I’ve been thinking about various relationships with women, thinking about how they relate to my relationship with (and to the memory of) my mother.
I often enter relationships (see: Serena and Veronique and Marina and Sofia), hoping I’ll be good enough and special enough that they won’t leave me. I try to communicate well, to give them exactly what they want, and to make it easy for them to function as they wish. My goal, of course, is to get what I want – for them to stay, to keep me safe – and to disprove the idea that it was something wrong with me that caused my mom to leave. By continually adjusting my demands, I attempt to show (myself) that I could have possibly done something to keep her. I use these women as proxies for my mom.
But recently, I had a thought about an almost opposing version of this feeling: instead of (or in addition to?) trying to keep these women to prove I did nothing wrong, maybe I’m (also?) trying to create a scenario in which their ultimate, inevitable departure truly has nothing to do with me. I want it to be genuinely a function of their own lives, leaving them longing to stay with me but unable to. This could serve as a balm for me in some way: my mom loved me, would have stayed, but she had no choice.
These two perspectives are, of course, not mutually exclusive. I might use a relationship to prove I could have done better and kept someone, while also unconsciously shaping the end to take a form that’s not about rejecting me, but about the inevitable march of life.
Maybe I’m not just marching toward an inevitable abandonment by trying to prove an impossibility; maybe I’m also creating endings organized around the march of others’ lives, and inevitable forces, rather than rejection of me.