CDear Ester, I always read to you. Take care of yourself you say. Because it’s true, my past is full of “but I really liked that idiot”? And time is the only thing you would like to ask back from past loves.
But then it happens again and you fall back into it, without asking, when you least expect it. When you end up alone you don’t feel bad.
37 me, 41 him. He doesn’t even have an active cohabitation. I have an 11 year long relationship behind me, of the kind that reaches the point of getting married or breaking up? And nothing, we decide to get married and in the meantime he chooses his colleague. Skip everything. Life change. I bless my colleague. They are reborn. Then acquaintances with men who one day are there and the next not… and finally when I was fine alone he arrives, mature, with a certain social position, not bearded… impeccable suitor, books, wines, attention, writing to each other and seeing each other at home because now where do you see yourself? And then when should the next phase start, sex… a clear u-turn what do you say… but who asked him anything? He did everything and now he’s backing out?
Then you’ve been wondering all the time: if he arrived single until now, there’s a catch. But we women are like this, we always think we can be the ones of redemption. But I’m sitting here wondering: are these my years? A man sees me and thinks this one wants to settle down and start a family and runs away? Or is it the idea that we also know how to be alone that is scary? I don’t ask him anything. When do questions ever have answers?
I don’t know, I think you shouldn’t push yourself further if you don’t have the courage to get involved… Am I too rigid? Or are men becoming less and less decisive? Where did those who ran for even an hour with us go? do they still exist? I find myself thinking that we women are the new men and I don’t like it.
Disillusioned with reservations
HI.
D.
Ester Viola’s response
Dear D., this is indeed a question. They have changed, we have changed, nothing has changed at all because this is the problem of liking or not liking each other?
In the meantime, I have an answer. What crisis of the male? They have never been better, better organized and capable of turning the tide of relationships to their advantage. The male – who lately complains of a crisis but it is only a refined tactic – has never seen the luxury of hegemony as in recent years.
We already wrote that love has tired everyone. The male is so prevalent these days, so triumphant. The partiarchy has unbeatable tricks that have now forced us to invent and enjoy blackmail functions smuggled for independence: friends with benefits. What does it mean? All together passionately, with release to the male
lazy to say nothing worse than the authorization not to call. You don’t care, you don’t call back and that’s fine. Evidently this isn’t going so well because then the heart’s mailboxes are clogged with big-woman-fake-detached questions about how to manage these beautiful and intense friendships with men without suffering too much or cultivating dreams. Falling in love with it is
obviously as a crime: you’re an idiot if he ends up with someone else and you had expectations. Usual end, however.
And so we found another way to be double cuckolded and beaten. It took a long time, but we did it. Patriarchy will never die. Because we collaborate always and everywhere. Evidently unaware of the first law of the markets, especially the sentimental one: it costs nothing, it’s worth nothing. And We deliver, too.
What Happened to Us, taken from a book that I can quote once a year and would make less of an impression on me if it hadn’t been written ten years ago. It wasn’t perishable matter, apparently.
In 1999
a) you had a couple of calls a day (the classic ones, when the relationship had already stabilized) plus a few messages – the two things could very well have been excluded;
b) nobody liked writing to each other, at least not always and not as much as seeing each other. Except for those already obsessed with the internet, the pioneers of chatting. The ones that scared everyone a little, before we all became like them.
In 2020
a) We always start from a chat. The future often depends on the quality of the exploratory chats (by “future” of a relationship we mean: seeing each other);
b) at the beginning, that is, just when things should be easier, you have to apply yourself meticulously. You have to be more or less unforgettable in the first instance, in those three lines (if he rereads them the next day and finds them interesting, he rewrites);
c) a couple are not enough, as it was with text messages – you write continuously and for minutes on end. Live. You come out exhausted, there really is a syndrome of chat fatigue (dizziness and attention span that decreases);
d) as if the amount of time wasted wasn’t already impressivefor the extreme level of competition there is the new problem of photos. That is, in addition to writing to him, reading it, publishing on social networks (so that he too reads it, counts your likes and realizes how much you are esteemed even by strangers), you will also have to be pleasant in photos.
The minimum standard has become: very pleasant in photos. And the photos have to change constantly, or people will think you looked cute from one angle for ten seconds. However, if you add up 1500 lucky shots in a year, you will have been passable for at least 15,000 seconds, i.e. 250 minutes, therefore over 4 hours.
Of course, there are some mitigating factors. It was an era, the last century, in which a minimum of commitment was needed, a space of interest, an inch of intention.
These are sick years, should we conclude this? I don’t know, but you’re right if you think that unrequited love, uglier than it is now, has never been. The same goes for betrayal and indecision.
Undeniable generational advantages
However, there are some undeniable generational (collective) advantages. For example, withering away from sentimental disasters from morning to night is no longer fashionable, that was us twenty-year-olds of the last century. In a life without the internet, without a world at our disposal, without a thousand possibilities of inventing something good.