Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
REducating kids about love is the categorical imperative that arose after the murder of Giulia Cecchettin from her (ex?) boyfriend. But re-educate for what?
The Minister of Education Giuseppe Valditara didn’t think twice, introducing by decree 30 hours of after-school lessons. But before deciding where and how, we should know what to teach.
Updating the forum Single supplement on the corriere.it and talking with the readers of this column, I realized that, For starters, what some kids lack is the basic notion of love: the simple fact that it is an equal relationship, in which everyone freely disposes of themselves and where nothing matters except what everyone feels.
The kids who write to me are no longer kids, they are made and finished men who ruminate on the roots of their current loneliness. Even though time has passed, they still haven’t gotten over rejection and, rather than attributing it to a normal love dynamic, whereby a feeling may or may not be there, and there are no culprits, they criminalize the women who rejected them.
«There are those who, strong in the ascendancy due to beauty, without asking themselves many problems, use it even trampling on others» one writes to me. The competitive element in males reverberates in relationships: «Nice guys, without haughtiness or arrogance, polite (me among them) discarded almost without batting an eyelid in favor of “brutes”, of villagers…» another gets angry.
And then there are those who, instead, rework: «Often – A. writes to me, there is something even more serious that pushes a man to go this far. There is emptiness, the absence of prospects that a woman next to him manages to mask, but which she re-emerges when she leaves him. As if you were sleeping naked under a blanket and suddenly the blanket flew away.” Out of the metaphor, A. reveals the anguish of his peers who have difficulty rewriting their role.
Paradoxically, in a society that has remained patriarchal, for women, growing up still means freeing themselves, being autonomous. For boys, becoming men is still a journey that lacks direction. And if you don’t know who you are, how can you love?
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