What Passes for Love & Finance in Winter

The cold arms of winter embrace the great urban mass. Even the concrete underfoot seems to take its hardness more seriously; skyscrapers stiffen and creak like frozen masts on an Arctic ship.

Sound carries further in the cold, trapped and condensed by the wind as it sprints down the canyons of darkened city blocks.

The voices carried on the winter wind speak of two things; love and finances, both of which – to hear it said – can provide a degree of warmth. 

And while the oddball poet or eccentric writer might derive inspiration from the ice-slicked, desolate cityscape, the unwed and unattached – singles, in the modern parlance – are exposed to the whistling taunts of the wind and pitying sniggers of frozen statuary.

Calm down, please. Take a breath. Pull yourself together. Just because the words love and finance appear in this little amusement does not necessarily mean that the content in any way relates to endless love or romantic love or high-yield bonds or prime stock picks or any of the love recipes and financial prescriptions so ardently followed by those who believe in love and wealth management.

First, let us define love. And if love defies definition, if it is an intangible feeling or an outright illusion, let us agree that the value of love lies in its dramatic potential, a bit of theatre, its power to transform an ordinary life into one that has a degree of spectacle, like a Greek tragedy or comedy. As for money, we all know that it, too, serves a dramaturgical purpose – class being the subtext of most classic romances.

You will notice that one can fall madly in love, but never sanely so; that one may fall deeply in love, but never shallowly so. With money, one is filthy rich or desperately poor, but rarely filthy middleclass. “He was fully rational and working part-time when he fell slightly love with her.” This doesn’t sound quite right to you? Perhaps that is because it does not conform to the love story and financial future you are underwriting.

It is late December. You are single. The sheets are cold. Savings are healthy but the world economic outlook is bleak. Someone isn’t committing, or someone is already married, or someone would rather just use the Internet to gauge the market and stream tubes.

Let us be honest, for once: it is an electric blanket you’re looking for. The Great Anxiety is upon you. Another winter alone you’ve sworn it will not be, and so you employ all the tactics. The dream someone could be a tyrant, a bore, a fool, a 50 year-old baldheaded American editor – and would you love this someone for a season? Yes, you would. The fear of being alone overrides good sense. Poor thing. Marry an accountant.

People need attention and capital. Isn’t the kid who commits a robbery really just gunning to be the apple of a court’s eye? Judges, lawyers, family members in the audience – playing their respective roles obligingly – with the kid as the star. He may be looking at three to five, but that’s the price you pay for stardom. And the same may be said of love: from an anonymous couple working in the same division at Company X to the stage of a wedding banquet hall, friends and family looking on, and finally, happiness and joint bank accounts ever after.

Now before you accuse the producer of this little amusement of being jaded and sarcastic (or worse, of being a bitter veteran of the battle for love and wealth), think about the fear of being alone, with no direction home, at a time when GDP growth is about to dip below nine per cent. Now the riddle of love and riches, that eternal mystery of forever love and fortune, could very well be hidden in the marrow of this tale, though it might also be a fiction, a fantasy, a numbered bank account in Zurich.

"All you need is love" sang the Beatles. And they may have had a point. For anyone who has an abundance of love – the love of all animate things – can expect a substantial upside. It is only when love demands something that it becomes weaponised. As you have proven this wintry season, my darling.

To read more from our resident satirist Rupert Pupkin, click here.