by
Amy Key
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[...] Sex, I miss, but I’m aware some of the things I might want from a romantic partner are infantile. Someone to be able to be a brat to without consequences, someone to baby me with soft words and the tucking in of a blanket when I feel vulnerable and unwilling to be accountable for myself. I wail that if I don’t get a romantic partner, I’ll never spot that lump that needs to be checked out and then die. Then other things I want are more than equalled by my closest friendships – emotional intimacy, making plans for the weekend, for short trips, for things we want to celebrate, and the foundational support of curiosity, feedback and encouragement that helps the people we love go after things they want.
this sounds like wanting a mother ngl
I need to cross a threshold – from the place I am in now, where I can still feel confused, ashamed, embarrassed, angry even, that romantic love is not part of my life, to a place where I care less about what other people might think about me and don’t punish myself when I do care, judge myself less for always wanting more. I have to own that romantic love is a present desire, not consigned to some fantasy me.
agreed about the first sentence, not sure of the second
[...] That’s the risk of abundance. It can be easy to find it lacking. A birthday party where you’re sore someone didn’t come rather than delighting in all who did. A canyon of want that is impossible to fill.
somewhat nice turn of phrase
It wasn’t until recently that I paid attention to a line in Blue ’s first song that goes, ‘I love you when I forget about me.’ In the last few years, I’ve come to realise that in the romantic loving I’ve done, I’ve often obliterated my sense of self: I’ve not located my needs, let alone asked for them to be met. I’ve just doggedly pursued a kind of abstract reciprocation – have I been noticed or have I not? – and because I’ve not paid enough attention to what I want, the vast contrast between what I want and what I’ve received hasn’t been as visible to me. Romantic love transformed me but not in the way I’d dreamed it would. It made me forget myself, not to my self’s flourishing advantage – connected, inspired, courageous – but to my detriment. My resilience, self-image and facility for care scrawny with neglect.
Svevo's heroes all seem to be tormented by an intense lust for self-improvement, spiritual or social, for education, wisdom or learning to better them or their positions; however old, they still think themselves unprepared for the serious business of living. [...]
[...] The Jew whom Weininger describes consciously and Svevo perhaps unconsciously is indeed a victim of a psychological disease: living in a society that considers him different and often treats him exceptionally, he either tends to imagine himself more different than he really is, so that he lives up to the character attributed to him, or else he tries to "cross the line," to ignore difference in treatment and to pretend that he is not a Jew or that there "ain't no such thing" as a Jew. Thus pseudoassimilation and Zionism, and the ambivalence of the individual hesitating between these extremes, are all determined by society's evaluation of the Jew rather than by his being Jewish. And if Svevo reveals Jewish traits in his style or his characters, he is illustrating the environmental influence of Austrian society which achieved the same results in other Jewish writers, Kafka or Schnitzler, or in the Jewish characters of "aryan" writers such as Robert Musil, rather than the influence of any Jewish heredity.
Of the two it was really he who was the egoist. She was like a mother to him in her unselfish devotion, but this did not prevent him from speaking as if his shoulders were weighed down by the burden of another precious life bound to his own, and of acting as if this weight of responsibility obliged him to go cautiously through life, avoiding all its perils, but also renouncing all its pleasures and all hope of earthly felicity. At the age of thirty-five, the desire for pleasures he had never tasted, for love he had never known surged up in his heart, but with a sense of bitterness and frustration at the thought of all he might have enjoyed: and he was conscious at the same time of a great mistrust of himself, and of the weakness of his own character which hitherto he had had occasion rather to suspect than to prove by actual experience.
He had approached her with the idea of a brief and easy intrigue, such as he had so often heard described, but had never yet experienced, at least hardly in such a form as to be worthy of the name. She had dropped her sunshade just in time to provide him with an excuse for accosting her. and now that he was thus cunningly entangled in the pretty web of the young girl's life he felt no desire to free himself from it until he should have advanced much further into her intimacy.
But the amazing purity of her profile and her incomparable good health --- are not good health and corruption always assumed by the rhetorician to be incompatible? --- had subdued the ardor of his first onset and, overcome with a sudden reluctance to go further, he now found all his delight in marvelling at the mystery of her face, with its clear and delicate chiselling and infinite sweetness of expression. His happiness was complete, he was at rest.
just the physical descriptions of her
She hesitated --- she clearly hesitated. One part of the story, the mountain part, she grasped at once. He only saw the love in it; she, on the other hand, at once felt the boredom and the cold. She looked at him, saw what answer he expected of her, and just to please him, replied without any enthusiasm: "Oh, it would be glorious!"
OUCH
"Enough, enough," he said contemptuously. "I have only one thing more to say to you. I loved you very much and that alone ought to have given me the right to be treated differently. When a girl allows a young man to tell her he loves her she belongs to him and is not free to do as she likes." This phrase was rather feeble, but it expressed exactly what he wanted to say. which is a great deal to expect of a lover's reproach. He had in fact no other claim to plead save the fact that he had told her he loved her.
yikes