on the side.
But how do you explain all those things to February, who wants romance, urgent and immediate, hard and fast. While there's a time for hard and fast, how do you explain some things are worth waiting for?
Like March.