C.Ara Esther,
I am writing to you after reading many of your answers with cynical but realistic features, aimed at encouraging those who like me have come across one of the many Beppe. I thank you because reading your column saved me, it made me feel less alone and gave me a way to understand why I was so obsessed with him. Now, years later, I feel the need to share my story with you. It all starts with me, naive university student, who had met love only once in high school and foolishly convinced herself that she was settled, that this was her “and they lived happily ever after” even though she knew very well, in his heart, how happy he was not at all. My story had been going on in the routine for almost six years now and I felt inside that these years had separated usthat we were different that he did not make me happy but I was afraid to leave, I had grown up in that story, I no longer knew how to walk alone.
When the other comes from a text message
Then he comes. He who in truth I already knew being a college friend of mine but what I begin to see differentlymaybe it will be the fact that we had to leave together for a project abroad, it will be that with my boyfriend I was in the middle of arguments because he did not want me to leave and I I didn’t feel understood and supported, as if my career and future didn’t matter. He and I began to get closer, to hear more and more often and I was lying to myself, I didn’t want to admit that I was falling in love with him. Classic cliché of our times, falling in love behind a keyboard, being infatuated with a chatnot being able to live without, rejoice at the sound of a message, hide behind the preview of the messages so as not to show that you are there waiting anxiously for that little icon that magically appears on your phone.
Love via chat
One day everything changes and becomes reality, he tells me, always and exclusively by message, that he feels something for me, and I make a choice: I answer. Days go by where nothing physical happens, we have this wonderful chat, this world only ours and I feel reborn, I feel strong emotions never felt before, he makes me feel alive, he fills me with compliments and I fall for it like a fool. Soon I leave my boyfriend, a decision that I have absolutely never regretted, indeed I think it is the only good thing that he has made me do. So here I am, free and as such I just wanted one thing, to go out with him, to experience our wonderful chat in person. Of course this does not happen, or rather we see each other once then it gets further and further away reiterating over and over that we would have our moment once we left in September (it was June then).
Does virtual love matter?
Love bombing turns into sporadic interest on his part mixed with an ability to attribute a sense of guilt to me because according to him I was too stressful since every now and then I asked him to see us. As a fool I believe him, I take on this burden, I attribute this mission to myself and I wait. The departure arrives, I am very happy but it all lasts 5 minutes: he leaves with me but after two days and finally taking me to bed he dumps me because he is interested in another one in Italy and after a week he leaves the program and returns home according to his own health problems (which he actually had but not so serious as to leave such an opportunity).
Social control
Months go by, I am destroyed and alone in a foreign country I try to force the disgust I felt for him to try to forget him. He who follows everything I do on social media, is always there in ambush. I come back for Christmas and he retraces his steps: he tells me that he made a mistake, that he misses me, as in romantic films I think, too bad that in films not everything happens by message. I insist and see you for a coffee before leaving. Yes, that’s all. From there my fall begins, thereloneliness does not make me think, I can not not write to him every day, we see you 2/3 times when i go back over the months until I discover in May that he has another one. Yes, I had never asked him for anything even about the September one, I tried to be cautious with the fear that if I asked too much he would run away. I get angry but I can’t leave, I felt alone on the other side of Europe.
Waiting for the message that never arrives
I finally come home in the summer and come to my senses: the messages that I could not help sending now seem like torture to me because I then have to wait for his answer that never comes, my friends help me so much to get out (for a long time I hadn’t told anyone about him since it all started while I was with my longtime boyfriend). I give him an ultimatum but of course he doesn’t change: “I like you a lot but I don’t want a relationship now“,“ I see us similar for the working environment but not for the rest ”. Answers I had already heard, phrases that destroy me inside that make me feel missing something, not up to par. I decide to try to move on, to look around me.
Love a person who does not exist
I meet the right one, He with a capital L, not one of many. Still shaken by the other, I tell myself that I can’t help but give him an opportunity, that He is good, he is different, I know I don’t have a great intuition about men but with Him I get it right. She begins a healthy, adult, peaceful and happy relationship. And exasperated by the other who keeps coming back, always by text so that he never makes a real gesture, I get my moment of revenge, I write him a long message in which I scream at him all my suffering and scream at him that I want to be happy now , with Him. Although there has been the covid in between, He and I have shared many more joyful moments than with my former historian. We have been living together for over a year now and I feel lucky. I found love and it is that quiet love you speak of but I am happy, He is my family. The other destroyed me, made me feel alive but it was a fiction, a drug that you cannot do without and from which you suffer from addiction. This he occasionally reappears, he watches me from behind the screen, on social media, silent as a shadow lurking. I am writing you my story as a moment of liberating catharsis. I trust you that every now and then I think about him, moments of melancholy for a person who does not exist, I already loved a person who does not exist. Patience, this is how life goes, if it had not been there I would not have known the real Him.
Ester Viola’s answer
Dear A.,
Ah, the love of youth, when nothing, not even being happy, is as intense as a “does not want me”.
I have only this very certain to tell you: at twenty-five you think the worst question of all is “why doesn’t he want me?”, at thirty-five it becomes “who gives me my time back?”. We move on to “okay, I was stupid” at forty. That’s all I know about love, that’s all it takes, it seems to me.
Then of course, we can easily paint the matter more exotic, with this uncertain subject you are talking about: avoidance, abandonment, but it is not my subject and it is not a day at all, so let’s move on.
In short whatever you want to call it, friendzone or unrequited love or dead cat, you are in the very busy sentimental dead end. Tight and dark, yet we all slip in. This is the waste of strength of the twenty years. Twenty years: there is no way not to throw them away.
Here, in no particular order, are the issues generated by any unrequited love.
If he doesn’t want me, why:
- Do you write?
- Do you want to see me every now and then?
- He says “I love you” but then is he with the other?
- Doesn’t he leave his wife?
- Do you keep looking for me?
- Blackmail me emotionally?
- Do you watch the stories?
- Does he want me every now and then?
Do you see one of your questions in the middle here, A.?
The confused state of life does not last long, however. About fifteen years. Then the first real back pains come and you start to see badly up close but more clearly backwards. And you readjust the questions, you start getting them corrected: but what did I expect from those who didn’t want to know about me? And then you will see that it will be amnesty for everyone: who called without saying “let’s meet”, who did not call at all, who killed you without even knowing it, who did as he does this one you tell me about in the email.
When it doesn’t take the first instinct is investigation. Investigate to see if it gets better. As if knowing why solves the mystery. And once the mystery is solved, the miracle should come to you. San Gennaro.
It takes years to resign: truths are useless.
The saddest lesson you throw down (sugar free) at one point is that it wasn’t them, it was really you. And since you will end up on the other side, and you will hurt randomly, you will see that it is practically impossible not to flay those in love with us with no hope of being reciprocated.
You don’t answer, and they suffer.
Answer, and you’re giving the drunk a drink.
You are kind, and they misunderstand.
You are rude, and they blame them. Where did I go wrong, how I offended you.
You take advantage of them, sometimes unscrupulous, and you are narcissistic.
Being bad is which side of the story you get.
Footnote in the margin but not too much: this true Him I like it very much, I will like it even more as soon as it is deprived of that dangerous capital letter.
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