Make sure your love letter goes straight to her heart
A new book offers some passionate inspiration. By Declan Cashin
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St Valentine's Day is nigh, and this week countless love-struck romantics across the country will be passionately (or frantically?) trying to think of ways to express their affection for their little love bunnies.
With that in mind, one might get inspiration, or at the very least, reassurance, from I Love You With Custard on Top, a new book that is stuffed with real-life notes and creative outpourings, all made in the name of love.
The book is compiled by Oonagh O'Hagan, author of the best-selling I Lick My Cheese, which collated a range of passive-aggressive notes exchanged between disharmonious flatmates.
For this project, O'Hagan, a fashion graduate and lecturer by day, made a direct appeal to the public for their various forms of romantic correspondence to be included (anonymously) in the book. The results are a mixture of the sweet, the funny, the naughty and the downright bizarre.
"You'd be amazed at how much people want to be involved," she says. "I think they like the idea of making something permanent, but also find it's therapeutic to get these notes out of their system. If they don't have ownership over it any more, then it becomes something new. It can add to the meaning of the items, or take away from it, depending on what they want."
O'Hagan believes that discovering and nurturing our sense of romance is an important rite of passage, even in the cynical and hard-edged times we live in today.
"We like to think we're sophisticated, but we're still quite primitive. We want to fall in love, we experience heartbreak, and we learn from that process. It's important to go through that. So in a way the book could qualify as self-help.
"I meant it to show empathy so people could think, 'God, yes I've done that', or, 'At least I'm not the only person'. Hopefully they can laugh about it. It would be a good thing to give people on the cusp of puberty."
Not surprisingly, text messages and emails feature in the book alongside the more traditional hand-written forms.
Even though our means of communication have changed dramatically in the last decade, O'Hagan doesn't necessarily believe that it has demeaned romance.
"I think technology has just re-invented romance," she says. "As I got notes that I could tell were hand-written in a fit of passion, I also got emails that were clearly written in the same state.
"Also, despite advances in texting, email and instant messaging, I still think people like to write things with a pen in their hand. It feels more intimate if you're happy, and more cathartic if you're angry. Certainly if you're in a relationship or living in close quarters, you'll still write notes to one another."
Some notes were too extreme to make the final cut. "I made a terrible error in judgment and put an ad looking for contributors on a dating website," she recalls with a laugh. "I got some really hardcore images and prose back. For instance, a guy sent me some notes that he'd sent to a former page-three girl. I felt these were disturbing in a 'Has this person some kind of deep issue?' kind of way. I didn't want to frighten people."
Given the topic of the book, it's fitting that O'Hagan confesses to her own embarrassingly effusive love scribblings. "My cringiest story also turned out to be most romantic moment of my life," she reveals.
"The cheesiest thing I've ever written was in my own diary when I was 13 or 14, and it was about a guy that I obviously thought was the best thing ever. I even put hearts next to the diary entry as my own code for seeing him. I look back on that and it's excruciating.
'What's funny is that about a decade later when I was 23, I met that same guy -- and now he's my husband. At some stage I felt I had to tell him about that diary, so I showed it to him. He wasn't too freaked by it. I think he was even strangely touched.
"I think that's a very good lesson in life. I'd forgotten about him; I'd got over him; I'd got him out of my system. Then when I met him later, it was obviously the right time for both of us. We both had to go around the block a bit before we were ready for each other."
'I Love You With Custard On Top and Other Notes From the Wilder Shores of Love' by Oonagh O'Hagan is out now (published by Little, Brown) €10.99
Irish Independent
