cHi Esther,
I’m L. Mine is a very complicated love story, I think even my historical psychologist has raised her arms in surrender. I’ll try to be brief.
I’m getting married at 25 with the classic good man, honest and hard worker. I don’t marry for love, but to get out of a painful and heavy, highly dysfunctional family situation. He is the only one able to accept me (at the time my fear was of being alone, I’ve never had friends due to character problems due to the family context).
I bring into the world 3 children, the reason of my life. For me romantic love never existedthe sexuality is the means to procreate, no passion, no desire for my husband, indeed … only refusal. But my desire to create a normal family it is strong enough to make me bypass this aspect. I concentrate and I don’t look around, I don’t give in to the temptations that present themselves to me anyway… quite a lot, to be honest. I am considered a beautiful, attractive, intelligent woman. Men, if they wanted, there would have been and so it is today.
I know him, after 18 years of marriage. It turns my life upside down, a balance so painstakingly conquered goes down the drain. He divorces, he wants me to do the same. The problem is that I didn’t feel like it. I tried and tried, for 8 years, but I’ve never been able to fully bond with him it’s at completely untie myself from my husbandalthough we have arrived at legal separation. Despite the love I felt for him, passionate and deep, I’m not never been able to close with my family. I arrived atexhaustion.
In the end he’s gone, tired of my push and pull, of my continuous returns to then leave it again. And me I’m destroyed. After a month he is already dating another woman and the idea is intolerable to me. I find myself here with a husband I’ve never been in love with but that I have preferred to a man who has shown me more love than anyone else in the world and that I have deeply reciprocated, with whom I continue to make comparisons. Why did I leave it? He wanted to marry me, start a new life with me, he gave me everything and proved the impossible… I just couldn’t imagine a future with him, but still I’m really broken. How do I get a reason? I feel like I threw away a great lovean absolute void instead of the heart, the memories I have are too many and too vivid, I can’t do it.
Thank you.
Read all the episodes of Ester Viola’s column Defective Relationships here.
Esther Viola’s answer
Dear L,
Well done, you ask yourself the question to bang your head against the wall. Why? Why you left your loverWhy you kept the cuckold you didn’t loveWhy you threw away the great love And you kept the peanuts in exchange? Just pretend you don’t have the answers. You have them, you have them. With every “why did I do this?” that we think lacking in logic, logic is indeed found. Superfine. We know you, me and your psychologist.
Love and the absurd
Let’s put it how he put it Caesar Pavese.
Pavese, in one of the letters concluded as follows:
“But where will we end up, E.? Is there anything more absurd than love? If we enjoy it to the last, we immediately get tired of it, disgusted; if we hold it up to remember it without remorse, one day we will regret our foolishness and cowardice of not having dared. Love only asks to become a habit, a life in common, one flesh of two, and as soon as it is such, it is dead. Thinking about it makes one go crazy”.
Love is subject to betrayal
But no, one doesn’t go mad, I would say to Cesare if I had him here. It’s just the marriage shallows. One of the two is intelligent and knows how to go by sea, he knows them and adapts to them. The other, the more sensitive to solicitations, looks for some diversion, but without intentions of real revolution. This is how the bourgeoisie is formed – one betrays, the other resists – it’s its historical tectonic plates. The couple will hold. Don’t tell me you missed the lectio of the old women of my town in the previous episodes: Peppe for Peppe, I keep Peppe mine.
The old women of my country used to refer to the Dasein of the male with the colloquial term: Peppe. One for all, all equal to one. So you keep what you already have at home. We didn’t go for very fine individual analyses, the depth to the country doesn’t attack. In the country they know that every love that God sends before the parish priest is equal to the other, and is subject to betrayal for statistical obviousness.
This was said in the countryside among people with little education, then we moved to the city, we studied, and we convinced ourselves that love has another nobility, that it exists in a different shape, a better quality that we will find. So if we don’t find it, we seem to die.
The dream of a love and its renunciation
Dear L. I know there is no comparison. Lovers of black need not make any effort for continuity. They have superbonus hormonal facade, thank you very much that you want to see.
Life, on the other hand, is quiet and even a little miserable elsewhere, emotional commitments are more limited, we love each other with mediocrity, in the midst of a thousand washing machines. “You’re either alone or in a shitty thing. That covers a 100% of human beings” (Louis CK is always a relief to tell life and do the exceptionally ugly just normal).
Do you know why you didn’t go after your dream of love? Because you too understand that making lovers doesn’t hold up, L.. Adrenaline is the same substance as butter, that too would become a marriage. It’s human nature, it gets boring. Because in the end one way life must disappoint you: it must always lack something to be perfect.
Every love falls apart
Unless.
Unless one (you) starts investing strength in many other things that hold while love – all love – falls apart. Happiness is not an event, it is sum. It is the partial happinesses that make the whole. Not one huge, invincible and towering above the others, that of the movies, but many little fighting happinesses.
Finally, for my part, a thought for that poor Christ, your husband, who knows everything, has understood everything and for the moment isn’t going away. It will remain calm and reasonable for a little while longer, soon it will be his turn to rematch and not wanting youthe matter is very mathematical. Already hate is boiling somewhere, and soon everything will overflow. The Sun Tzu some feelings suggest you get out of the swamps of melancholy quickly and move your troops elsewhere.
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