Cardboard fruit

Thinking romantic love and intense one-to-one relationships are going to fix anything is both mistaken and insane. Society doesn't know this. Even when you discover this truth, you need to learn it for yourself the hard way.

Imagine eating sugar-coated cardboard fruit. Eventually, you'd become sick and realise there was no nutritional value in the cardboard. It's only the rarest person who can then set bottom lines and become sensible and Very Grown-Up about love, romance, sex, dating, relationships, and Feelings. Most people need to lick and eat all of the cardboard fruit throughout the whole forest until they're sick, bloated, bilious, red-eyed, and rueful before they stop.

I don't believe in restraint, control, especially self-control, lines (top, middle, bottom), or anything else until you've sucked the damn thing dry. Until then, go out there, mess everything up. Go wild. Let it all hang out. Do exactly what you want to do. No holds barred. It's frankly quicker and less painful. Go and fall in love with eight people at once and have sex until you're covered in bruises and can't walk straight and find yourself blinking, gaunt, dazed, and bedraggled in some damnable dawn. Do that a few hundred times. And then giving all of the vacuous nonsense up will be the easiest thing in the world, because you'll know the game is over and you were the prize chump from the very start: the house wins, and everyone loses.

But it's no good telling anyone this. If you do, they won't believe you, and, even if they do, they'll feel frightfully deprived if they try and act on this knowledge. They'll be running round free, desperate to be banged up behind bars.

Whatever it is, go and do it till you're sick to the stomach and it gives you up. Then, recovery will become simple, clear, and surprisingly easy.