Author Mhairi McFarlane is based in Nottingham, but writes about romance for a worldwide audience. Her debut novel, You Had Me At Hello, has been translated into sixteen languages and is being developed as a major feature film. In the run up to the release of her seventh novel, Last Night, she explains to us why she thinks Valentine’s Day is a tad overrated...
Life takes some strange turns and I’m not sure there’s going to be many weirder for me (well, never say never) than realising here we are in 2021, and my professional title is more or less ‘romance novelist’. After seven books about relationships in the women’s commercial fiction or romantic comedy genre – or if you want to be politically incorrect, chick lit – I guess I can boldly and fairly claim the label.
That doesn’t really sound like a job you can have, does it? With hindsight, I am dismayed I didn’t tell the careers advisor at Rushcliffe Comprehensive that was my ambition, given she thought I was an absolute joker as it was for saying ‘writer’. Though at certain points in my so-called career I’d have had to admit she had a point.
Anyway, romance novelist sounds like I eat Turkish Delight on a fainting couch and am surrounded by those dogs that look like mobile powder puffs, like Matt Lucas in Little Britain as Babs Cartland. Take this down! I have a sort of Pixar-looking fluffy cat and a lot of leftover chocolate from Christmas, so I guess I’m a fair way there? Totally up for the fuchsia muumuu, too. This is a long way round to saying that as a romance novelist, I’m sometimes asked for my opinions on Valentine’s Day, like I might know anything about it.
Well, here is my piping hot take: it is the antimatter of romance. It takes everything that could be romantic, and sucks it into a black hole vortex super-event of non-romance. If you want to pay over the odds for one of those pared-down ‘Presume You’ll Be Having Sex Later, Sir And Madam’ cringey subtext-laden menus which inevitably involve salmon somewhere and blush cava, in a dining room with a strained, funereal mood – because groups always make the atmosphere, like it or not – be my guest. Be Frankie & Benny’s guest.
Yes, I used to be one of those fools who bothered with it, as part of the mindset you have in your twenties where you think the world is looking at you, cares what you do and is giving you marks out of ten on your cultural normativity.
One year, on February 14, on a night colder than Jacob Rees Mogg’s heart (it’d not be a complete fix, but holding Valentine’s Day in, say, May would help a bit, wouldn’t it?), I was in a central Nottingham restaurant with my visiting Valentine. A few tables over, I spotted a colleague of mine out with his date. Buoyed by pleasant surprise and the cheap white wine I’d been chinning, once the meal was over, I tottered over to his table on my Valentine’s-normative high heels to say hello.
I still remember his expression as he looked up at me: like a face you might see through the porthole window of a crashing plane. After some agonisingly terse conversation, and observing the Paddington stare given me by his girlfriend, I realised I had not just intruded on a private conversation, I had interrupted them actually breaking up. Clutching my cellophane cornet of aggressively-priced single rose, I staggered away, muttering my apologies.
Now that encounter stands, planted flag-like in my memory, as the apotheosis of Bad Valentine’s. The boss level V Day, if you will. They had come for the rigmarole and pantomime of three courses of Thai cuisine to prove to themselves, each other, and the imaginary beady-eyed world, that they were still in love. Somewhere during the Tom Yum soup and prawn rice parcels with dipping sauce, they’d realised they were over. Stick a chopstick in them, they were done. No-one would plan to have the parting of ways on that night of all nights, so you can only assume the massive spotlight moment necessity of needing to feel something in the surroundings, dealt the fatal blow. Ugh. I feel giddy with horror just thinking about it.
Romance is a funny thing in that once you try to make it explicit, pin it down and demand it appears on cue, the reverse immediately occurs
Romance is a funny thing in that once you try to make it explicit, pin it down and demand it appears on cue, the reverse immediately occurs. BE ROMANTIC as a command is kind of like BE EXCITED or BE HAPPY, as soon as you’re told that’s the emotion you’re obliged to be experiencing, it flies away. Romance is in a smile, in a shared look, in a gesture, its charm and very power is that it is wholly specific to your individual context and the person you’re feeling romantic about. Which is why universalising and commercialising it is doomed. It is simply not on sale in Paperchase for £4.99, and do you need any stamps?
I could write a romantic scene between two people having a Burger King in the car park at Scotch Corner Services (no euphemism) but put those people in a gondola on a honeymoon in Venice, and I’d genuinely struggle. It has to be spontaneous. You’ll no more capture moonlight in a jam jar than get dewy-eyed over novelty pink lychee cocktails served with an embarrassing garnish of Love Hearts sweets, whispering self-consciously in a joint that’s rinsing you blind for a couple of steaks and a tarted up Gü pudding.
Call me a Marxist, but even the restaurant is going through the motions, dry-humping you – all this flummery only exists to keep the tills ringing. Like when caterers charge you extra for hire on a knife to cut a wedding cake, or a hotel wants more out of you for a Sunday roast served during December. It is, my dear friends, a con. And yes, I say that as a big romance lover. George Foreman liked the grill so much he bought the company, I like hearts and flowers so much I made them my nine to five.
But there’s no getting round the fact that Valentine’s Day seems to be making a coded statement to society. I Found Someone. Someone Loves Me. Two By Two Onto The Ark For Us. Suck It Sad Singles. Or more often: The Magic’s Still There, I Promise, Slash, My Wife Would Kill Me If I Didn’t. Once again, in making the gesture, it has the opposite impact. It lands as faintly desperate, as if you’re trying to prove something that doesn’t need or want proving, if it’s there already. Ugh. Do you know, I think I finally realise how ThaiGate happened.
After that incident, or thereabouts, I changed my own Valentine’s celebration protocols. I kept the champagne (but of course: don’t blame champagne for this mess) and the idea of a meal, but changed it to God’s finest food: delivery curry. We watch a film – which is a rom com if a decent candidate’s about, equally can involve guns and spilled intestines if that’s the better-looking option on Netflix. I mean, there was a Valentine’s Day massacre, it’s not like crime takes a day off. Thus applying the Sir Alan Sugar law to fix Valentine’s Day: no, not be a belligerent cockney Tory. Take the best of what’s on offer, and make it work for you.
Mhairi’s latest book, Last Night (HarperCollins) is out on April 1 in paperbook and e-book. Turn to page 40 of our latest issue to check out a preview excerpt
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