My Husband

by Maud Ventura

I don’t know of any fictional heroine who can show me how to behave. There are plenty of despairing lovers who sing about loss or rejection. But I don’t know of any novel, any film, any poem that can serve as my example, show me how to love better, less intensely.

My husband has no name; he is my husband, he belongs to me.

Monday has always been my favorite day of the week. Sometimes it wears a deep royal blue—navy blue, midnight blue, Egyptian blue, sapphire blue. But more often Monday takes on a practical blue, economical and inspirational: the color of Bic pens, my students’ workbooks, and simple clothing that goes with everything. Monday is also the day of labels, resolutions, storage boxes. The day of smart choices and reasonable decisions.

I’ve always preferred the first chapters of a book, the first fifteen minutes of a film, the first act of a play. I like starting points. When everyone is in their rightful place in a world that makes sense.

the couples that last are the ones that keep the mystery alive. For example, a few months after we met, I ended things with him. A two-week hiatus during which I ran back into the arms of a former lover, Adrien. We took the train and went to see the ocean. Then, one morning, I left a note on the pillow and I returned to the man who would become my husband. What happened during those two weeks of wavering is none of his business.

When my husband is absent, the house resounds less, like a piano whose soft pedal is engaged: the sound comes out muted, domestic life loses variation and intensity. It’s as though someone’s placed an enormous lid over our roof.

I wonder whether I’m the only one to notice the universal women’s waiting room.

“I’ve never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”

It’s a common event, a husband returning from work. It happens so often that people stop noticing it. Their focus is on other things: increasingly late hours with each promotion, a meal they don’t want to ruin, the children who need to be tucked in. They get used to it, and their attention drifts elsewhere. But I continue to prepare for it each night. I’ve never stopped noticing.

They say that those who sleep on their backs are sociable, those who lie on their stomachs are sexually frustrated, those who prop themselves on their sides are confident.

An unhappy man doesn’t smile in his sleep.

For years my husband has called me “sweetheart” while I yearn to be a femme fatale.

We think it’s our fault if the other person leaves us, that we could have done something to stop it. We imagine that we could have acted in such a way as to preserve their desire to be together. The idea behind “let you go” is pleasant; there’s even something reassuring about it.

No one can see my neuroses except me. The way I see myself is not how other people see me. Everything is okay. I belong here.

When I met my husband’s family, I felt that there were certain codes I hadn’t mastered, but I couldn’t yet identify them.

More generally, the idea that my husband existed before meeting me is surreal, even revolting.

Why doesn’t he say that? Why doesn’t he say I was part of the story, too?

So my husband thinks his best friend is married to a pineapple, while he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.

Each new person who enters into our life is an additional dilution of his attention, a dilution of him, and I’m horrified by this. The energy he expends toward others hurts me: it tells me that I am not enough for him.

He already understood that desire was born out of frustration, that it is often more effective to suggest than to do.

People think it’s all that anxious waiting that creates dependence and fuels passion. We imagine the object of desire as a man married to someone else, a man who doesn’t answer the phone after a certain hour, who’s inaccessible on Christmas or during the weeks of summer vacation. Passion is supposed to be born from passively waiting in front of the phone, the jealousy of knowing he’s in bed with his wife, not knowing when you’ll see each other next. But to the adulterous lovers, to those who love each other from a distance, and to those who are no longer loved, I would like to say that love has never been a question of uncertainty or waiting, that regularity and reciprocity do not alter intensity. I would like to tell them that passion can also grow from domestic stability, from consistently punctual returns home, from the proof of commitment, from the repetition of daily life. I would like to tell them that the heart can also beat at set times.

Lovers who kiss all the time often do it to hide their lack of things to talk about: when one’s mouth is glued to another’s, it’s difficult to have a deep discussion on the meaning of life.

If I could speak to Phaedra, I would tell her that it is even more painful to love someone you already have.

I love. But don’t think at the moment of loving you I find myself innocent in my own eyes, or approve.

My husband could certainly have married better. Even so, I am embarrassed that this imbalance is so obvious to everyone else. I am mostly embarrassed that they speak about it so freely, that it’s socially acceptable to announce to me with no shame that I’m “lucky.” To my knowledge, no one has ever told my husband that he’s “lucky” to have me.

I love our children, that goes without saying. I love them, but still, I would rather have not had them. I love them, but I would rather have lived alone with my husband. Today, I think I can say with certainty that I could survive the death of one of my children, but not of my husband.

I read somewhere that there are three kinds of women: the woman in love, the mistress, and the mother. That seems right to me.

“If we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.”

I saw my husband become so used to my presence that he no longer found it miraculous.

Couples who don’t love each other anymore don’t care about not catching everything. They think of their exchanges as a text with many holes, and are unbothered by it; they say it’s no big deal, they’ll fill in the gaps later. I think the need to be exhaustive is proof of love: not wanting to lose a single word.

Thursday is like a second Monday. It’s a new beginning, the end of intermission, the swimmer kicking the pool wall to flip and head back in the other direction, the picnic halfway through the hike.

Masculine desire is fragile.

I think it’s essential that a couple’s arguments always be about love.

It’s as though each day of the week places a filter in front of my eyes—a film roll with its own grain, or a certain sensitivity to light. Each morning, my entire landscape shifts in hue.

I love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much so that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and saddened. When I love, I become harsh, serious, intolerant. A heavy shadow settles over my relationships. I love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.

After how many times seeing the same person naked do we stop being excited by it? When does the magic wear off? Six months, three years, ten years? Why does the 36,000th time we see a person naked not produce the same effect as the very first time?

If we could identify our last times as easily as our first times, thousands of moments would be lived more intensely.