Love is perhaps det strongest feeling we can have, and if it is true, it can linger. It is very difficult just to move on and forget the love you have had for one person, even if it is the best thing for the both of you. We often want to hold on to the both warm and torturing feeling of once being loved by this person, so we glorify the relationship and tend to repress the bad things associated with this. This is what rosy retrospection is, and it is one of the issues “What’s in Swindon” deals with.
The story is told by Marty, who is our 1st person narrator. With Marty as our 1st person narrator, we get very close to their common relation, but always from Marty’s point of view. He tells the story of him and his girlfriend’s relationship when they were younger, and we see how his life has changed drastically since they were together, when he explains that when they were together they “were in [their] early twenties then, the two of [them] pale and skinny and living in an exacting proximity to each other. [They] knew no one else in Wigan and made no effort to mic with people outside of [their] respective jobs. Instead [they] sat in [their] smoky one-room flat, talking, occasionally fighting and in the evenings making love.” (p.32) This shows how their relation was extremely intense and passionate, and it is understandable if it could have felt like they were the only two people in the world. They absolutely seclude themselves from the surrounding world, so it is undeniable that they have relied almost entirely on each other. When you live in this kind of symbiosis, you will have a very special bond towards one another, even if you are not well suited for each other. It can be easy just to remember this person by all that you have experienced together and forget that people change over time. This is what happens with Marty, who was once a young man who lived in the moment with his girlfriend Angela, and then he proceeds to grow up after their relationship, and realize that he cannot base his whole life on this one relationship, and needs to get a life for himself. This absolute seclusion from the outside world will of course tear on any relationship, because you simply cannot live your life in this modern society without any kind of interference, and this also becomes clear when Marty explains that “Of course, it could not last, and those last months were unbearable, horrible. Without either of us noticing it, the real world slowly began to encroach” (p.33). This quotation portrays how they both slowly slip away from each other. The outside world has caught up to them, without either of them ever noticing. This is something that happens in their unconscious mind, and even though they did not talk about it, the both agree on it, in some kind of way. It is an unrequited love, but not in the sense that one of them just left without explaining why or because of infidelity. They just could not keep up with their very intense love affair anymore, and they both instinctively knew that is was time.
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