Un message after years, nothing had ever happened between us other than an exit resulting in disappearance, on his part obviously.
We know that sometimes we find ourselves, out of boredom or for fun, scrolling through the past, fishing out moments and even numbers from the address book… The excuse of Christmas greetings, then New Year’s Eve, then the photo from the mountain… and so, photo after photo, message after message, relationships that were never worthy of being defined as such are reconnected. We laugh a lot, we joke a lot, double meanings, non-senses, in short, we flirt. We immediately sense a great understanding, so much so that we decide to “see each other again”. We know… second chances are not denied to anyone. It’s immediately complicity, chemistry, alchemy. I sense it from the first stolen kiss at 4 am on a step, like two teenagers, although both close to forty. Kisses almost never lie, or they lie less than the person who gives them. It seems to me that I have finally suddenly fallen into the beautiful things, the things that “happen”.
Three months of intensity and discontinuity
Thus begins a see-saw of messages and meetings, ranging from see you this weekend, to last minute “setbacks”, from let’s go on holiday together to “I talked to my mum about you”, from I’m coming to Milan this evening, he lives in another city, to last minute can’ts. All of him! Three months like this. Discontinuity, some lies, but intensity.
“So what do you do? Greedily you wait. You wait for that desire to be shared…” And then you can’t play the part of the “frustrated forty-year-old” who dots the “i’s”? You play, you play his game, sometimes you pretend not to understand, you laugh, you joke because after all, even if it’s a little, you get on really well with him and the game is fun! We also know that men are “slow”. And then he kisses you and hugs you like no one ever has. On the street, in public, at the bar, by the sea, at the station. Everywhere. And what are you doing “do you want to give up all this?”
Too available
And no “… it’s my challenge with destiny. I would like the two of us to be close for life.” I am kind, welcoming, patient, helpful…. too available, as I always am without distinction, in short, “without tricks and without deception” in my inexplicable naivety, a pity that at forty years old it is not admissible. But as we know, it is easy to misunderstand kindness and correctness, and those qualities that should be the added value to your person turn against you by increasing the enormous ego of forty-year-old men, who would like to appear like assholes, but who in fact are still clinging to their mother’s skirt. Nothing, they don’t know how to live on equal terms, they need someone to scold them and beat them up. It’s not enough to be beautiful, intelligent, friendly, autonomous, enterprising, self-confident, cultured, curious, in fact it’s too much.
The hiding begins. Diluted answers. “We will see each other soon…”. Not answers. The friends obviously suggest the only possible and imaginable solution: cancel the number!
Ghosting and the need to understand
You delete it, he rewrites it for you, you re-memorize it, you delete it again…. you re-memorize it, but the intent is to repay it with its own coin and disappear, as indeed all the most valid psychological theories suggest that aim to heal those who “suffer” the now full-blown disease of singles: “ghosting”. It’s not for me. I don’t adapt, I can’t, I don’t understand. I have to bring out what I feel, like pebbles, one by one my thoughts and emotions are transformed into words.
A message written and sent quickly at 5 in the morning. I dug too much for a relationship that lasted a few months, so they say, but in my opinion sensitivity does not have time as its unit of measurement. People are people, after a minute, after an hour or after a day and I don’t understand what leads some human beings to feel entitled to “use” the lives and feelings of others, without putting a minimum of tact into it. It will appear heavy, I know, I’ve been told several times.
Where have the men gone?
My question is this. What leads some men to wear “temporary selves”, and not experience the real pleasure of being men. And the Men, the Men…. where have the Men gone?
Ester Viola’s response
Dear A.,
Men are where they have always been, and so are we. Only the technological gadgets change, but the unanswered message is the same as in 1998. And so are the ways of keeping people hanging, whether they are aware of it or not, whether they want it or not. Relationships are divided into three, 1) at all costs; 2) optional; 3) whims (it’s a semitation).
Men have always been there
Yours is the story of every unrequited or poorly requited love, in moments, days, months and years. And don’t think for a minute that you could have done better, since adulthood should guarantee a certain mastery, at least a mastery over one’s naivety. Nothing, the experience with feelings is intermittent: either you have the experience, or you have the feeling, they don’t go together.
When love finally becomes mutual
What do I have to tell you, then? You already knew this. Worse than an unrequited love that remains nailed there as an eternal regret and those various five minutes of no-one-like-him that every other day afflicts even the most experienced, and even after years, there are only long-lasting unrequited loves that then become mutual. In short, on the other side, after a thousand adventures, they resign themselves and love you. I belong to the second category of time wasters, I know what great disagreements are like that then become something else.
The day the spell is broken
And so I know that special feeling in the imagination of those who don’t feel it, and it’s so special that I don’t even wish it on my enemies. The feeling of “now who wants this?” which then degrades, even, and after a week the question is: “but who is this?”. Without a shred of satisfaction or revenge but with a lot of anxiety about disappearing. Reductio ad sknownutum – I don’t know how it happens, but the lover who is finally requited just wants to go far away, to escape, to no longer know anything about the person who didn’t want him, about the person who until a moment before he had loved with all the molecules available in the body.
And you wouldn’t want to know anything more not only about the other, but also about yourself: how did you do it, you ask yourself. How was it possible, now that on the other side they have revealed themselves as they were, that is, normal people, to have had that fixation for so long, to have caressed it and smoothed it until it became something, which in the imagination, was love, but whose love, you say, if your dog could barely find it pleasant company?
Any person
It is truly a chilling experience, the sudden loss of love of those very much in love. It has no comparison, years of life pass before you, yours, the ones you lost in the name of nothing. Not an unreal dream, not a disproportionate ambition, not something ridiculously difficult to achieve, no. A person. Than known better. You don’t like it at all.
Love as a lack of information
Is a great unrequited love just a lack of information? In the end yes, I was really convinced. A great love is something that first of all exists, a being together that must have disappointed you several times. However, the imaginations of the beginning are deadly, I know, and they don’t go away, they feed on themselves, if you’re not careful they eat up all the available time.
How to get out of an obsession
However, what I know for sure about obsessions is that it is useless to think about going against them. They have to be followed a bit, you can’t match them. The solution is – while you keep them, since there is nothing else you can do – bring back the reserves of attention you have left towards other things, other people, friends, books, keep the great pot of interests uncovered and never lose sight of it.
It passes and we move on to something else
In there there will also be new people, the only ones with the superpowers to free you from imaginary fixations. And so, slowly, it passes and we move on to something else.