New game New luck
When I met my husband, he was still married to another woman. We met at dinner and it was their last day together, but I did not know that. What a nice couple, I thought, not a perfect match, but that just makes it more interesting. I liked him, and it would have been nice if he had not been so happily married to a very nice woman, but the feeling vanished quickly.
Later, I learned that her separation after four difficult years of marriage had long been a settled thing and that she moved far away the following day. On the eve of the separation for permanent and later divorce, my prospective husband did not indulge in a phase of emotional and personal freedom, but instantly fell in love with me.
I had always imagined that the love of my life would be a complete new beginning, with a person who had never really loved before me. Of course, everything was different. For most of the first year he constantly analyzed with me his previous relationship. At first I felt flattered, but over time this eternally same pattern became a boring burden. It also annoyed me that my former loves somehow did not matter compared to his intense pain.
After a while, I protested and refused to listen to more stories from his married life. I burned anecdotes from his childhood and youth and for my sake also on other women's stories. The one he married before he met me should be part of his past, not part of his presence.
Every love story can be told in different ways, because nothing teems so much with tiny particles of opposing forces that can add up to harmony and disharmony, like a connection between two people. Where does this energy go when the relationship breaks off or is broken off? Of course, it does not disappear, but occupies either a new love or the void left by the old - or both.
Today, when I've been with a man (okay, with exactly the same man) for many years, I doubt there's anything like a clean new beginning, a dash under the past, or even a straightforward path in love affairs. to initiate another person into their own experiences. Just like a love story, a separation changes depending on who or whom you tell them.
Illusion "eternal love"
Traditional weddings continue to live on the illusion that our lives are eternally (okay, "until death divorces us") a valid couple's decision to stay together for a lifetime and eliminate all other temptations, potential risks and failures. In reality, we do not fool ourselves. Most of the marriages and relationships in my circle of acquaintances contain on both sides quite a few ex-partners, and men and women tell their stories without shyness to anyone who wishes to hear them. Everything merges into a single great succession of loves and separations, creating the continuum we call our love life.
I do not know if it's good to let old ones melt into new ones and keep them in the same emotional space for all eternity. Our lives have been much longer today than ever, and carrying so much emotional luggage around for so long is as confusing as it is unnecessary. Henry VIII developed a very extreme method of making room for a new woman in his life: kill the old one. But if you reduce this behavior to its symbolic core, is not that a sensible idea?
Old love stories: part of the old self
I recently received an e-mail from my very first lover. He did not mean much to me at the time, and he does not really care about me today. Why should one take contact again decades later or even think of each other? From every love, great or small, we take something to the next - but there is no reason to hold on to the real people we once said goodbye to. Should they live in our past and become part of our life story - forgotten or occasionally remembered with the tenderness that one should muster for all the old friends and for the old selves.
