Relationships

An Oxford don has raised the prospect of producing a cocktail of hormone pills that would help you to fall in love. What an appalling prospect! You might suddenly find yourself consumed with an irresistible desire for Ian Blackford. The ancients knew what was really required: a means of ensuring that the object of your passion fell in love with you. The ancients regarded an attack of lust as the same sort of experience as falling ill or being afflicted by madness. So a man in love with a woman would write a love spell asking a god or some unpleasant earth spirit to, for example, ‘burn, torch, the soul

Women who fall in love with killers have always fascinated and repulsed me. What drives them? Do they think they can ‘save’ these men? Are they secret sadists, acting by proxy? Are they masochists, getting a cheap thrill from communicating with someone who has tortured a fellow woman to death? Bonnie and Clyde syndrome, also known as hybristophilia, puts the case that, as an evolutionary reproductive trait, some women can be drawn to ‘bad boys’ who are prepared to break rules/laws and are therefore ‘stronger’. I was pleased to see that Denmark has now banned prisoners serving life sentences from starting romantic relationships while in jail. The ban was introduced

Spring is coming, the roadmap out of lockdown is here, and the faint signs of an End To All This can be seen, in smoke rings, on the horizon. I scan the list of freedoms with impatience: schools, if you must, parental visits in parks, fine, fine, but when will I get to see my girlfriend indoors? If you express some level of frustration with lockdown life, the worry is that you will be taken for someone who believes the right to spread plague is enshrined in the Magna Carta or that society took a wrong turn with the suspiciously foreign antics of Louis Pasteur. I am keen neither to

As a proud resident of Sussex, I had to laugh when I heard that Facebook had threatened to ban references to Devil’s Dyke — the 100-metre-deep South Downs valley which has been a tourist attraction since Victorian times — for ‘violating community standards on hate speech’. The touchy bots even slapped a 48-hour ban on a man who posted a photo of a bus bearing the beauty spot’s name as a destination with the caption ‘Heading up to the Dyke’. It’s nutty, but it sparked a serious thought: where have all the lesbians gone? Just the other week the lesbian Joanna Cherry was sacked as the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for

Q. My husband and I have two single friends who we believe should be introduced. In days gone by, we would have held a dinner or drinks party in order to do so. But with all the lockdowns, it is proving hard to get them in the same room. To make matters more difficult, they are both conscientious types and have moved to their respective family homes in the countryside to offer support to their parents. How should we introduce them? A Zoom call seems so unromantic.— Name and address withheld A. Much better to ambush the couple by inviting them to attend Zoom drinks to celebrate some confected achievement

Now and then Were households allowed to mix at Christmas during the plague? Samuel Pepys’s diary entry for 25 December 1665: ‘To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding… which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition… thence to my Lord Bruncker’s by invitation and dined there…’ Festive fights Do divorces really increase thanks to Christmas? Divorce lawyers often say they’re especially busy after Christmas, as couples seek to untie the knot after a fractious time. But since the HM

I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of den mother to a large group of people who believe the risk of coronavirus has been exaggerated, and it dawned on me that this could be a useful service for them. The idea is that if you’re a Covid realist you don’t want to go out with a hysteric who thinks the lockdown is being eased too quickly and frets about a ‘second wave’. You probably wouldn’t even be able to arrange a first date, let alone manage a kiss at the end of the evening. What you need is

Just before lockdown began, Matt Hancock and Dr Jenny Harries presented the nation’s daters with a stark dilemma. Non-cohabiting couples, they advised, should either move in together for the duration or stay physically apart. Couples who barely knew each other’s surnames were catapulted into levels of intimacy that would normally have evolved over years and the enforced lovebirds were soon living like old-style pensioners, spending every moment in each other’s company, arguing over hand sanitiser brands and giving one another dodgy haircuts. For the large pool of existing singletons, the picture was radically different. Gone was the usual flurry of social engagements, and even the possibility of meeting someone at

Back in April, The Spectator ran a feature in which the partners of regular contributors wrote about what it was like being stuck in quarantine with the likes of us. What Caroline had to say was not very flattering: ‘Toby spent the first week of lockdown in bed convinced he had coronavirus. He didn’t. He is a complete hypochondriac at the best of times and this pandemic has sent his anxiety levels through the roof. He was so worried about catching it that the stress led to a bout of shingles, which is what actually laid him up.’ Ever since then I have been trying to prove to her that

I’d never have thought I’d be good at doing nothing. Or rather walking the dogs, loafing in the sun, trying to match Paul Hollywood’s tête de brioche (third time of trying), doing jigsaws and reading hefty books. But I’m lovin’ it. The only thing that stresses me — indeed brings me out in lower-deck language most unbecoming to an octogenarian — is doing live shows or podcasts on Zoom or Skype while our broadband buffers, stutters or crashes. And some poor presenter is trying to fill the gap, desperate for me to make the technology work. Calls to Relate have tripled under lockdown I’m told because seeing too much of

It’s heartening to hear that while it’s curtains for the economy, our domestic lives are on the up. In Wuhan there was a spike in divorce rates, and in Japan, wives have been sending their husbands away to hostels. But here in Britain, there’s love in lockdown. Sales of engagement rings have risen significantly since we were all told to stay at home and couples have found creative ways to pop the question in their living rooms and local parks. For those who have been married for longer, working, eating and sleeping at home together 24/7 for weeks on end has been a strange novelty — an odd throwback to

One of the nice things about having a column in The Spectator is that I get a chance to reply to all the smears and lies published about me. Which brings me to my wife’s remarks in last week’s magazine. The editor asked the partners of regular contributors to write a few words on what it’s like living with us during lockdown and Caroline was unbelievably rude. Among other things, she accused me of being a ‘complete hypochondriac’, said the pandemic had sent my anxiety levels ‘through the roof’ and ascribed my own life-and-death battle with the virus to a bout of shingles brought on by the stress. Needless to