Bookmarker tag: topic/attempted-love (11 notes)

What anguish. I would be better off to stop writing. I’m afraid that being tired keeps me from being objective. Sometimes I think that I haven’t loved Michele for many years now, that I continue to repeat that phrase out of habit, not noticing that loving feelings no longer exist between us, and have been replaced by others, perhaps equally valid, but completely different. I think again of the anxiety with which I waited for Michele as a fiancé, of the desire we had to be alone, to talk, of the time that went by rapidly, on the thread of looks and words, and of the tedium that now descends when we’re alone together, and no outside distraction, not the radio or the movies, comes to save us. And yet once I even wished that the children would hurry up and get married, so that we could return to being alone, as before; I thought that everything was still intact. Maybe, if our children had remained children, I would never have noticed this change. Or if Guido had never spoken to me, or if I had never listened to Cantoni. I was really convinced that it was still love, and until Mirella confessed she was afraid that her life would resemble mine, I was also convinced that I was happy. Maybe, in reality, I still am, but what I feel when I’m with Michele is a cold happiness, very different from what I feel when Guido talks to me or takes my hand. These candid gestures are love and the gestures I perform with Michele, instead, are only affection or solidarity or habit, even those rare, more intimate ones: pity, or, rather, compassion for human weakness. I seem to have suddenly understood all that. Maybe Michele has understood it for a long time. He’s much more intelligent than I am, especially in these things. Then I heard Clara say that love has to be invented day by day. I don’t know what that means, in practice, but I sense that I’ve never been able to invent it.

[...] When I look at Michele, I’m sorry I no longer want to go to Venice with him. Everything would be easy, simple, clear, and I wouldn’t struggle with so many opposing feelings. But if I went with him, I wouldn’t feel that happiness I long for. We’d sit at a café in Piazza San Marco, silent, listening to the music, distracting ourselves with the faces of the passersby, as we do sometimes in August when Rome is deserted and we sit in the café in the square nearby, where there’s a little orchestra that often plays Ratcliff’s Dream. Maybe we’d find some excitement at a table in a trattoria with good food; but I don’t like going to a trattoria with Michele. At the end, when I see the bills that, after checking the figure twice, he places on the table, I always think it wasn’t worth the trouble.

But you have to have had the vision in the first place. In the time between meeting and dating Ashley, I had dated, among a few others, another woman who developed brain cancer early in our relationship, when we would normally be figuring out what we were to each other. After her diagnosis, I decided that I was obviously living in the story where I would devote myself to my poor, brave girlfriend because the alternate story, where she got sick and we broke up, was too sordid to contemplate. (I had also absorbed some odd scholarly notions about the newness and nonnecessity of companionate love between life partners.)

Of course, we broke up. For months I maintained the facade, to myself and to her, that ours was a great love affair, till one afternoon I couldn’t—I folded up like a tent. The effect of my attempt to be generous was mostly that she had to spend her last romantic relationship on an undiagnosed anxiety patient who was engaging in an attempt to be good. I denied her the chance to be fallen in love with. It may be the worst thing I’ve ever done. This may have been too eccentric of a mistake to be worth enjoining other people not to make it, but just in case: Don’t do this. It’s one of several reasons, too, that I’m depressed at how often single people, particularly women, are told to settle. Most straight men I know could stand to question their own physical preferences, learn to notice how often these are not indigenous to ourselves but overwritten on our sexuality by mass media and boy training. (“You like her? She’s a six at best.”) But otherwise, to them and to everyone else, I say: don’t settle. Marriage is hard enough. And it’s an incredibly contemptuous thing to do to another human being.

I try to behave with some sort of grace. I try to be pleasant and generous. But I actually feel I’d like to give up this draining attempt to be married, to go and live somewhere high and sunny, on my own. With the windows open. Yesterday my fantasy was to ask him if we could each write down a list of good and bad things about being married to each other, and try to talk about them and work them out. But I haven’t mentioned this idea because I know what his response would be—one of his incredulous laughs: ‘Why the hell would we bloody well do that.’

Meanwhile, acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love. By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart and would sing melancholy songs to him, with a sigh; but she would find that she was as calm afterward as she had been before, and Charles seemed neither more loving nor more deeply moved.

IT TAKES TWO REVELATIONS TO LEAVE A PERSON YOU’VE ONCE loved. There is the moment you realize you no longer love him. And there is the moment you realize you can no longer pretend. The length of time between the two varies, depending on your capacity for deceit, your tolerance for fraud. [...]

The secret that I held closest, the secret that I never told anyone, that I shared with no one, was that I had married Linda without loving her. I wanted to love her. I liked her immensely, thought the world of her, respected her, but I could not then say that I loved her. I probably came to love her. I certainly shared life with her enthusiastically, happily, willingly. I was pleased that she was the mother of my children, but my heart never ached for her, my skin never longed for her touch. I had in fact used her. I had used her to feel whole again, normal, to feel like a good man after what I had done in El Salvador. She held my head and stroked my temples when I was depressed without knowing the cause. She considered me the moody artist. And that I was. The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.

'Anne!' Lewis cried out. 'Come see! I caught a rainbow.' He was watering the lawn and a rainbow was dancing in the spray. 'Come quick!' I recognized that urgent, friendly voice, that happy face - a face which was like no other. It was Lewis; it was he and no one else. He had stopped loving me, but he was still the same. Why, then, should I have suddenly thought ill of him? No, I couldn't get off that cheaply. The truth was that I understood him. I, too, hated unhappiness and was loath to make sacrifices: I could understand his refusing at one and the same time to suffer because of me and to lose me; I could understand his being too busy deciphering his own heart to bother much about what was going on in mine. And then I remembered his voice that day he had gripped my shoulders and said, 'I'd marry you tomorrow.' At that moment, I had repudiated all rancour, forever. When you really want to stop loving, you stop loving. But you can't want to at will.

They ran down to the pond. Nadine swam with her head sticking straight up in the water, majestically, as if she were bearing it on a tray. He liked her face. ‘I’m fond of her,' he said to himself. 'I'm even very fond of her. Why isn't it quite love?' Something in Nadine chilled him; her suspiciousness, her grudges, her deceitfulness, the hostile solitude in which she took refuge. But perhaps if he had loved her more, she would have become more open, more expansive, more agreeable. It was a vicious circle: love can't be served up to order, nor can confidence. Neither one could come first.

“I don’t deserve you,” he used to say, before they were married. “Your goodness, your stability, how calm you always are — the way you just get on with things, and make it look so easy…”

Respect — that was what she’d taken his words to connote, but might they not in fact have been intended as a confession, that whatever it was he felt for her, it was nothing even remotely resembling love?

After a few years of this work, through her acquaintance with young staffers involved in the audit’s administration, the mother met her husband. She preferred not to go into detail about the husband. He was young and attractive and they fell in love, though the mother would admit now that she had been so young she could not perfectly distinguish one strong feeling from another, and they were probably each, in some part, mistaking their excitement about the lives they had begun with excitement for each other. It was also true, though, that most loves depend on such confusion, or perhaps even consist in it — of choosing to give someone else credit for what we have become.