H
ow was work, darling, and can we drink each
other’s blood?” I said to Harriet on Tuesday
evening, licking my lips.
“It was fine, thanks, darling,” she replied,
“and what?”
“Our blood. We should drink it. It’s a thing
now. It will demonstrate how much we love
each other and how connected we are on,
like, a metaphysical and/or spiritual level
or something.”
“Can you put the bins out first?”
When Megan Fox, you know her, the Hollywood
actress — she was in Transformers and Transformers:
The Game and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
— announced her engagement to Machine Gun Kelly,
you know him, the — googles — musician, it sounded
very romantic. He asked for her hand, she said yes and
then they drank each other’s blood.
Did you not drink your fiancée’s blood when you got
engaged? I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t. I proposed
under an oak tree on a hill in somewhere like Wiltshire,
which was quite romantic. Perhaps a seven out of ten.
But I forgot the penknife so when she said yes, I gave
her the ring and we just walked down the hill again,
hand in ungnawed hand. Amazing we’re still together
almost two decades later.
But wait. Drop the scalpel. Megan Fox — you know
her, robots in disguise — wants to clarify
all this. It’s not what you thought I just told you.
“So,” she explained pithily last week, “I guess
to drink each other’s blood might mislead people or
people are imagining us with goblets and we’re like
Game of Thrones. It’s just a few drops, but yes, we do
consume each other’s blood on occasion for ritual
purposes only.”
Not, then, because Miss Fox is thirsty. Or Mr Gun
Kelly is iron deficient. Not whole pints either. Just
a few drops “on occasion”. The interviewer failed to nail
down what sort of occasion. Birthdays? Dental
appointments? Where’s Paxman when you need
him? But it’s clear this wasn’t a one-off, “hooray-
we’re-getting-married” spot of cos-Draculing. This
is a regular thing.
Do you not regularly drink your partner’s blood?
Until last Tuesday, I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t.CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
MATT RUDD
If I haven’t drunk my wife’s
blood, am I even in love?
I don’t even tell Harriet I love her very often. My view
on the frequency of I love yous is that less is more.
If I said I love you in 2014 and I haven’t said I don’t
love you since, then you can assume the situation
vis-à-vis love hasn’t changed. Saying I love you all
the time devalues the I love you. Harriet does not
entirely subscribe to this brilliant and undeniable
logic but now we’re drinking each other’s blood on
Tuesdays and nothing says I love you like a weekly
glass of person-claret.
Can I clarify as well? We are not drinking each
other’s blood on Tuesdays. Not even a few drops. Of
course we aren’t. Because the minimalist I-love-you
logic works here as well. As Confucius or Aesop or
Claire Rayner once said, the more grandiose the
gesture of love, the more trivial the love itself.
Sweeping statement klaxon: the couples I’ve
known who tried the hardest to convince everyone
else they were on some higher, more intense, more
magical plane of sexy super-relationship are no
longer couples. Those who didn’t care what other
people thought and just got on with it are all still
together and happy.
History is littered with people trying way too hard
to show the world how in love they are — palaces
have been built, statues have been erected, body
parts have been cut off, duels have been fought and
epic poetry collections have been quilled, all in the
name of demonstrating quite how massively
romantic a romance can be. Shudder.
But true love is not “Take off the blindfold,
darling, and behold, I’ve made you the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon.” Or “Put on the blindfold,
darling, and pass me those handcuffs.” It’s “No, you
have a lie-in, I’ll take the kids to football.” It’s “Of
course we can watch that film, not that film.” It’s a
thoughtful note on the fridge, or “No, I’m the one
snoring, I’ll sleep on the sofa,” or “I’ve made us a [gag]
goat’s cheese salad because you love [gag] goat’s
cheese.” It’s not complaining too much that we spend
half our weekly food budget on oat milk because of that
article you once read about unhappy cows and
bovine growth hormones. It’s long conversations
about nothing of consequence 20 years after
someone popped a question and absolutely no one
drank blood under an oak tree.
It’s all of those small things and a lot more and then
not going on about it like I’ve just done.
Don’t say it with blood, Megan and Machine. Don’t
say it at all.
I give them a year n
@mattruddHistory is littered with
people trying too hard to
show how romantic they are
The Sunday Times Magazine • 5