Cursed cliché: His new - a younger one
I'm sitting in a piano bar near the central station in front of a glass of champagne. My hands are cold, but from my breastbone rises the familiar feeling of a heat wave. Not now, I think. I made myself up against my habit. I should have known better. I take off my shawl, although a Swiss style consultant recently recommended women over 40 to cover their cleavage in his magazine column in order not to provoke a "scumbag scandal". Rotten meat, I think. Fits. Here I am sitting and waiting for the new or not so new friend of my ex-husband. She is younger than me. Of course she is younger than me.
"How much younger is she?" That's always the first question. Not: "Is she younger?" That goes without saying. No: "How much younger is she?" The more frequently this question is asked, the more importance it gets. This summarizes the complex, traumatic ending to a marriage. How much younger? 15 years. This is almost the same age among heterosexuals. At least if the woman is the younger one.
"I'm too old for you!" That was the first thing I said to him when I met him. I was 29, he was 27, but he looked much younger then, with his boyish charm, his refusal of all adults.
The age difference between us became visually clearer. I had so many laugh lines in my mid-30s that I was approached during readings. He remained wrinkled and dark-haired. My hair, on the other hand, turned gray. At some point I stopped coloring them. "My husband would not have allowed me that," my mother-in-law said, half wistfully, half admiringly. Mine allowed it. He even claimed that he liked it.
Our relationship has been intense, difficult, combative and passionate from the beginning. We were together for 18 years, with two breaks. Once I fell in love with someone else, once he did. We did not have a civil marriage - at least that's what I believed. The last five years have been the hardest and the last 15 months hell. This last major crisis was triggered by one of his travels as a photojournalist. Upon his return, a two-day quarrel broke out that ended with my scratching my face in despair. I moved out for a week. After that it was clear: Now it has to be different, or we part. I suggested a couple therapy. He said I should go alone. That made sense, because I was the neurotic, the difficult, the one that destroys itself.
Later, I read somewhere that men who are outraged, are increasingly nagging at their partners, while women in the situation are more relaxed and come home with fewer demands.
I reacted immediately refusing.
On this trip he had photographed a young woman who was pursuing a project there. When he showed me these pictures, I reacted immediately dismissively: How the one with her gucci goggles is in the rubble - chick in the rubble, I thought. And how she looks at the camera. That knowing look, that half smile: I know you're on me. And how tenderly the camera captures them ... "What happened there?" I asked. "Nothing, why?" "Come on, she looks really in love with the camera!" "You're crazy." I believed him. Also because the woman was not his type. Aggressively displayed sexuality, artificial hair, nails - everything he did not like. And yet, in the following terrible 15 months, this suspicion kept coming up: He has another. If not, then else. Any. I could not blame him: we were both worn down. That you do not just fall in love, I knew from my own experience. That nobody from the outside can push into a really happy love relationship, I knew too.
A coldness spread between us, a distance that I did not know and that I could not explain otherwise than that: there must be another. That's what my girlfriends meant. But I had asked him! Not once, a hundred times! On my knees, in tears, I had begged him: "Just tell me, give me the mercy shot!"
The thought that he could lie to me, again and again, consistently, icy cold, had never come to me
He reacted indignantly. "You would like that," he said. "That would make it easier for you." That's right, I felt. That would make it easier for me. And I was ashamed of this groundless, neurotic, somehow cowardly jealousy that kept flaring up. The thought that he could lie to me, again and again, consistently, icy cold, never came to me. Why? There was no reason for it. We could talk about everything. We did not live a petty-bourgeois life lie. He despised nothing more.
One of my friends was cheated on by her husband, but she stayed with him. That made me angrier than was appropriate. She has a perfect reason to go, and she's not going, I thought. And then: If I feel that way, I have to go. Without a reason.
I took all the responsibility on me. In the family, in the village, in public. "I'm just unreasonable," I explained in an interview the failure of my marriage. For half a year, I cried every day. But I never doubted my decision. I had gone to save my skin.
He wanted to therapy
After the separation, my ex-husband suddenly insisted on the couples therapy he had previously denied. In five agonizing sessions, we dissected my groundless jealousy that would drive him "into the arms of a younger woman." He explained why he could no longer covet me: because I had such trouble getting older that I could no longer find myself beautiful. Was that true? I wondered, I asked honestly. Or did not I find myself beautiful because he no longer wanted me? In my desperation, I had sometimes asked him, "Am I too old for you, is it the hair, should I dye my hair?" Would I have done it if he had asked me to? Equally still the eyes lifted, Botox sprayed? Could he have wanted me again - or certainly not? Would I have wanted this kind of desire at all? Suddenly I remembered an unhappy time in my youth, when I was in love with a bisexual man, and I thought, I can not be young again as I can be a man.
As I visibly grew older, I made my husband older. I took the illusion that I was forever young. How long should I be punished for this? My age was actually an important part of the breakup. It drove me on, it made me more radical, uncompromising.
Ten months after the breakup, he was sitting on my balcony. He was very pale. "I have to talk to you." He had met a woman, it was getting serious. I felt a deep relief. Finally I was able to lay my blame! I was happy. Hugged him. He was still very pale. And then, by the way, I asked him how he got to know her.
"Do I really have to tell that?" He said. "On this trip two years ago, you saw the pictures back then ..."
So I was right the whole time? So I was not at all neurotic, unreasonable, pathologically jealous? The relief that I should have felt about it did not materialize. Instead, I felt sick. I sent him away. And filed for divorce.
"Oh, tell me something new, something I have not heard a hundred times!" Even my hairdresser is bored. I became a cliché. The worst time of my life is reduced to a cheap midlife crisis joke. The man says to his wife: "I never assumed that you believed me!"
All men are lying.
Really true. He said that. But my hairdresser is not impressed. All men lie, you know that, it's genetic. " And then he asks the question everyone asks, no matter how I tell the story. The question that always comes down to it: "How much younger is she?"
Here I am sitting and waiting for her. We want to speak out. She thinks I deserve "the truth". I do not even know if I want to hear her at all. Finally she comes back to work. With her chin out, she looks around the bar. Arrogant chick, I still think - but at the same time something melts in me. I know that it is much more difficult for her than for me. She still loves him. Not me. Quite unexpectedly, the relief that I have been waiting for for so long fills me. This relief makes me generous. I get up and hug her. "You're so much nicer than in these photos," I say. And I mean it too. She has open eyes, a clear view, an infectious laugh. In the course of our conversation, I also realize that she is smarter, more careful and pragmatic than I expected. Or as I ever was.
"Do you think he has a midlife crisis?" She asks at some point. "Looks like." But it does not concern me anymore.
Although she flinches a few times as we share our stories, she is far away from me. "That's just how easy they are, the men," she says. "You can not expect certain things from them."
Yes, I think. Yes, you can. Of course you can! I have two sons. I expect everything from them. And from the rest of my life. The world is full of great and great men whom I could theoretically get to know. Why not? I am not destroyed, I realize. I still believe in everything. To the great love that may or may not come. On the fact that I alone can be very happy that I can take seven lovers or seven books to bed.
I like to have gray hair, wrinkles, heat waves, but I have not resigned. I still think everything is possible, at any moment. I am still very young in my heart. Younger than her. How much younger?
Milena Moser,
49, lives in Aarau in the Swiss canton of Aargau. More about her life, her work, her books at www.milenamoser.com
