Hindsight

In hindsight, I maybe should have gone back and re-read this book BEFORE I stepped into the abyss screaming, "Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!" (That was the moment folks, do you believe it? Watching a hockey game on April 23rd and emailing with someone who thinks sports are the dumbest things ever -- he's wrong about that, by the way -- and I make a naughty comment having to do with Stephane Matteau. Yes, I can even make hockey dirty. I have a talent, what can I say?) Unfortunately, as I've written before, my ass lost its glasses somewhere.

"So are you the type who hadn't realized how unhappy you'd been until you found yourself in the midst of a serious life-shattering affair, diving headlong into this new person's arms to escape the rising tide of emotional deadness at home and in some ridiculously short space of time risking things you never thought you'd risk, without a clue how you've gotten yourself into this whole thing or what disaster might be waiting around the next corner? If not, please use your imagination: imagine that every moronic love song is drilling a pathway directly to your deepest self, imagine being hurtled up and down the entire gamut of emotions from one hour to the next, consuming Tums like Raisinets, but what if it's a million times more compelling than anything else in your life? Even if home life wasn't *totally* terrible, even if there were (and are) good times plus all the comforts of familiarity and history and even affection -- when not squeezed out by an
accretion of disappointments and injuries or that low-hanging cloud of overfamiliarity which means knowing in advance the shape of every argument before it even happens, and everything you once liked best about yourself getting buried under the avalanche of routine. Let's say there's even sex -- reliably satisfying, gets-the-job-done sex (and what's wrong with that?) -- but how can that compare to the feeling of being *reinvented*? Of being *desired*? Of feeling *fascinating*?

"Or maybe you're the type who dived headlong into this love affair as a rickety lifeboat from an entirely familiar unhappiness that you can't bring yourself to do anything about, and whose bittersweet romance with your own melancholia or extended penance for imagined sins will be your new lover's real competition, not that mate waiting at home. But even having made your bed you'd still prefer a little company in it now and then, plus the occasional rush of possibility all the while knowing that eventually the sackcloth will come out and there you'll be, as penitent as the day is long, slinking back to the familiar emotional deep freeze that you can't (or won't) forsake.

"Or maybe you weren't unhappy at all, and things were just fine at home, and you were just unlucky enough to fall in love."

Laura Kipnis
2003