I loved this blog from Rob Mitchell and Elaine James’ Last Quango in Halifax. With author Rob’s permission, here is how it begins:
There’s a song by a band called the Wedding Present which like so many other songs is about falling in love. It’s called A Million Miles. It’s about that moment when you meet someone for the first time. The moment when your stomach spins. You can’t eat, you can’t sleep and yet despite this, as the song goes, you ‘can’t even remember the colour of her eyes’. The song connects with that first fleeting moment when a returned smile and a burst of shared laughter on the walk home together means everything. When your world is filled with subsequent endless telephone calls to each other (it was written in the mid 80s before text). It’s about that mad bit. The bit where the massive risk has paid off, even if it’s only momentarily.
I know it’s different for everybody but that song has always resonated with me because that’s how it feels when it happens. It’s a kind of prolonged Christmas Eve of anticipation. It’s mystifying, scary and the most exhilarating experience that you can have. Its the 1000-1 off-chance of a new human relationship that may lead to love and will involve lust and desire alongside, hopefully, some happiness on the journey. The risk you’ve taken was huge. The smile that might be unrequited, the humiliation of a misread signal, the shocking discomfort of a blind date from hell, the deeply personal hurt that comes from rejection if, as may be likely, a rejection is just around the corner. Yet despite that, despite all of that, we felt it was risk worth taking.
Love and falling in love. Seeing people fall in and out of love. Beginning and endings to relationships plays a huge part of our lives. I’ve completed two three year courses on issues around humanity and social care and I’ve completed countless additional training courses but I genuinely cannot recall ever being asked to write about love in any assignment that I competed. I have definitely never written the word love in an exam. I can’t remember a single lecture on love or certainly not one that didn’t medicalise it, or quickly move towards framing love in terms of ‘attachment’ or ‘obsession’. But love and relationships appear to be one clear thing that drives us. We don’t get to choose who we love or we can not prevent unrequited love. It is part of who we are, and can at times lead to terrible sadness. It is the essence of humanity. And yet, it is something that health and social care isn’t comfortable with.
As social workers you would think that our profession would be there when people needed help and support with love – it’s sort of in our job title. But in my career, I have found the most significant block in terms of our thinking about supporting people to experience the love, with all the risk it brings. I can recall on one hand the number of conversations I have had with people where there has been a positive approach to helping someone with any aspect of having that ‘Wedding Present song’ feeling.
It is particularly stark when it comes to people with a learning disability. Instead of love, I hear about sex a lot. Read the rest of the blog here.
Escaping the invisible asylum 