Our columnist Rocko Schamoni has observed that the tide in the head is often low when the heart is overflowing
I’m standing in the Königsallee in Düsseldorf and I’m observing people. Look at their everyday actions. Men and women behave differently, which may have to do with social conditioning but also with personal disposition. When shopping, these differences come to light bluntly.
Wealthy women, for example, like to drag their husbands into the expensive inner-city shopping arcades. Maybe for advice. More likely to have a willing porter with you. Here the men often stop in front of the shoe, fashion or jewelery shops and wait bored until the women have satisfied their shopping spree. They swipe on their cell phones and dream of modern electric SUVs and cool digital tools. Sometimes they sneak away and hang around in front of the windows of expensive watch shops.
When looking at other passers-by and their behavior, I can think of new terms that could be used – for example, stupidity in language and stupidity in space. Men tend to be stupid in terms of language and women tend to be stupid in terms of space. What sounds like a classic gender cliché turns out to be true at the moment when a stupid woman has lost her way in public space and asks for directions with an irritated expression. Because then the dumb man has great problems to help her. Although he knows the space around him very well, he doesn’t know how to depict it in language. That’s called a classic lose-lose situation.
A small bridge leads over the moat in the center of Düsseldorf, with a few padlocks attached to the metal lattice. I attest to another sub-form of human impotence: amorous stupidity. In the past, the majority of people had to get married in order to be able to fight and bully each other for a lifetime. Since marriage is now considered old-fashioned, many who wish to commit for life go to a bridge and lock a lock with their names on it.
I saw it for the first time in Cologne, on this huge bridge over the Rhine. Over the years you could watch how the bridge slowly but surely grew. How, where you used to have a beautiful view of the Rhine from the train, a wall of metal slowly grew, a wall of metal and love.
You can find that in almost every city now: bridges that get structural problems because of all the love. Even in small towns, metal bars are abused for this possibility, and in villages I have seen people chaining their relationships even to fences. That is contemporary love, that’s wedding 2023. And I can understand it. The whole annoying and costly effort with the lawyers, the marriage contracts, the expensive festivities and the hideous family celebrations – all that can finally be left out: bridge-lock-feddich!
The lock industry has also made a giant leap forward as a result of this modernization, there are now “Love Goals” in every lock shop, hundreds of thousands more locks are being sold, which means jobs and ultimately a higher gross national product.
Who was the first to start it must have been a real visionary.
Others, unable to find space on these bridges, fasten their padlocks on those who got there first. These are relationships that are chained to other foreign relationships. Sometimes up to seven other locks are attached to an original lock from the first generation. relationship parasites. And if today someone detaches his/her lock from such a bridge and then various other locks are attached to her/his, then these relationships are of course immediately dissolved, whether they like it or not, it’s a proverbial chain reaction.
In the centuries to come, one will wearily shake one’s head at the name-strewn lumps of corroded metal that one will find under the bridges of our cities in the rivers and will know: That’s how love went in the early 21st century.
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