CDear Ester, I discovered your column a few months ago looking for advice on heart problems of various kinds and in a few days I devoured the stories and answers.
A small premise seems necessary to me: I’m 22 years old, a missing mother for a few years due to a bad illness, a complicated relationship with my father it’s a younger sister towards which I feel very responsible.
I’m writing to you because I can’t understand what problems I have in managing my relationships. “Good question” you will say, almost as if I expected a third person to be able to solve everything for me…
I admit that I have always experienced feelings more of fantasy and imagination than of reality, at least until now.
Loving has never been easy for me
I have behind a long-lasting love affairtoo, in high school for a classmate of mine with whom I had an affair, albeit a short-lived one.
The problem arises once the story is closed: I realize that I am very jealous, I regret my decision, I want him and only him. He makes me pay, he deceives me, he plays a double game, for years he does what you call a deadcat. The dynamics “he runs away, I chase” It belongs to me very well.
In the meantime I have other acquaintances but nothing and no one makes me feel those damn butterflies in my stomach like with him.
Covid breaks out. When I see him again after months and months I feel like I’m feeling a little better. In retrospect I can say that what I needed was just the passage of time.
University begins, I have a thousand thoughts on my mind, my beloved mother passes away, the last thing I think about is not having a boyfriend.
Loving and struggling with anxiety
The summer of the following year instead I meet G. and it’s love at first sight (on my part!). We only go out twice, I already felt like his wife. She looked for me little and when she wanted him. I was always crying, I had to please him at all costs. “If he doesn’t like me it’s because I’m not beautiful, intelligent or nice enough”, these are the thoughts I had. I’ll keep it short: it’s over before it even began. He probably dated me for a while, realized he wasn’t interested and simply stopped looking.
A new love but too much insecurity
At university I’m starting to be interested in D. with whom I had already exchanged various chats: I take useless buses just to chat more with him, I attend conferences just to see him, I’m happy to receive a message from him every now and then.
Time passes but he doesn’t ask me out and I, insecure to the point of death, don’t even think about taking the first step. The session period arrives, I study crazy and desperate, I’m eating my hands thinking I’ve wasted an opportunity with him.
I don’t feel butterflies in my stomach
After some time, however, we get closer and, I don’t know how, I ask him to go out. We start dating and everything is fine, too fine. I don’t feel butterflies in my stomach, I want to experience an overwhelming love, but I understand that I have finally met a good guy and I think I’m the problem. I’m starting to go to therapy: the fact of the matter is that I don’t love myself and I suffer from anxiety, a lot of anxiety. The summer passes in which we are not together, every now and then we talk willingly but then I get back on the carousel. Seeing him again I ask myself why I can’t try to live a story with a boy with whom I really feel like myself and who genuinely loves me for who I am and so I throw myself into it.
With him I discover a world: I had never had such a strong intimacy with a boy, both on a physical and emotional level.
Anxiety continues to haunt me
After a month, however, my anxiety knocks on the door again: are you sure he is the right person for you? If you’re so calm, it means you don’t feel transport so why are you with him? You’re not sure what you feel while he is, he’s wonderful and deserves someone who reciprocates him 100%… I haven’t been at peace for a long time and these doubts of mine also pop up every time I’m with him after having spent several years together. hours although well, I can’t help myself and burst into tears. He consoles and comforts me, tells me that he feels loved by me.
I wouldn’t change him for anything in the world, I feel infinite affection for him and he is in all respects part of my life but my heart is heavy.
In short, Ester, the million dollar question: why is it so difficult (for me?) to be loved, to love in return and to live a story lightly, day to day?
With love, V.
Ester Viola’s response
Dear V.,
Because life is not light. Not you.
I wrote this once and it seems correct to me, I wouldn’t know how to rewrite it:
Is there a way of being to be loved? Are certain characters more suitable than others? Do you learn to become desirable in a certain way as a couple? Stupid questions, necessary questions.
Is there a way of being to be loved?
They will love you for who you are but they will also love you for how you make them feel, that’s the
dilemma. And how do we all want to feel? Better, that’s how we want to feel. Cheer up,
on a highway towards the sea. We want to feel short-sleeved. We love those who
they distract, there’s no point in going around them. They are more beautiful than the beautiful.
Is a dead cat afraid of love?
Her name was – her name is – Valeria. She was one of my favorite classmates in high school. Very pretty and capable of appearing even prettier, a vain person with great profit. But that wasn’t the point, even though we were eighteen and being pretty was the number one recommendation for social recognition. Everyone is looking for me, everyone wants me, Valeria had it written on our faces. I then met other people like that. Better than me. Gattemorte, or whatever you want to call them. You can be one of two ways, you deadcat. Gattamorta is either a completely disinterested person who finds a way to make you die of love without doing anything, or they are the others, always cheerful characters, fluffy characters, sequined characters.
Loving without superficiality
Do you know the lethal weapon of superficiality, V.? Do you know that glittering, contagious superficiality, that being above all the evils of the world? When Céline says in letters to her friends: life reserves nothing but pain and sorrow, except for those who ski, I like to think it is that, the Perseus by Calvin: to cut off Medusa’s head without allowing himself to be petrified, Perseus supports himself on what is lightest, the winds and the clouds.
And while she exercised her right to be a summer breeze to all who knew her, why was I a nothing? I read! I was studying! And I didn’t understand how it was that reading and studying and being a hypersensitive abyss didn’t pay three cents. What an injustice it seemed to me.
Lightness in love wins
Then you understand better. Lightness is the June of characters, a way of being in the world that tells those around you that it is possible to be different. Don’t ditch among thoughts, worries, among questions.
So – you ask – in a sentimental selection of the species who would be the Darwinian winners? Them, the light ones? The strongest? The fastest? The exes? The ones who had arrived before us? The ones who come after? The ones who don’t care too much? The independents? The always cheerful? Valeria? Even finding a way to know, V., is of little use. Even Valeria came to class one day crying for love, and Valeria was invincible. Love wants what it wants, and not even every day. All the unbeatable are destined to lose, and every imbecile wins, sooner or later.
You need to become a relentless practical spirit
Therefore I conclude. Dear V., you need to become a relentless practical spirit. We need to prefer things to words. We need to think that anxiety, worry, fear are not facts, they are ‘or bad times that we carry in our heads.
Happy are the happy, says that other book, and Borges also says. Happy are those who are born with it, those who realize it, those who arrive at happiness with a lot of bad luck, the desperate exes, who are the happiest hearts of all, because all it takes is going to the beach on a hot Saturday in April to eat fried anchovies. And April is there, around the corner, just after Sanremo.
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