Here I am on St Valentine’s Day, all on my little lonesome. Not perhaps how I’d have liked things to work out, but I think the way things have worked out with the certain wonderful young lady in whom I took a romantic interest have worked out for the best. I’m not really bothered about Valentine’s Day or that I’m not “going out” with anyone, but it’s perhaps a fairly good point to muse on romance and ladies and all that gooey stuff.

I must say that I would very much like at some point in the future to have someone to love and cherish, to , to have as a friend and companion through every challenge of life.I do get satisfaction from helping and caring for others, and I do find that I need encouragement and support. Now I needn’t necessarily have a wife to give or receive these, . I find people fascinating, all their quirks and personality and uniqueness and ways of thinking and so on. To find someone to whom I could dedicate my life and who wanted to do the same to me would be an awesome and wonderful thing. To have someone special to get to know inside out, to share the rest of our lives together, is really quite an incredible thing. Quite a challenge, yes, to make that work, but one that by the grace of God I hope I can both attempt and be successful in.

If that ever happens, it’s a long way off! There’s the small matter of finding the other half of the couple! That involves the scary, exciting and heartbreaking process of getting to know someone, and getting to know each other to see if such a relationship is possible. That’s usually no quick or easy process. One of the things that I find really silly is the way that “going out” is often treated as a way of getting to know someone in the first place. I think that it’s far more sensible that it is merely the next stage in an already existing friendship. If there’s someone you like in particular, then there will naturally come a stage when you will have to decide whether to get to know each other to see if you are the right people for each other, and it’s only sensible to recognise this.

I think one of the problems in our culture is that we are so bad in relating to each other and communicating with each other generally is that many people simply don’t even get to the stage of a good friendship with many people of the opposite sex. As a result, they need to go out of their way to get to know someone. Unfortunately, another tendency is for us to be impatient, and in this current time we are perhaps particularly inclined to instant gratification. I think it’s better if we build strong relationships with many of the people around us, as a community, and then if there’s someone a person particularly likes, they get to know them further as a natural progression of their existing friendship.

Moving on to a slightly different aspect of relationships, I’m going to briefly talk about what I think of long-distance relationships in light of some of my past experiences. At the moment (and I hope she doesn’t mind me mentioning this. I can edit it out if she does!), my sister Hannah seems to be waking up to some of the practical problems of “going out” with someone off in a distant part of the UK. I think I’d be very wary of attempting to embark on another long-distance relationship. It’s all very well having romantic notions of love overcoming all, including only being able to see each other a few times a year, but personally I think I’d rather hold off for someone nearby, or at least someone I could see fairly regularly. Things can work out like this – my sister Becky and Rich are going strong in their relationship after a couple of years, but they were at least close enough for it not to be impossible for them to meet up somewhere between their two homes without spending massive amounts of time and money getting to see each other, and now that Rich is at Bangor, he’s just a bus-ride away. A pretty long bus ride, admittedly, but a bus ride nonetheless.

I’ve certainly come across some young women who are very nice people here in Cardiff and also elsewhere, but I certainly don’t have any plans or anything at the moment. (Also, I don’t know what they make of me!) I’m not really looking for anyone, as such. Of course, there’s always that treacherous part of me in the background operating my mental radar to scan for likely-looking ladies, but I’m in no hurry, and I hope that I can be content whatever God has in store for me. If it involves an intelligent, Godly and attractive woman, then so much the better!

PS I need to make some phonecalls this week for some of the stuff I’m hoping to write for Gair Rhydd – phone up the BBC about Doctor Who, maybe Philip Pullman for my author profile on him, that kind of thing. The joys of journalism!