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‘You may think you loved me,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘but you never loved me, you never loved me as I really am.’
Should she love his infidelity? Would hers not be a true love unless she also loved his infidelity and his need to control? Is it a weakness of her love that she can’t endure everything?
‘Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘could cope with much more than you. You’re a poor imitation of Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says. ‘What I have done is nothing compared to what Victor Andreasen did to Tove Ditlevsen.’ The Danish author Tove Ditlevsen and Victor Andreasen, the editor-in-chief of Ekstra Bladet, stayed together their whole lives, almost, no matter what one did to the other. Because they loved each other. ‘We love each other, Ida! You know that!’
Tove Ditlevsen, she answers in their imagined conversations, ended up killing herself. Tove Ditlevsen was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and Victor Andreasen couldn’t take any more and left her, she reminds herself. Perhaps Tove Ditlevsen should have left Victor Andreasen much sooner. Then she might not have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, she might not have killed herself, who knows. Tove Ditlevsen planned to write a book about her life with Victor Andreasen, whom she referred to as a highly intelligent psychopath, did you know that, the title of which would be The Woman Who Put Up With Everything, a bittersweet title, if you ask me, as if she might well have many regrets and would have done things differently had she had the chance, she tells herself quietly in their imagined conversations.
omg lol
He tries letters, but he writes the way he speaks and she can’t answer him. It would take a novel to explain to him what it was like for her, a completely different story to the one he would have written, she can feel it the few times she talks to him on the phone, before she gives up. He gets irritated, he says that she is wrong, that if she had changed then they could have made it work, whereas she believes that he was the one who had to change, but she no longer believes in change, she has lost her faith.
i get it
‘You never listened,’ he says on her answering machine. ‘You never took on board the things I struggled with in our relationship, which I tried to discuss with you repeatedly, but you just carried on doing what you always did.’
Does he mean that she should have stopped travelling, stopped spending time with other people because he had told her how anxious it made him feel? Should she have called him more often, done fewer of the many things he didn’t like her doing, would that have been to listen to him, to follow his prescriptions, put herself in a cage so that he would feel safer? Assume his contempt for everything he despised, his enemies and his points of view because not doing so would lead to sanctions and pain? She reads his letters and argues with them in the evenings, lies awake at night and argues with them, there is so much she wants to say, but even thinking about it is exhausting.
boundaries!!! lol
Whenever you felt uncomfortable, you let your discomfort rain down on me in the form of aggression and recriminations, you poured it over me rather than hold back, as if every uncomfortable feeling which my behaviour produced in you was my fault and my problem, never yours. And I let it happen, that was my fault, our tragedy. I love you, but we can’t be together because nothing is going to change, and everything that has happened, the things we did to take revenge, to survive, which bought us temporary relief, will tear us apart if we were to meet and talk, so it is the end, it really is over. I’m trying to understand it, not to be angry – not to hate you because you ruined it – you ruined it!
[...] January’s entries were about the winter sales and some guy named Per I thought might be interested in me. In February it was a guy called Tor and a Mulberry bag I’d managed to get half-price and a pair of shoes I should have bought half a size bigger. I appeared to have seen a lot of films I didn’t like, spent time with female friends who bored me and eaten a lot of rubbish. In between I had been to editorial meetings at Romerikes Blad and scribbled down my thoughts about people, but not once about issues; I had spent my Easter break somewhere hot so that when I came home I’d have a tan for this Tor who I didn’t know if I liked, I couldn’t remember him now, nor was he mentioned again after Easter. The names were interchangeable, as were the dates, there was no sense of progression, no coherence, no joy, only frustration; shopping, sunbathing, gossiping, eating – I might as well have written ‘she’ instead of ‘I’. And had anything changed, had growing older made any difference?
lmao
[...] My guilty conscience hadn’t eased despite the Kosta Boda vase. Should I buy a new diary and write something else? Invent substance and key events or write an entry about the Kosta Boda vase, I really am coming down with something, I thought, so I drove home and went to bed to sleep it off.
[...] Who profited from dead letters being turned into living ones? Financially it made no sense. Then again not everything can be measured in money. And what if profit was the most important criterion? What if people who got their once-dead-now- living letters became so happy they didn’t buy anything for ages? Forget it, I thought, I left the loo, closing the door behind me, what else can you do when your house is on fire, I was freezing cold and burning hot at the same time.
lol
Do others feel the same way, I lay there wondering. Do other people have sex like this? I thought he had done it for my sake, I had a feeling he was doing it for my sake, that he wanted to be good enough, did he sense that I was missing something? Why didn’t I just say no, why didn’t I laugh, why didn’t he laugh, why did we stay awkwardly not speaking, failing to find the words, silent in a rut we couldn’t escape?
:(
At night I sat in front of my laptop, working on a story about a PR consultant in crisis. He looked like Rolf, I called him Bjarne. Bjarne was struggling to come up with a good name for a fish restaurant in a neighbourhood with many other fish restaurants, all of which were vying to be the most real, the oldest and most authentic. There was The Genuine Old Fish Stall, and The Really Genuine Old Fish Stall, and The Genuinely Old Fish Stall with Genuinely Old and Real Fishermen Living in the Basement. Bjarne’s initial proposal was The New Fish Restaurant Where the Genuinely Old Fishermen Have Moved In, but his boss, Børge, thought that was going too far, and Bjarne took offence and snapped that when he sat his exam at the School of Life, he got top marks.
lmao