After a disastrous year at work and some very bad thoughts, young writer Ben Human does what anyone would: he downs an emergency bottle of red, leaves behind his beloved Karoo, and follows his girlfriend of two months to England, where he plans to stay alive, in love and employed long enough to write one unforgettable book.
Six months on, domestic life is looking very different from advertised as he faces the absurdly intractable problem of getting and staying married to Jessica, whose choice of wedding music bodes the very worst kind of ill for their life together.
Darkly funny and deeply hopeful, I Love You, We Said is the moving confessional account of an outsider battling to come to terms with writing, love and life itself as contact sports.
After a disastrous year at work and some very bad thoughts, young writer Ben Human does what anyone would: he downs an emergency bottle of red, leaves behind his beloved Karoo, and follows his girlfriend of two months to England, where he plans to stay alive, in love and employed long enough to write one unforgettable book.
Six months on, domestic life is looking very different from advertised as he faces the absurdly intractable problem of getting and staying married to Jessica, whose choice of wedding music bodes the very worst kind of ill for their life together.
Darkly funny and deeply hopeful, I Love You, We Said is the moving confessional account of an outsider battling to come to terms with writing, love and life itself as contact sports.
Weâd known each other just six months, Jessica and I, so the
trouble between us only really got going on the morning of our
wedding day.
It was going to be a filthy summerâs day, that first of
June, Year of Our Lord 2002; the Queenâs Golden Jubilee
weekend celebrations helpfully providing the public attention
vacuum we needed to prise open a last-minute gap in the
Ealing Broadway Registry Office schedule. My bride looking
comelier than ever â flashing eyes, flashing smile, damp
patches sexily rounding the under-arms of her sleeveless
gown, our baby forming in her bellyâŚ
My one job (besides showing up): to bring her beloved
Bee Gees Their Greatest Hits Double CD Compilation along to
the ceremony, so we could exchange our vows to the fervent
entreaties and crass insinuations of âHow Deep is your Loveâ.
The Registrar pressing âplayâ and âstopâ on the portable stereo,
if youâll permit me the sad and distressing visual.
You see how it is.
How was I meant to get and stay married to someone
who liked the Bee Gees? Who understood the problem with it,
presumably, and unmoved, pressed on?
It boded the very worst kind of ill.
But if Iâm being honest, I knew exactly what to do. What any man
in my position would, provided he knew what was good for him.
I had to lose the damn thing.
And a man, a real man, a man of the world, would see the
point of it, and know that it was beautiful. Wouldnât think twice.
All heâd know was that the fucking Bee Gees wouldnât be singing
at his wedding.
But I knew, as I opened the car door for her outside the
Registry office, that I wasnât going to do that. I couldnât let it
go, see, because it didnât really solve anything. What would really
change with such a shallow stunt?
And that, long story short, is how it came that I brought the
accursed thing along, burning (truly) to have a discussion about
it, one that would convince her of the crime of music like it being
played on a day when life-long memories are made.
The issue I couldnât get past was this: In no more than
two hours I was to be tied forever to a girl who liked beautiful,
vulgar music, whose idea of love, life and art was shrouded
in a kind of soft-focus potpourri-and-chocolate-box aesthetic.
The kind of thing that, ideally, would have been dealt with
long ago by any normal couple.
But to be fair to us, better late than never. In matters of
such visceral report as music or art or politics or crime or the
recreational value of drugs, say, or capital punishment or the
division of wealth or gender-based advancement â in all these
things, disagreement thatâs shied away from is merely filed
away, until it is summoned forth foul and festering one day. And
personally, I dreaded the wait more than the showdown.
But what difference could a conversation make at this late
juncture â or ever? To anyone else, hauling it out into the open
at this juncture would seem breathtakingly trivial and reckless.
Which was absolutely and terrifyingly true.
I was spinning out. Time to breathe.
I had a job to do and I had to do it soon, but I was staring
down the twin barrels of an impossible predicament: face the music
now, or make it go away and face it later. Over and over, forever.
âYou OK, babe?â she asked. The endearments, too, needed
work. I felt my head move slowly from side to side in a way I
couldnât control and hoped was passably imperceptible. In no
scenario did this end right.
Then another solution presented itself, less tenuous than an
argument about taste, equally pathetic, much likelier to succeed.
I would casually drop a hint about what balls it was, a man
having to listen to a band of keening peacocks with low muscle
mass in beige suits and brown shirts on his wedding day. A
hint so dark and toxic thereâd be no mistaking its seriousness,
predicating a fight so overblown it would live forever in infamy.
And a man, a dark man, a man of destiny, could have done
that too without too much thought, because it really neither
befits a discerning music lover nor a truly cool customer to stoop
to argue the merits of the Bee Gees. Raise a fatuous stink about
how uncool they were, on the other hand, and you might just get
yourself some resonance.
Itâd be her turn to be cool about it. âWhy didnât you just
say?â sheâd have to ask, eyes flashing stonily. And that silent
promise of payback would be a bridge Iâd cross when I came to
it. Besides, I found I liked her just a tiny bit cross. Drew her out
just a tad closer to the surface behind those relentlessly matterof-
fact eyes. Made the heart skip a beat and what all.
But I realised I wasnât going to do that either.
What man would straight-up ridicule his brideâs taste
in music on her big day? I was capable of many things, but I
couldnât humiliate Jessica under some false and insulting pretext.
No, I was going to have to do it the hard way; I would have to
win her over to my way of thinking.
So, hereâs how that went down â our first of five gargantuan,
totally bullshit battles of married life, all thanks to my childish
insistence on principle.
âYou know what?â I opened with pre-emptive bitterness, on
being asked where the CD was (burning a hole in my jacketâs
inside pocket, in case youâre wondering): âPeople donât get music.
They donât. And let me tell you â theyâre the majority.â
Nothing. Her eyes, so brown, mild and pleasantâŚ
I pressed on.
âBeethoven, Van Morrison, Thom Yorke â,â I intoned. âTheir
contribution has been for naught. But the tone-deaf hordes â
they reign supreme, somehow. Rather than letting themselves be
elevated by sublime composition and interpretation, they get to set
the standards in our musical democracy. So stung are they when
their taste in music is questioned, so convinced of the equality of
all music, that they devalue any notion of good or bad. To them,
relativism is an absolute. No right or wrong, just the Gospel of
Personal Taste.â
I waited.
Crickets.
I was going to have to kick it up a notch.
âBut in truth, Jessica, music can be shit, Jessica, or it can be
great. Taste is preference, and preference is genre. But discernment
is an ear for mastery. You might say itâs its own kind of mastery.â
Throughout being harangued in this way, Jessica responded
with the pretty, unconscious gestures, expressions and sounds of
one unused to arguments with Ben Human, would-be author
and past master of the self-defeating principle. At being told
she lacked discernment in music, she rolled her eyes with goodnatured
impatience, the kind already marshalling a comeback.
On hearing she was but one amid a roiling mass of musical
philistines, she smiled derisively â so sweetly and distractingly
unpractised in the arts of disparagement as to almost penetrate
my ardour and silence me. She frowned crossly at the idea that
refinement of her arsenal of critical constructs was needed above
all in this situation, and snorted with disgust at the suggestion
that oneâs â anyoneâs â taste in music was anything but sacrosanct.
But when it finally became obvious to her what little regard
I had for her music, and how poorly I thought it reflected on her,
for an appalling sliver of time her face contorted into a mask that
I saw with full and absolute clarity would become her default
countenance if given the benefit of five years with the likes of
me. It projected such outright fury, just this side of contempt,
that I thought I could read her mind: mine were shitty ideas and
theyâd never amount to anything like the achievements of my
precious heroes of philosophy, music, literature, art, and sport
(since self-flattering comparison with the stars must have been
what I had in mind, given my constant judging and failing of
everyone by the mastersâ impossible standards).
I was momentarily shaken, but continued.
âI donât expect you to understand,â I said, which is how this
slow train-smash picked up speed and certainty of outcome.
âEnjoying truly brilliant music is a solitary pursuit. Not only are
there fewer of the kind of person who understands this, but they
are cowed and bullied into silence and isolation. The Bee Gees
arenât bad per se. Iâm not saying that. Itâs good bad music, you
understand â competent and affecting and meaningless. Nana-
na-na-na-na-na-na-naaaaaah⌠Thereâs a way-ay, everâbody
sayay, to each and everâ liddle thihihihihingâŚâ
Iâll skip the details of what happened next and fast forward
to the both of us trembling with rage and righteousness, her
threatening not to go through with the wedding, and me seizing
on this moment to relent.
I said sorry.
It was a surprising turn of events, also for me. I was, in
fact, rather pleased with the late arrival of my all-male weasel
instinct advising retreat at the precise moment when victory
might be gained from it.
What was I after?
To get married: check.
Not to have the Bee Gees playing at my wedding: check.
It was an honourable retreat in my book, and timely. To her,
it was just too much trouble to prolong the fight, and she gave in.
The Bee Gees were out.
Knowing this, I kind of hated myself. I had taken something
away from her, on her day, our holiest memory. But I was greatly
reassured by how craven and sensible I could be in my handling
of love. I was a man and a prat, no arguments there, but I was
human â if not first, then after all â and now I too had a shot
at happiness. Nobody would question a man who put love and
peace before principle. A man who manipulated outcomes, on
the other hand⌠But we never spoke of the incident again.
In the end we forgot all about the CD and had a nice little
ceremony followed by a picnic in Virginia Woolf âs Richmond
Park, attended by my buddy James from back home, my other
South African buddy Shirley â more recently from Brighton, as
well as Jessicaâs cousins from Wimbledon and a friend of hers,
Jay Baby (about whom Iâll tell you in a bit).
Jessica had bought Orlando: A Biography in preparation for
my arrival in London, where I was to spend six months trying to
make a start on my writing career â her treat.
âWhat did you think?â she asked, on the way to the park.
âOf what?â She meant the book. âJust wondering,â she said,
modestly.
âItâs â you know â itâs good,â I said, unhappily. Her eyes
clouded over. Something behind them shut down, some button
I had pressed.
What did it matter what I thought? I didnât know how to
tell her. Iâd decided to make a go of writing and was struggling
mightily (and vainly) to write âto the limits of my abilityâ. It
was a task Iâd stupidly set myself, being of uncertain ability and
at any rate so directionless that I couldnât possibly do whatever
talent I possessed justice. What could I say? I hoped to improve
with practice. It was a drag. Maddening and confusing and a
massive hill to climb. Meanwhile, I had no right whatsoever to
say anything about any published author.
I should have just told her.
Under a twisted tree in the park James gave a comically
inexpert best manâs speech that somehow, classically, covered
all the bases and yet hit all the wrong notes â unpredictability,
patent falsehood, tactlessness and touching affection. Nobody
had ever made a speech for me before, so if my sins absolutely
had to be dressed up and trotted out for all to see, Iâd rather it
was James doing it.
Embellishing wildly, he implied a wicked drug habit at
some unspecified time in the past and a certain fondness for
âthe ladiesâ, eclipsed only by an unchecked abuse of alcohol
and general lack of polish.
Well, Jessica was displeased in the extreme, I noticed, but
she didnât say anything. And rightly so, I figured â life hadnât
ended. She may just have been ignoring it, for all I knew, but
something in the set of her mouth (thin, I realised â maybe for
the first time) should have made my blood run cold. James, whom
Iâd known for fifteen years to her one, was about to have his arse
frozen out of my life, and I didnât see the signs. To be honest, I
was too busy taking an enormous amount of stupid pride in being
reminded of what a glorious shit Iâd been in years gone by.
Then suddenly, life as I knew it did end, as it were. My
payback was swift, and at once so masterful and petty as to
render any objection equally small-minded.
Under the creeping stealth of sunset, the new Mrs Human
announced an end to proceedings, so suddenly and almost
entirely in passing that everyone was already packing up before
I knew what was happening.
Airily saying weâd all see one another again (a lie), she
indicated through shocking matter-of-factness that thereâd
be no discussion and no dissent. People from the old country,
up specifically for the wedding, looked speechless on being
dismissed by their friendâs wife of one day. The woman had some
cold wrath at her beck and call, their blank stares and silence
acknowledged. Well, good luck to his balls in her tiny little purse.
From one moment to the next, completely undetected
and uncontested, the day had changed from the glorious
unselfconscious now to the sorrow of time lost. How bitterly
thwarted and confused I felt! Shocked and awed at her fearsome
powers, I sneaked a look at her as she issued instructions to pack
up. Werenât there going to be drinks at the beautiful Tudor pub
weâd passed earlier? Surely we needed to get off our faces now?
How often did one get married? Was she not one-eighth Scottish?
Evidently so, but in the wrong way. Unfortunately, I laughed
a little then. When Jessica finally permitted herself a glance at
me, none of the conspiratoriality I so liked played out on the
precast façade that had taken the place of her face.
My world had tilted. I saw the lie of the land. I had the battle
of Sisyphus ahead of me with this woman of far more redoubtable
reserves than I had given her credit for, and I was friendless and
on a short leash in a city I didnât particularly like or understand.
I felt betrayed but infuriated by my own inexperience in the
politics of love, as well as my unguarded arrogance. I needed to
watch my wicket with this one, but that was for another inning.
Right now, I was out for a goddamned diamond duck on my
very first outing with an infinitely better half.
Oh, it was stumps for me and my shenanigans and my ragtag
bunch of hippy friends, shaming her in front of her family on
what should have been the best day of her life on that glorious
summerâs day in TW10 â and never again would I ever have it that
easy again ever. Iâd had my bit of fun and my precious misspent
youth and my stupid joke of a literary dream, and she was to
wear the big girlâs pants and run affairs from here on out.
If there was to be any love-making that evening, I knew
from bitter experience â and it was by no means certain â it
would be a sober, pragmatic affair. No laughs, no hot, breathless
nuzzling, just hard-won sex with a very practical woman who
was as tight-fisted as a tampon and didnât make any exceptions
and might at most permit herself a look of Machiavellian bliss
as she ground out a victorious and admittedly stately climax
atop my traitorous cock.
In hindsight, I donât think she carried the control issues
around specifically. It was merely part of her programming,
something a girl got by with in her family, which their menfolk
assented to and guarded against and attack-dogged in
observance to. We were destined to be pitted against each other
forever â she, hyper-stubborn and prescriptive in the mould of
her parents before her and her grandparents before them, and I,
poor idiot, pitifully alone in the world and dead set against being
prescribed to and out of my depth in this woefully small arena
of adulterior shit, to coin a phrase.
But letâs take a moment to recognise the important thing
here â my beautiful girlfriend was now my beautiful wife. A
stone-cold fact that I took inordinate pride in. Enough to keep
me docile for a bit, though not, probably, for long.
You see, thereâs something very wrong with me.
At the outset of Ben Human I Love You We Said Ben and Jessica are on the verge of getting married and Ben appears to be mentally obsessed and upset by her desire to play a Bee Gees song at their wedding. Ben considers it an important battle to win which he attempts to combat with as much tact as possible. Suspense then looms on the success of this marriage as the narrative flashbacks to Benâs childhood and his abusive father. Benâs troubled childhood doesnât just revolve around his fatherâs abuse, but it encapsulates the unjustified and at times unintentional animosity of his great aunt Tanâ Cassie towards him, âToothpaste uncapped? It was that Ben, sure as she was alive. Toilet seat up? Ben again. Broken window? Ben, all Ben.â
Ben decides from early to stop being a soft target and learns to scoff off baseless accusations. As Ben matures and his world appears to be a happier and saner place. However, he soon realizes he is no match for the wiles of the woman he deeply loved and had hoped to build a home and family with. Ben learns after marrying Jessica that she shares an apartment with a guy. There are more and more jaw-dropping revelations that unfold about Jessica and Benâs evolving or rather dissolving relationships upon marrying after three months of courtship.
Ben admits to being a member of the lost generation and he takes us on the roller coaster ride of the highs and lows of his journey. Incredibly he makes it to university and falls into the typical macho male image of alcoholic drinking, smoking, and having copious sex.
I Love You We Said by Ben Human contains explicit adult language and themes. It attempts to examine the pitfalls that occur after a couple promises to love each other for better or worse, for richer or poorer. Moreover, it examines the brokenness and fragility of the male psyche that makes him incapable of truly healing, loving, and developing into his best possible self.