My Husband

by Maud Ventura

I know that I have to control myself in order to love.

But my life before doesn’t concern him. I don’t have to tell him everything: 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.

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

I want him to dote on me, to take his time, a long time, to spare no effort.

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.

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

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.

I gave him an opportunity to compensate for the clementine, to prove that he is capable of making an effort, that he isn’t opposed to compromise. He did not seize that chance. Too bad for him.

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.

Marriage is all about compromise. But why did I have to be the one to adapt?

I’m still angry about the clementine, but I am mature enough to set my anger aside when necessary.

Miserable and powerless, I witness the transformation of our couple into a family.

Now my daughter is seven, almost eight. When I read her a story, I try to choose one in which there’s no prince, no romance. I buy her books with independent heroines who defy dragons, sail warships, dig up dinosaur bones. Choosing such a story is part of the painful responsibility I feel toward my daughter. I want to prevent her at all costs from making the same mistakes as I did.

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.

When my husband went back to work and I found myself home alone with a newborn, I felt like a prisoner, trapped in the role of mother, which I had no desire to play and for which I had no talent.

I do my best, but most of the time I’m too busy being in love to be a good mother.

“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.

no flagrant signs of a personality disorder.

Sure Jan

I wouldn’t waste a minute being in love.

I often try to take a lover. These rendezvous have only one aim: to ease the romantic pressure that weighs entirely on my husband by dividing it among several people.

I desire him as though I’ve never touched him.

I am convinced that if I made a map of my daily micro-movements, it would reveal that my husband is the sun around which the majority of my movements gravitate.

I am still in the unreal state that persists when I emerge from sleep too quickly and my dream superimposes itself onto the day.

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.

my desire to love has always been so great that for each person I’m with, I love with the same intensity. To console myself over one, I leap into the arms of the next, incapable of being alone.

For some, it was perceived as an excessive but reassuring proof of attachment. For others, it was a frightening and guilt-ridden responsibility. But in all of these cases, the relationships failed. So when I met my husband, real husband material, I decided to show nothing of my dependency.

Today I’ve learned to hide it, to pretend, but deep down there is still only one thing capable of getting me out of bed at any hour of the day or night: love.

“Love brings you sadness, just like your mother,”

(Why is it that something is bearable for months or years, and then one morning we wake up unable to stand it for a second longer?)

On the scale of years, we share a beautiful love story. Over the course of fifteen years, there’s been a marriage, a house, two children. Satisfying. On the scale of months, the landscape remains luminous: there is no month without a moment just for the two of us, without us making love, without tender words and a gift from him. On the scale of the week, the sky remains more or less clear: not a week without an affectionate gesture, a sweet remark, or a deep conversation. On the scale of the day or the hour, the romantic weather darkens. On this scale, I can detect all the ways he’s distancing himself, all of his oversights. On this scale, I pick up on all the words he doesn’t say and all the times he doesn’t look me in the eyes.

And one moment can effortlessly cloud all of our years.

the team. I tend to forget he does this, but my husband often tells me important news after the fact. As if he needs to digest the information himself before communicating it to me, like a true introvert. This slight lag sometimes makes me feel like we’re living in different time zones.

I have no need to dominate in order to feel alive.

“I’m convinced of one thing. My sister is so obsessed with love because it helps her avoid thinking about real problems. Love is a distraction! It’s so much simpler to cry on Monday over her first husband, whom she says she’ll love the rest of her life, and then get back together with her second husband on Wednesday, after a fleeting infatuation with a man she met on a train the week before . . . It’s easier to cry over a man than to think about the cancer she’s been battling for ten years, or the fact that she won’t ever be able to have a child.”

It’s as though he’s always struggling against his true nature.

If I had chosen to be loved rather than to love, I would certainly have been a better mother. And I would have had the necessary headspace to form real friendships and focus on my career.

some people think in a long interior monologue with full sentences, while others reflect through abstract concepts.

I made love to her that very night. I do it systematically whenever she sleeps with another man. I mark my territory, and it’s a way for me to communicate tacitly that I’m not angry at her, that I forgive her.

The secret to keeping the scales of power tipped to my advantage is to switch up the intensity: if every week were like this one, she would be exhausted and numb to everything. So, after a particularly grueling week—a crescendo from Monday to Sunday—I have to ease up on her. That way she lets her guard down, puts things in perspective, remembering that she and I do have good moments. She even guilts herself: How could she have been so angry at me when I’m such a loving husband?

I am lucky to have her by my side, I’m aware of that.

It was clear right away that she wasn’t from my world, but that wasn’t important: she was different, complicated, complex.