My Husband

by Maud Ventura

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.

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

She just like me

The two of them perform an impeccable choreography, a seamless lovers’ ballet.

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.

The proof: he doesn’t pull my hair and doesn’t ask me to go down on him.

This trick helps me to avoid a lot of disappointment—hoping it’s him, only to find that it’s just a friend or family member.

I settle for: “See you soon.” Subdued and detached. Exactly how I want him to perceive me.

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.

We suffer the consequences of an overly intense and inappropriate love. We feel no complacency about being a woman in love. No satisfaction with ourselves for experiencing such passion.

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 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.

(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?)

And I’ve noticed that he has a tendency to erase from his narrative the hassles, the arguments, the yawns, and the sighs, which in my world often take up so much space that they eclipse the rest.

My anxiety was founded, my fear legitimate all along. I had every reason in the world to be worried: my husband really did intend to leave me.

I have nothing left to fear, because what was bound to happen has happened. I have nothing left to fear, because the worst has happened.

These are two punishments that I had to enforce at the beginning of this week, with the aim of reestablishing equilibrium between my husband’s behavior and my own. That’s the very principle of restorative justice—and I know from experience how important it is to be in a relationship with a baseline of equality.

It limits my nights of anxiety, the wounds that fester and never heal, because from the moment my husband is punished, I feel that he’s paid his debt. And then I can start to forgive him.