ANDster,
But you who like the Pythia preside over the omphalos of Love for me, talk to me a little, what do we do with the passion 3.0 that erupted, very unilaterally, through an online dating site? Let’s face it, between the home office, compulsive smart working, time spent at home every evening, I challenge the majority of consenting and sexually active adults to boast of other encounters.
However, I will decree for myself. I wanted to go and find the easy conquest via the internet (as my mother would say), I had the incredible (mis)luck of catching the ideal object at the first try (physically very good, professionally well-connected, mentally very labile, forty-year-old like me), with whom I, who boast a world record level of personal challenge/inability to lose, immediately fell in love with. After three purely sexual encounters, each followed by a series of heart kisses lasting 3 weeks, the ideal object disappears. It evaporates. With a little heart attached, obviously.
Now, the undersigned believes she has three options before her:
- she cries desperately for a while and maybe forgets it, but she feels (in)so bad about it;
- she writes to him, he doesn’t reply, the undersigned gets humiliated and always feels very bad about it;
- old-fashioned evil eye, because if I’m sick at least a little so are you, come on.
None of the three hypotheses above has a happy ending, which obviously had already started in my head complete with fireworks and pink doves. So damn the internet or damn me, who can’t enjoy the moment for what it is?
I await response.
Heart kisses, the good ones.
AND.
Ester Viola’s response
Dear E.,
You look for love on the internet and you do well, there aren’t too many alternatives.
Love 3.0 resembles love 1.0, the beginning of the list, end of last century. Before there were the “if he doesn’t call it’s a sign of disinterest”. Then the text messages arrived.
Nostalgia for text messages (and paid illusions)
Where were you in 1999? Did you get the texting bug back then? Sending messages cost a penny for every fifteen words, we were ripped off then as now, but at least you managed to make them spend ten thousand lire. Sometimes I think that all the romantic progress we have been capable of in recent years has been going from the modest price of the nineties to the free of now.
Apps: more meetings, less certainties
Then came dating apps. And thank goodness, these are years in which everything conspires to make things easy. The old method of meeting new people now seems like the labor of Heracles. I can’t even think about it: get dressed, go out every night, gather your social life and get introduced to people who your friends consider vaguely balanced. Our hopes survived this painful calculation of probabilities. In fact, no one ever showed up for months at a time. In the villages you could wait years.
The real problem: understanding who is in front of you
Now meeting someone is the least: understanding who they are has become the problem. But those who are smart shouldn’t take too long: among the advantages of no longer having too much youth, is learning to read people a little after spending some time with them. The other day on Instagram I found a micro-diagnosis that said: a crush is lack of information. What a nice conclusion, what a nicely worded sentence, why didn’t I get there before. Even Proust would have liked it.
Growing up also means stopping waiting
Who knows if you and I, E., are more or less on that branch of maturity where when we are told about the fantastic sexual adventures and disappearances that come after we react with elbow bumps and giggles. We look at each other embarrassed for the girl who ended up under us, saying oh well. We’re old enough to know that you can’t fill your life with so little. It is a sacrosanct right to be stupid for those we like best, but with all the ways that exist in life to ruin it, just get behind those who don’t write back in chat after a while? “What have you done in these years?”. “I’ve been waiting for messages.” We did it in our twenties, and I’d say that’s enough.
