Cplow Esther,
I’m writing to tell you that I give up.
There’s me and there’s him: we meet for professional reasons, we become close, we happen to see each other and spend time together, we get to know each other quite well.
After a while he gets seriously engaged, but breaks up, goes back to looking around, directs his interest towards other girls, establishes new relationships.
For my part, I try to make a long-distance relationship work, but I don’t succeed. I fill my life with travel, books, art, pilates, work. I look around too, I hang out with a couple of guys but their attention ends up making me anxious and making me understand that their expectations are not mine.
At a certain point I start to think that I would like him next to mebut he is distracted, if not by others, by a professional life that does not satisfy him; and then I don’t say, I don’t ask, I stay still.
There Our relationship remains of variable intensityperhaps unfinished, certainly defective.
And yet the further we go, the more I don’t understand.
I don’t understand why a days in which we give ourselves lightness, we laugh, we get serious, we hug each other, we touch each other, we walk away and start laughing again, days of forgetfulness, detachment, disappearances follow.
I don’t understand him telling me he’s dating someone else (“without commitment and with one single purpose”) while repeating how good he is with me (with whom nothing has ever happened).
I don’t understand myself because, aware that a similar relationship cannot lead to anything, I continue to feel good only with him, even when others show more care and interest towards me.
I do not understand; and maybe you will tell me that there is nothing to understand.
So I say it to you (but more to myself): I give up.
This is the magic formula that breaks the spell, right?
Yours C.
Ester Viola’s response
Dear C.,
The magic formula is when “I got tired” it’s the truth. There is no sea more beautiful than the sea of obsession. Yes, you heal from tiredness, exhaustion, from the nerves that get to you when enough is enough. You know, nothing is worse than when it takes time.
These precedents are needed. They are needed. The cure for broken love affairs is to have two or three of them in your twenties, you need some precedent to know what that is. And above all: to have enough. A very strong love because you don’t consider me! Why do you think little of me! Love to be earned! Yes yes, already seen it, keep it. (Then becoming skeptical and staying funny also makes you fall in love like a magnet, but we’ll talk about this another time).
Relationships… disastrous?
Let’s try to understand a comma, now. Could it be what, this being and not being, of the wreck you write to me about?
1) It could be a Fish Blood
That’s what they call them. We already talked about the definition; fish bloods are people with low temperatureshe doesn’t like you enough, but the truth is he doesn’t like almost any of them enough.
Those who care, “how much” depends on how they wake up. Those who are happy with you, on equal terms with another person. Those who have their ex on the pedestal and tell you every five minutes, no one knows with what use.
Those who were injured, a lot, as children. Those who, because of mum and dad, now have to maintain their insensitive pose. Those who write, and then rewrite, and all you have after months are kilometers of Whatsapp. What do you find? Nothing. The sight dropped. You don’t even get Millemiglia points.
The ones who see you as a friend. Those who, since time has passed, improve your credit: you are a little more than a friend.
Those who don’t call you to go out, but if you invite yourself alone to their house they don’t mind. The ones who just won’t kick you out of bed.
Those that “yes” and “no” are basically similar words.
Those who frankly are deluding yourself.
Those who exaggerate, to dramatize like this.
Those who say things should be taken more lightly.
Those who are too weak, never a bit of carrion.
“The more trivial defects they have, the more they make you angry,” he writes Philip Roth.
2) It could also be complex indifference, the most dangerous.
There is another person, for him, somewhere else. With which it ended or never began. And so one does his best to distract himself. He writes at random, deceives people who come across to keep him company. To make people suffer to death without knowing, without wanting, without understanding.
We don’t know about the two. There isn’t a here Occam’s razor infallible: the simple solution is presumably not the correct one. We shy away, we keep guessing. And even if you guess, you won’t win anything. The problem with heartbroken love is that one must resign oneself to the fact that knowing how things are doesn’t change anything.
You understand C. that if you have to choose between these painful extremes, between these two rip-offs, you might as well.
iO Donna © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED