My daughter was telling me yesterday about her boyfriend’s sister, who has just broken up with her partner. She had cheated on him, not once, but several times, apparently, and he had had enough.
‘I couldn’t believe it’ my daughter said, ‘It’s not like her at all, she’s such a nice person’.
A nice person. People who are unfaithful to their partners are not nice people. What about those who long for infidelity, but never quite succeed in achieving it? I think about the times I’ve though about confessing to her about my feelings. What would be her reaction? If I lost her love and respect, how would that feel?
It feels like an echo from thirty years ago: ‘What would my parents think?’ Am I still living my life according to what I think other people think I should do and be? Of course I am. It’s summed up in that sentence I carelessly typed a couple of minutes ago: ‘If I lost her love and respect, how would that feel?’ Put like that, it is too great a thing to risk.
And what about self-love and self-respect? I don’t feel myself to be a ‘nice’ person, and I never have. I have always had these feelings, even when I was her age, whatever relationship I was in, I always wanted something else, or someone else. I used to tell myself – even until very recently – that this was just because I’d never found ‘the Right One’, that I needed to find someone I could be faithful to painlessly, someone who would be everything to me and there wouldn’t have to be any kind of thought or struggle or wrestling with my conscience because he would just be there and that would be all I needed.
But why should that happen now, if it has never happened in thirty years? And if it isn’t going to happen, what does that mean? That I might as well just stay where I am, because even if I could find another relationship, it probably wouldn’t be any more satisfactory than this one? (Though I might at least get some sex, which could be a bonus – oh stop it woman, why do you have to bring it down to that level?)
Stay here, and be a Nice Person, in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of my children?
They are the only people in the world whom I truly love. But is love a trap? Is putting someone else’s feelings before your own, living for them, the truest way to find happiness, as I have read, or is it self-negation?
I remember another conversation, on another, apparently very different topic. Just after the Parish Council meeting where I tried and failed to resign, when I was told that they couldn’t manage without me. I was talking to another friend, who said: ‘Nobody is indispensable’. Am I indispensable to my husband? I assume I am, but how is he feeling? I make excuses – he’s under a lot of stress, he has all these worries at work, things will get better again when that settles down, - because I’m too scared to speak to him, to ask him how he’s feeling, and more importantly, to tell him how I’m feeling. And I think about all the huge and intimidating practicalities, about the house, and how would it feel to leave the house, and where would I go and what would I do and how would I feel about that, and it’s all too much and so I put aside my fantasies and carry on as though nothing is wrong.
As though I were a nice person.