Never get involved with a mother. Should have learned from Oedipus....

So you know!

The Oedipus complex or conflict is a concept developed by Sigmund Freud to explain the origin of certain neuroses in childhood. It is defined as a male child's unconscious desire for the exclusive love of his mother. This desire includes jealousy towards the father and the unconscious wish for that parent's death. Later researchers used the term Electra complex for the same phenomenon in girls. (In Greek myth, Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, helped plan the murder of her mother.) Freud and his ideas were a primary inspiration for Carl Jung, who further described the concept and coined the term "complex".

The idea is based on the Greek myth of Oedipus, who kills his father Laius and marries his mother Jocasta. The Oedipus conflict, or Oedipus complex, was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness first occurring around the age of 5 and a half years (a period known as the phallic stage in Freudian theory).

Lady Wolfe.. 29th April

So it is 7am this morning and I am woken by my phone. Someone has sent me a
multi-media message. I smirk to myself, thinking, ah, Sicily has had a good
night out and just returned home. ( yes.. true.. I must have ruined my reputation in my gold year.. now I reverted from the clubbing queen to the middle class ipnotherapautized person.. ) She will be sending me a picture of a
diamante hamster or a woman dressed as a playboy bunny. Hurrah for
enterrrrrtainment. I love my friends.

I open the message.

It is not from Annalisa. It is a picture of my date from Wednesday, smiling
prettily, with the following message:

Good morning lovely You. x.
My eyes are still full of sleep... my love my darling x J x

I have three instantaneous and conflicting reactions:

1. Shag me now! I am in love!
2. Oh-oh, we had a nice time but I wasn't THAT charming. I have a stalker.
How tragic, how lesbian.
3. Uh, she's sent the message to the wrong person. It wasn't for me.

I ask myself the now-familiar question. What would the Woolfsta do? I send a
text saying.

Good morning. Gosh! (she is the kind of woman who makes me say gosh rather
than, for example, fuck me)What a nice way of waking up. But I don't think
you really meant to send that to me, did you?

I get in the shower. I listen to my phone ring and think, I need coffee for
this. Cup in hand I phone her back and she answers on the first ring with a
stream of apologies, so of course I apologise back and after about five
minutes of cross-apologising we get to the point, which is that:

She went on a second date with someone in York on Thursday night (what?
what? who was looking after the children, that's what I want to know.
Someone should inform the social services immediately) and has fallen madly
in love with her. This is it. This is the One. And she is so 'terribly
terribly sorry' for being so careless and accidentally sending the text to
me instead of The One but she was just so excited.

I immediately say, 'No no, don't apologise, I am just pleased for you, that
you've found the right person. That's wonderful. That's what we're doing all
of this for' (god, I'm good)

She says, 'Well I think finding someone is just about luck.' (faster
pussycat, kill, kill).

I say, 'Ah, but what about agency. If it was all about luck then we wouldn't
need to do things like Soulmates. We would just be swept off our feet by the
right person without having to look for them.'

It's still only 7.30am by this point. I am hyped on coffee. I continue
recklessly, 'Yeah, it's like Greek tragedy, right? You don't know how much
of it is fate and how much of it is down to your own failings. Discuss.'

Silence.


I go for a hour-long run on the Heath. Cardiovascular exercise is going to
be vital if I am to keep up this internet dating business. My heart is going
to have to become a lot more robust....