Cplow Esther,
I’ve written to you before but here I am again. This time I have no story to tell but only questions to try to answer with your ironic, sometimes cutting, but necessary clarity. After more than 15 years together with the man I met at 20 (yes, at 20 I found “my person” and didn’t know collections of human cases, entertainment and various rip-offs) with whom I had two children and bought a house, I find myself wondering more and more often about this: Was Michela Murgia right or not when she said that loyalty counts for nothing but only reliability? That loyalty is just another name for possession?
I ask myself this because I have come to understand that I will never leave my family (both for the children, first and foremost, and for the profound affection that binds me to my partner) but I miss the sensation of an erotic dimension experienced as I would like it…
A couple of years ago I had a very brief relationship with someone, which then caused me a sense of guilt enough to end up in analysis and an obvious shake-up in my relationship, which nevertheless resisted.
But I have never forgotten those feelings. It was chemistry, pure chemistry. A sexual compatibility that I have never had with my partner and for which I am surrendered to the thought that I will never have. And chemistry, unfortunately, cannot be learned or built. Either it is there or it isn’t there.
He’s a good dad and I would never take him away from his kids. He is a solid man, an “engineer inside” and not just by profession: totally incapable of communicating and making a romantic gesture but this is nothing new, I have always known it and I accepted it anyway. He expresses his love elsewhere, in the concreteness of everyday life. No sentimental vocabulary.
Well, a deep love binds me to him, every time I ask myself about it I always know what to answer: I still want him by my side. The feeling is rooted but there is not the slightest passion. It is a love that is more like that of a brother. Obviously I tried to talk to him about it several times but he doesn’t see any problems. His solution is that things change over time and that’s right, that’s fine.
So dear Ester, the question is this: for your sake and that of our family, will I be able to accept doing without that chemistry, that erotic sphere that I lack forever?
I am a mother and partner but I am also a woman. I’m 35 years old, I still feel young to dismiss any pretense of sexual satisfaction. It is a sphere that for me, however, remains important in my life as a woman.
I can’t imagine another story intended as sentimental involvement but perhaps I would like one that was only body… that I too could finally find, from that point of view, a bit of satisfaction…
Forgive the brutality and lucid sadness of this letter.
I hug you, N.
Ester Viola’s response
Dear N., you rightly feel nostalgic for unexploded pasts that never happened.
Here’s what you missed. There is a collection of rip-offs that we call experience and with which we perhaps arrive at a kind of ramshackle sentimental maturity through painful ways that no one can do for us. One would expect original suffering, that the grieving Madonnas (us) would pierce their hearts with fun, while making a thousand unsuccessful attempts. When you suffer variegated at least it’s worth it. Instead, nothing.
Here are the things you didn’t have:
There was the long distance relationship. Mesi di: Never anyone like him.
The unrequited relationship. Mesi di: Never anyone like him.
The relationship corresponded to hops. Mesi di: Never anyone like him.
The maybe friend, the maybe not straight. Mesi di: Never anyone like him.
The chase after the ex who is with someone else. Mesi di: Never anyone like him.
A squalid half dozen (not even) fixed cases. In life you can find yourself or take the long way around (I try everything!) or after a couple of holes in the water, fall back on a compatible subject.
That is, someone with the characteristic: what he says the day before is valid the day after (it seems like nothing but it’s almost everything) and is slightly reliable and sincere. Then you change character, but that too is another matter.
There’s no point in deluding ourselves that studying the past is of any use, but let’s try anyway.
This happened and you missed this: with an asshole discovery (so much adrenaline!!!) you would have gone out for three nights despite the contrary opinions of your friends. After a month (when things were going well) it would have disappeared, you would whimper, your friends would have doubly mortified you with “we told you so”.
Unfortunately, those adrenaline rushes would have been imprinted in the memory, generating a terrible short circuit of dependence: either you give me love like this, or I don’t want it. It’s too beautiful that tension rarely satisfied and you want to repeat the pattern. If it went very badly, you would have spent about ten years of stupid replies, then, once the educational headlines on the Siberian walls were over, you would have chosen a good person, very reliable and yet. Sighs of lost youth.
Exactly how you are now. The long way around to get to the same place.
The problem is that now what seems like everything is missing. And it’s too early to calm down because you’re 35 and you also want to have fun. Feel the flesh on you a little. Which is quite human. And then choose among the possible alternatives. You could change everything, N.. See what the world outside has to offer, fall in love all over again, find someone else, start again, be happy. But usually those who want to leave have already left, and do not conscientiously write their doubts about their doubts to a mailbox.
Or you could choose a middle ground to ensure erotic games without collapsing buildings: you find a lover, you ensure the chemical reactions that you like best, live a little recklessly and gain in good humor. Be careful obviously: for certain problems you have to be very good at it, you also have to remain cold and prudent, you need shoulders of steel to make yourself stupid and know how to carry on anyway.
What is your character, N.? Where do you think is the place – for you – where life is best? The only thing that I think I have understood, in general, over the years, is that you have to know how to decide not based on what you want at the moment, but by considering the character you have in order to face the consequences later.
I found a nice conversation with Antonio Pascale from some time ago.
So reading between the lines: love, if it works, should be that dependence that nevertheless gives you independence, that strength of bond that gives you strength in living. move, symbolically from Olivia to Viola…But it is very difficult to move from dependence to independence. In short, the exchange in love – a much celebrated dynamic – does not always work. How come?
The most impossible thing in nature is great mutual love. There is a passage from Proust: it is so true that it depresses me (look, I would delete it from world literature)….
Of course, I know him… no it’s not true… I always lie about love… I don’t know him but I already agree. Anyway, what does he say?
Desires gradually interfere with each other, and it is rare that in the confusion of existence a happiness comes to rest exactly on the desire that had invoked it. I think any way you spin it, this phrase has a spark of truth.
That is, do desires hardly agree with the source that generated them?
You answer the last question.