Bricks

A small romance is happening in my classroom.

They are five years old and besotted with each other. They go out of their way to make sure that a part of them is always touching; a foot stretched out, or a finger linked on the carpet, or a shoulder leaning against the other. They enter the classroom next to each other, they sit next to each other, they fly their imaginary aeroplanes in line with each other. If I even make any attempt to separate them there is mutiny: tears, recriminations and frequently thrown blue bricks.

What is strange is that - while the little boy increases with confidence every week and seems inflated with this developing love - it is having the opposite effect on the little girl. Where once she would sit happily on the chair and tell me how much she liked rabbits and that her favourite colour was pink, she now glances at the boy every few seconds to see if he's watching or listening or proud of her. She is distracted; she is less focused; she picks up vocabulary less quickly. She cries easily; she is on edge to make sure that he is sitting next to her, or partnered with her, or holding her hand when we make a circle. She is always, always aware of where he is in the room, while he - in the meantime - happily gets on with his thing and just assumes that she will be next to him. Which, of course - being five and in love - she is.

As I sat and watched the little girl's chin wobble this afternoon - he had sat at least a metre away from her, and was nonchalently ignoring her and making a car out of lego - I realised that perhaps it has always been like that and I had simply never noticed before. Girls and boys - and then, in a bigger kind of classroom, men and women - react differently to love. Men tend to take love, and they add it to themselves: they become bigger, and better because of it. Loving and being loved makes them more than they were - poised and safe and confident - and they grow. Women, on the other hand, tend to do the opposite. From that first hand holding to the first text to the first date to the first kiss to the first night to the first proposal, wedding, child: women deconstruct love - take it apart, turn it over and over, look at it, talk about it, think about it, worry about it - and are consequently deconstructed by it. Whether it's anxiety that we wear the wrong clothes or have the wrong hair colour or listen to the wrong music or make the wrong kind of jokes or apply the wrong makeup or have the wrong job or the wrong dreams or the wrong shaped legs, we take ourselves apart and then prod at, criticise and destroy the pieces.

Love forces me, from what I can tell, to pretty much stop functioning. I stop writing; I stop drawing; I stop making jokes; I stop being in a room when I'm in a room because my head is somewhere else. I think about little else, and my head and heart become full of cotton and wisps and feathers and anxiety and criticisms of myself. When I am heartbroken the same happens: I just stop functioning in a different way, and my head and heart become wet and heavy and full of water and general self-loathing. From countless tears and phonecalls and emails and weepy glasses of wine in the pub, I know that most of my female friends do the same: they deconstruct love, and they use love to deconstruct themselves. I also know - from countless laughs and lack of phonecalls or emails and many, many happy pints in the pub - that most of my male friends do not. They're just happy they're getting laid and have somebody to go home to at 11pm who will remind them to brush their teeth before they get into bed.

So much has been made of gender and creativity throughout history - why there are so many more male artists and writers, why the Western canon is predominantly masculine, how money and liberty and freedom and power allowed men to achieve what we could not - but perhaps it's simply that love inspires creativity and productivity in men, and plugs it up in women. After all, the best and most famous literature in the world has been written by men in love - Shakespeare, Hardy, Dickens, Keats, Byron, Tolstoy - while the best and most famous literature by women has one thing in common: the authors are almost always single. Jane Austen, all three Bronte sisters, Christina Rossetti, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Harper Lee, JK Rowling: all alone, all unmarried, all unloved. Not with heads full of fluff or water; not crying in the corner of the room because somebody is making a lego car without thinking about them first; not busy deconstructing themselves or somebody else to see what they can do with the pieces. Free - without love - to build, to create, to produce, to construct. To make something, instead of tearing everything around and inside them apart.

When women talk about finding love, we never think about what we might be losing in the process. Somewhere out there, perhaps, was a man who could have made Jane Austen happy; the man whose absence or missed train or dinner party or penchant for brunettes gave us Pride and Prejudice. Maybe the world has Wuthering Heights because Emily never found him; because he took the wrong turn on the moors and ended up marrying a nice girl with pretty ankles. Harry Potter might never have turned up if Rowling's husband hadn't left her first.

I'm not Jane Austen or Emily Bronte or JK Rowling, but it doesn't matter. I want to be building something, and creating something, and constructing something. Putting something together, instead of pulling it apart. And it doesn't even matter what it is; it can be anything. As long as I'm making something that wasn't there before I started.

So I'm turning my back completely on love, to see what will happen. To see if it makes a difference. To see if I can produce something without it, and stop taking myself apart because of it. To see if I can make a car out of lego, instead of wobbling my lip in the corner because of a boy.

There is nothing I can do to save my little five year old girl. I can just keep my fingers crossed, and hope that in 23 years she'll finally work out how to save herself.

And maybe start building with her bricks, instead of just throwing them around the room.