cara Esther,
How are you? I think this is the question to ask yourself first, since you are a martyr reading the thousands of tangled stories that reach you.
My name will be L.: the case I am submitting to you is yet another story without any hope of recovery. At least with the assumptions that I will list for you. I ended an almost four year PAQ two years ago with a man who wanted a future with me but I didn’t love enough.
Since then begins a real obsession with the Dorian Gray of the story, the man who with looks and smiles gives me a few nights of fire and excludes me from his life without too many explanations.
My existence goes on without direction: in the last year I’ve had several crushes with men I have no memory of, except my desire to have fun. In the meantime I also see my ex again, aware that his conditions continue to be an obstacle for a (possible) heated soup: he (always in love with me) wants to live together, I just don’t want to.
But the obsession with the narcissist becomes platonic, unambiguous and while he calls me “paranoid, heavy and unable to take personal precautions for the choices I make” (text cit.) I keep thinking about those nights we spent Together. Evenings in which, evidently, he only needed me to inflate his enormous ego a little without ever thinking of getting involved with me in the slightest. I am well aware that he has an ex in his past that he loved very much, who left him without a fight. He struts his stuff with pleasure, proclaims himself a divinity on Earth (also) with me. It’s just that sly look from him that convinces me, every time I see him.
I keep thinking about “his” conditions, which I stupidly accepted to have him: no involvement, “I’ll walk out that door and forget everything” (second cit.). The next day at work I was devastated, especially following some of his personal and intimate confessions that I didn’t expect during a wake up call together.
I know it’s all wrong, I know I’ve made myself say things that no one has ever even thought of mentioning to me given my hard and strong woman’s armor that I’ve built. But I keep thinking about that individual, about the fact that I was his toy and that his constant lies and messages (“shall we have a beer tomorrow?”; I drank dozens of beers without him, of course) were only targeted to keep me quiet and at bay, in case I could serve him again. Note, if he can help you: we are (also) colleagues.
There is a lot of confusion, above all because I still have this little man in mind who is perhaps also devastating my character (from sunny, likeable I have become increasingly nervous and prickly with the male fauna).
Certain to read your nefarious diagnosis and a few words of comfort, I thank you in advance Esther.
L.
Esther Viola’s answer
Dear L., I’m fine, and you’re fine too. Or you’ll get better soon, that’s enough.
You know what? These have become unbeatable. They have always been unbeatable at disinterested. The cruelest are never the ones who don’t want you, they are the ones who don’t always want you. The chances of escaping the trap are zero.
In unrequited relationships, reciprocated on the fly, like yours, strength is needed. Not love, forces. Reserves of energy that can certainly be asked of a twenty-year-old person. Then you understand that the more you go on, the more you’d better put aside the courage to challenge all fronts. Even if you have that courage, especially if you have it.
How does it end? With a voluntary reduction of the dreaming potential. And from there on, it doesn’t take anything to live very well.
The situation you write to me about is as follows: you can’t take it anymore, but you still can.
Possibility? Disappear, L. Everyone would like it, but it’s very rare that it succeeds. Where do you disappear? Which side are you hiding from? Where do we go when we want to leave? Under the bed? It takes the internet there as well, the notifications arrive. Head banging is not enough.
The possibilities boil down to the usual two. Shall I write them back to you?
1) I still resist.
Resisting is an artist’s work. Worker sacrifices and meager rewards await those who go against the odds of fate. The wall of facts is nearly invincible, but there is always a crack. That crack belongs to heroes and to those who don’t stop in front of unrequited loves. If you fall a hundred times, get up a hundred and one: it’s when you can’t take it anymore that you’ll discover that you have unexpected reserves of patience. There is only one liver but who cares: forward without fear. I know that in the hospice, love stories that have been taken for granted flourish again.
Does the prospect of losing forty years scare you? Winning when you’re old is winning a little less? Meanwhile it won’t be an adventure. That love will only be made of poetry (of course, you have sciatica). In short, who is destined and who is not, we will only find out by living, it is useless to get excited, just wait.
There are no other remedies to get in love one day. There is only the medicine of being there, Safran Foer also confirms.
2) I’m leaving.
This type of solution has a postulate: the awareness that nothing can be done in front of a loved one except forgiving and making someone lonely for a few months. We realize that desire moves towards what is more opposite, so what hopes do we have, who are short-lived and devoted lackeys.
Enough, by the way.
It would be nice, and yet who ever gives up, if the heart commands to continue? Friendly fire against yourself?
Dear L., the fact is that people like him fall more in love than with people like you. Why? Why are the indifferent also rewarded?
People who don’t care too much about the effect that some of their slight nastinesses will have on us are usually quite charming. Small doses of poison that they are good at administering. Which is an admission that we all suffer from very little self-esteem. Who calls her insecurity, who says she is a victim of narcissist, who calls her low self-esteem, someone humanity.
But finishing it is not an impossible feat, believe me. It happens while you think that nothing is happening. Forgetting is slow release pain, bricklayer pains, the kind that add a brick every day. Soon you will come to your senses, new new. In place of the girl with great love, there will be one with broken boxes of feeling bad. That she makes rigorous and more essential decisions. A little colder, a little more calculating, a little more able to defend herself and also capable of laughing at each other. “You are never as strong as when you cross over to the other side of despair,” writes Alice Munro. In short, we say goodbye to a certain naive spirit, the one they say is so suitable for making us fall in love. That amazement and tenderness that one should keep and instead out of charity. It seems a loss of poetry, of beauty, instead it is character. Because you realize – maybe you’ve already realized it – that it’s easier to desire a distant person than an unbearably affectionate one. You learn to know how to get loved back by the sum of disappointments, before then you don’t feel love, you can stand it. Please read these last few lines carefully until you find them optimistic and agreeable.
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