To the women, an invisible choir but whose presence we did not detach from our steps, gave us carte blanche to live the loving passion to the fullest. Straight, yes. The totalizing passion was offered to us as the only way of personal fulfillment. As a dogma, the idea was installed among us that a woman without a man who loves her is an incomplete being. So we tacitly accept the role of object –not subject– of desire, and on more than one occasion we are satisfied with the crumbs of affection from guys who today make us blush. “How could I fall in love with this idiot?”, we repeat incredulously, cursing our insecurity and, above all, that futile enchantment.
In youth, we were in tow: they marked the times. There were manuals of help –never go to bed with him the first time, don’t respond to his messages right away…– that tried to tame the erratic impulses of the defense of extreme romanticism. In Reinventing love (Paidós), winner of the European Essay Prize, Mona Chollet undertakes an arduous task: reviewing and moving away from all submission of sentimental relationships to defend love in an inventive and confident way. The author examines how romantic representations are built on the sublimation of female inferiority.
And it is true that submission, tragedy and abandonment have built the love script, both in Hollywood movies – that Marilyn who spoke to her partners in a childish voice – and in literature, from Tristan and Isolde to The Lover, by Duras, passing through Albert Cohen’s river Bella del Señor or Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, in which Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, waits patiently for him without wrinkling. One day he would have to bring together all the waiters of famous men in the history of literature, since Penelope. In Pure Passion, Annie Ernaux writes that when the phone rang and it wasn’t him, she hated the caller. And in her imagination she is composing another story, which has little to do with the real one: that of a married man who will never give up his other life.
Beginnings are always idyllic. We edit the best of our lives to offer a compelling portrait and we see signs of each other everywhere. You don’t usually think about endings. Until we discover that our way of living love lacks reciprocity on the other side. Difficult, narcissistic men, allergic to commitment, make up a highly valued variety in flirting. Now, not only immaturity, masochism and a patriarchal view of love are responsible for the failure at a time when the matchmaking market through apps is on the rise.
“Why don’t we fall in love?” asks Liv Strömquist in her illustrated novel I Feel Nothing, the phrase with which Leonardo DiCaprio ends his relationships. Revisiting the classics, she delves into the ins and outs of love and asserts that we are all becoming DiCaprios, for whom a controlling and individualistic mindset makes it difficult to create strong bonds. Impatient, capricious, dissatisfied, how are we going to understand the other if we can barely stand each other? Strömquist speaks of emotionally detached men and women determined to create a family, even if alone. And her longing, like that of Chollet, and that of so many feminist women, is not to kill romanticism, nor to reformulate it, but to write a new sexual contract so that the mystery of love feeds us without devouring us.
