I also dedicate today’s song to the birthday celebrant, Dougie Morris, from Cleckheaton in West Yorkshire. Dougie is married to my niece, Carol (my sister Eileen’s daughter). Have a nice birthday, Dougie and leave some room for plenty of cake and ale. Uncle Billy and Sheila xx
Today is ‘April Fools’ Day’ and my song is appropriately titled ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’ It is a song that poses a message that I have long and often asked myself, ’Why do fools fall in love’.
This song was an original hit for the New York City-based group Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in January 1956. It also reached Number 1 on the UK Singles Chart. As a young man, I was constantly finding love in the arms of some impressionable girl. Indeed, I would be hard-pressed to find a time in my life when I wasn’t in love or when I wasn’t in the process of ‘falling in love’ with some young girl or woman whose charms had smitten me to distraction. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘being’ and ‘falling’ in love was to become a constant feature in my life ever since I discovered the sensual pleasures of being in the presence of feminine beauty of coquettish charm.
Whenever I have occasion to recall my conquests, my knockbacks, my bitter disappointments, and any rejections; whenever I remember those testosterone-driven years of youthful exploration around every attractive female I was able to put my hands on, whenever I bring these memories back to mind, I now know why I loved the idea of ‘being in love’. I now possess the seasoned wisdom of an older and more streetwise man and can no longer deceive myself as to the indisputable yet crucial distinction between the messages a male frequently confuses as having been transmitted by his brain and not his balls!
Only growing through the developmental stages of a child, teenager and man enabled my expectations and experiences to match what my mind, body, and feelings were telling me. I was eventually able to distinguish the difference between teenage infatuation and youthful curiosity. Only through emotional growth and increasing age was I able to distinguish between ‘what is’ and ‘what isn’t’; between ‘want’ and ‘need’, between ‘lust’ and ‘love’, between knowing the difference in ‘wanting to be with’ and ‘not wanting to be without’.
I learned that It is not uncommon to find reluctance in ending a sexually satisfying relationship/affair, even when love by both people is no longer present in that relationship. I also discovered how hard it can be for an unhappy wife who never worked outside her home and who is financially dependent on her husband. How difficult it must be to be married to the wealthiest of husbands and enjoy living a luxurious lifestyle, to decide to leave her marriage. It must be hard to leave a loveless marriage in order to pursue one's uncertain future from the penniless position of living off beans daily from inside a grotty flat that isn’t large enough to swing a cat.
Being conditioned to one’s privileged social status and high living standards, and being used to never having to do without anything you want militates against many a married woman ending an unhappy and unfulfilled marriage. Such a radical change in circumstances takes considerable courage to seriously contemplate.
As a Probation Officer, I often came across women in physically abusive relationships with their partners who preferred to stay within that relationship rather than leave it. Some women stayed, not out of fear of leaving a controlling man who regularly beat them, but because of a reluctance to leave a man they still loved and who they wanted to believe would someday change for the better.
Only one’s experience of the pleasant and unpleasant, the good and bad, the disappointing and emotionally devastating, the acceptance and rejection, the satisfying or suicidal; only these experiences can truly inform one whether ‘loving and losing’ is better than ‘never have loved at all’.
As a boy aged nine or ten, I once asked my mum, ‘Why do fools fall in love?’ My mother looked at me, smiled wryly and replied, ‘Because they’re fools, Billy. Because they’re fools!’
Love and peace. Bill xxx