Cplow Esther,
I’m writing to you after reading your latest pearl of truth: “What they don’t say about love is that you can often do just fine without it.”
True, very true. Above all, experienced on the skin. I have gone through the colorful variety of relationships and love sufferings. My PAQ lasted the beauty of fourteen years, made up of everyday life, tenderness and boredom. Subsequently I was a lover, loved one-sidedly, myself in love one-way, used, and in turn I used. I have known happiness as the abyss, real depression, drugs, followed by a slow, arduous recovery.
I have rebuilt entirely on its own, demolishing the crumbling foundations of a childhood piece by piece with many, many shortcomings on an emotional level. I can’t say I’m a new woman, there’s still a long way to go. I’m like one of those construction sites with work constantly in progress and I don’t know if I will ever be the balanced person I would like to be, but anyway, this head and this heart have touched me. Now, on the threshold of the fateful 40, which, like it or not, acts as a watershed, I find myself staring into space in front of me.
In pairs? No, alone
I’ve been alone for a year and a half, and I’m pretty comfortable most of the time. The emotional swings were so intense and at times devastating, that for a long time I gratefully welcomed the calm of “no news, good news”. However, there is a but. Loneliness weighs heavily, sometimes, let’s say often. The desire to share life with another soul makes itself felt. The baggage of experiences gained, however, is heavy and cumbersome. It’s as if I had already experienced everything, as if my personal well, the source of the feelings that color life, had dried up forever. I can’t get interested in anyone, in the slightest, absolutely anyone. All the avenues I’ve tried, including the unattractive dating apps, have proven miserably in vain. Now, short of resources and faith in the future, I see the specter of eternal solitude stretching out before me. Sorry for the drama, maybe I exaggerate. I don’t even know what I want to ask you. Perhaps a reassurance, a “whatever happens, everything will be fine”, or a cynical thought on the cruelty of life… You do it, I will gratefully welcome everything that comes, even if it is a reprimand. A hug,
L.
Ester Viola’s response
Dear L., come here, let me hug you.
You write: I’m like one of those construction sites with work constantly in progress and I don’t know if I will ever be the balanced person I would like to be.
And why, us? Look around you, say, do you see champions living happy, organized lives? Apart from Instagram, I mean?
Whoever says yes is a slob, we are all screwed up in various ways, someone knows it and has only said “minimum objectives”, he spends his life as if diligently doing his homework and that is what he calls happiness.
Happiness depends on the wells you choose to dig it, each to their own and everyone deserves respect.
Promise me that during the Christmas holidays you will read Happy are the Happy by Yasmina Reza.
But let’s get back to us and simplify. The problem this morning, having discarded the various cellophanes with which I wrapped it, is that I don’t like anyone. You don’t even go there, in front of the convent, to see what they’re going through. Nothing good, you tell yourself. You’re probably right too. These days, then. A thousand ways to meet and no one finds the same, as we have become.
The couple is a strange animal
The couple is a strange animal, L. It doesn’t get by without stability, it doesn’t get by without instability. And you saw this. Official couple, couple of lovers, the end is always the same, with different times. Usually it doesn’t break and yet it folds into an unhealthy but useful series of comforts into which the participants finally settle. The couple becomes of the same substance as the sofa. Understanding and adapting is a slow process, not for young people.
We already said that there are unrepeatable and strong years, in the sense that you endure everything, tears and sleepless nights, in which you like them: the silences full of meaning, the months consumed by nostalgia, the “I’m-with-him-and-I-think- a-te”, the anxiety and sorrow that make you lose weight, the decisive message that metaphorically lights up the room after weeks of not feeling each other. What triumphs of the spirit. Three sentences that brought happiness in enough supplies for a year.
Couple, love, liberation
Long-distance loves are the same, those written, those in leaps and bounds, those where you bleed. Then one day, more or less around the age of forty, Shakespeare leaves. And Dido, Medea, Phaedra of Hippolytus are evicted. And what a liberation. Feeling bad becomes a waste. Stop feeling stupid, stop looking for ways to exalt yourself. He begins to not see the point of adrenaline. Suddenly an exotic object is revealed: the calendar. But have I really wasted all this time dreaming?
Love takes a new course
Thus love takes a new course. A balanced course. And once the couple becomes an objective structure that is not anxious or painful (see above: sofa and dishwasher) you will ask yourself – because we have the propensity to ask each other even the most stupid things -: is it the same love without madness? Is it lowercase A? Other? Am I settling? Here is my old litany: there are infinite ways that love reveals itself but then the funnel tends to narrow and:
1) it doesn’t even start (amen),
2) begin (te deum!)
3) mostly ends (pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris)
4) he can continue (gaudium magnum).
A “normal” relationship?
After 4) – which is already an epic success – how does it evolve?
Normal. You will be in a normal relationship. Like ours. Even if we like to delude ourselves into specialties: we-are-not-like-the-others. You are, you are. It’s you too.
In order not to be wasted, twenty years must all be dedicated (thrown away) to a better one
understanding the unhappiness of love. It is necessary to meet certain artists, the Sarratori. To arrive at a kind of useful sentimental opportunism that also involves the acquisition of hormonal insensitivity to the big A, as you call it. In short, it takes about ten years to lose the habit of fixating on random people.
The couple that shines
After that everything is illuminated. Especially these two:
1) Elective affinities.
Legend has it that two compatible spirits will find each other and stick together forever.
However, if you step outside the theoretical worlds and, along sad empirical paths, observe one by one the stable couples you know, you see another type of loving each other. From “we’re together because” to “we’re not leaving each other
because”, then “I would like to go, though” and the last stage “when I go, we’ve grown fond of each other now”. Except for the lies they tell on Instagram, which must be resisted.
The couple that is satisfied
2) The satisfied.
They do not exist. With adulthood we discover that “Being an ideal couple, eternal love, big A” and
“settling for people you’ve never liked” are two unlikely extremes, there’s something in the middle
the couple.
Escape the desire for a complex relationship, L.. Don’t lie to yourself about the sense of great love: is it great for autonomous reasons or because it doesn’t make you feel calm? Asking yourself if the love for the big A and the enormous contempt for the little A don’t actually come from this (patriarchal!) backbone that no one ever talks about (it’s from Flaiano) and which I’m reporting to you:
Indulgence for people who behave badly. He who arouses neither sympathy nor compassion is
the average man, honest and without great inclinations towards evil. The man who works to get by, who starts a family and supports it. The average man is unpleasant. (I’m unpleasant. You can tolerate me). To become likable you have to behave like a rogue, to be loved you have to be supported. It is the erotic misunderstanding that continues. The wicked person gives those sexual guarantees that the good person does not give. Those who behave righteously admit their “ordinary” sexual activity and are not interested.
(Now they call him a narcissist, and they run after him anyway.)
Adjust expectations
What is never said because it seems bad is that love is made up of a slow adjustment of expectations. And you certainly can’t make poems and films about compromising with oneself.
You don’t like anyone because it’s not time. Then one day you wake up and you no longer want to feel demotivated and sad. No one ever says how great loves begin, without poetry, like this.
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