Charity OnePlusOne (slogan: ‘We strengthen relationships’) has just gone and got themselves a £2.7 million grant from the government to launch their new campaign Love Nuggets. Hush your sniggering in the back there, this is an entirely serious subject.
Anyways, Love Nuggets is all about celebrating ‘the everyday things people do that make the foundations of a happy relationship’. (Though according to one unnamed Debriefer, ‘love nuggets’ is also a slang word for testicles, but take from that what you will.)
On the Love Nuggets website people are encouraged to submit examples of their nuggets and, so far, they’re overwhelmingly maddeningly either women talking about nice stuff their man does for them (‘He watches my favourite TV programmes with me, even though he can’t stand them’) or men talking about the nice stuff that **they themselves have done for women (‘I give my girlfriend a backy on my bike when she’s late for work’).
Notice the difference? Really rather annoyingly there are very few examples of women bigging up what nice things they’ve done for men (are women just expected to do nice things for men?) and next to no examples of men shouting about what nice things women have done for them (clearly, women are just expected to do nice things for men). Not sure who this insults more.
Here’s a few choice ‘nuggets’ of men boasting about what they’ve done to make their women happy.
‘If she has to stay up late working, I’ll find something to do and stay up late too so she’s not alone’
Honey, (and since we’re on our uppity horse here we’re absolutely allowed to use the word ‘Honey’ without irony. Picture us using it like Samantha in SATC) if I’m up late working, the last thing I want is you bashing around in the background dropping ‘helpful’ suggestions and asking me whether I think your hair looks better parted on the left rather than on the right. Go. The. Fuck. To. Bed.
‘I sometimes re-schedule my boys night out if it’s the only night in the week she’s free'
Honey, if I’ve got myself a night free that week I’m either heading out with **the girls myself, or staying in catching up on Orange Is The New Black since you won’t watch it, thanks to it being about lesbians ‘and not the good kind’. Believe it or not my plans do not revolve around you and your boys’ night.
‘When we first got together, I’d drive 30 miles across the M25 just to see her for half an hour’
Correct me if I’m wrong, but sitting in an air-conditioned car for 30 miles on a motorway is not exactly the sort of journey for love that the **Proclaimers waxed lyrical about, is it? Plus, it’s really cool that you only did that ‘when we first got together’, because now we’re a few years down the line, these little gestures are all a pile of rubbish really, aren’t they?
‘I go to the cinema with her to see a film I really don’t want to see’
Hey! That’s like the time I went to the pub with you and your friends, or that time we watched The Expendables on Netflix because Celeste and Jesse Forever looked ‘wanky’, or how about when we went to that new burger restaurant even though I’m a vegetarian and ended up just having a bun filled with wilted salad while you tucked into a massive fat cow’s rump. Say it with me: COM-PROM-ISE.
‘I went to her mum’s birthday lunch even though there was an important footie match on’
Honey… Nah, forget it. I can’t even. Stop the earth, I want to get off.
Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.