Picture This

We all know that a picture paints a thousand words but with my kind and me, you are far more likely to receive a novel. If you know what to look for, my use of pictures is a helpful indicator for you. Initially, I will take hundreds of pictures of you as I shower you with compliments. I will also ensure there are thousands of pictures of us, wearing beaming smiles, radiating out our long-standing love (of three days so far). These pictures will be taken in a sun-drenched location, on a ski-slope, outside the theatre, at restaurants, at the game and so on and so forth. These markers of happiness and location will be plastered all over my phone and social media as part of my Relationship Bulletin (see post) and also a general declaration to the world. Look at us together, see how happy and content we are. This is going to last forever.

Wait a number of months and then ask to see the photos of my phone. I will be evasive and no doubt pick a fight and engage in one of my numerous manipulative techniques to deflect you from pursuing this line of enquiry. The reason? You are no longer clogging up my photo album, in fact I will have stored there various pictures of my new target. None will have been taken with her consent. No, these photos might be surreptitious ones taken at work or most likely copied from her Twitter feed and Facebook account. You might think in the evening that I am sat poring over our photos. Not a chance. I am studying my next source of fuel.

You will also notice a reluctance for me to pose in photographs with you. I will come up with all manner of excuses and invariably suggest we have plenty of pictures we do not need any more.

“Honestly, you take so many selfies, anyone would think you were a narcissist,” I will declare in a delicious moment of irony. I will be refusing to appear in a picture with you and slowly removing all those pictures of us and you from social media accounts. I will not do it in once fell swoop ; that is too obvious. Instead, I do it little by little, imagining I am erasing a little bit of you each time. My version of a death by a thousand cuts.

If you do manage to get a picture of me unawares there will not be the brilliant smile I always used to flash, instead it will be a scowl. If I submit to a posed photograph the smile will be thin and the eyes will be cold and dark, just like how my heart feels for you.