The final instalment of the Fifty Shades trilogy topped box offices in North America last weekend (even the possibility of the film releasing in India is unimaginable) just in time for Valentine’s Day. It is that bitter-sweet day when ‘hot mess’ Charlene (for those who have been following the exploits of the adorable seven-year-old Ava posted by her mother Katie Ryan on Facebook) sets out to do what she does best — laze and offer some useful advice: “When you give somebody flowers you are giving them responsibilities” and ‘Social media should shut down on Valentine’s Day because I don’t want to hear your awkward love stories.”
For those who are already in too deep or are looking to get their hands dirty with some bad romance, here some ways you can make a lifetime’s worth of (interesting or traumatic, depending on how you look at it) memories, inspired by the Fifty Shades trilogy:
The introduction
Set-up an interview with your love interest, pretending to do it for a friend’s college paper. As you are about to enter your love interest’s office, trip and fall to catch his/her attention. Your love interest will then, hopefully, come over to help you up, at which time you can give him/her a wide-eyed, baby-doe look. You can then proceed to disguise the 36-questions to fall in love technique as the interview.
First dates
On your first date, a coffee meet, you tell him/her that you are not a relationship person and that he/she needs to stay away from you. You part ways after an almost kiss when he/she embraces you on the pretext of saving you from an errant cyclist.
The real first date
You rendezvous at your bachelor pad where you decide to show him/her your playroom: your den, decorated with vegan leather whips, handcuffs, canes and two red lazy boy couches with the best view of the video game console hitched to the TV. After a food fight featuring vanilla ice-cream and bottles of Dom Perignon, you work up an appetite for a gaming marathon.
Valentine’s Day contract
You propose to cement your relationship further with a relationship contract with detailed descriptions of roles, responsibilities, dos and don’ts, a la Sheldon and Amy complete with punishments for errant behaviour.
Security Detail
In order to ensure the safety of your partner, you secretly sell off his/her car and gift him/her a super car along with a security guard for all-day protection from sleazy colleagues and other potential love interests.
Airplane Rides
Learn to ride a glider in time for the next V-day and impress your partner by displaying your skills. Make sure to have a stereo system in the glider that can play ‘Love me like you do’ to console your partner as he/she throws up once the gliding begins. You have to own both, the plane that carries the glider as well as the glider and the building that houses the glider for maximum effect. Buffet breakfast is a bonus.
Strappy Helicopter Rides
This can be an alternative to the glider idea, but it can also be a supplement. The idea is to strap your partner in the helicopter carefully, tightly in order to avoid traffic en route to Whitefield, where your house is located. The magic is in the seatbelts.
Take an elevator ride
After a five-course breakfast where you only eat a few bites of pancake and cursorily sip at orange juice just for something to do after sharing a toothbrush that morning, you ride the elevator up and down the hotel in order to bask in the chemistry (what is it about elevators). The hotel staff, seeing as you are a billionaire, is most obliging.
The healthy date
After you make sure your partner gets a makeover (to prepare them for the upcoming meeting), complete with a full-body wax, you make sure he/she gets a thorough gynaecological check-up done right at home, with some preventive shots for good measure. The doctor reminds you about him/her about impending check-ups every few months.
The career enhancer
In order to secure your future, buy your partner’s company and discreetly ensure he/she becomes the CEO and you are the boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. This way you can make sure you pick him/her up at five. Beware, he/she may not be done by then but the personal bodyguard can do the job quite well.
