I was a parasite at 22
The most embarrassing thing I learned about falling in love
I went to a Philosophy talk on Saturday night about monogamy, of all things. I know. Wild Saturday night for a woman in her 50s (I won’t tell you I was in bed by 9.30pm in case I kill the vibe completely).
It was a great surprise to see how, despite being the youngest there, lol, people were openly talking about sex and orgasms. I really feel comfortable among people who don’t look away when those words come up.
Another great surprise (one that really fed my ego) was the recommendation of a book I read years ago. The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck. If you’ve never read it, the short version is that it opens by telling you life is difficult and then refuses to comfort you about it.
My kind of book.
And at some point in that talk, a couple of ideas that, I already knew but never really understood fully, hit differently than it ever had on the page.
Co-dependency is parasitic behaviour
Boom! That landed in my stomach like an arrow.
I saw my 22-year-old self in bed crying her eyes out and hiding the phone (one of those early brick mobiles) in a drawer because I did not want to keep checking every twenty seconds to see if HE had messaged back. Fucking embarrassing. That was me, yeah. A parasite.
The thing we call “falling in love” (the can’t-eat, can’t-sleep, you-complete-me thing) is temporary by design. Peck describes it as your sense of self collapsing for a moment so you can pour yourself into someone else. The loneliness stops. You feel infinite. The two of you against the world, and the world doesn’t stand a chance.
And then… life.
He wants sex, you want sleep. You want to talk about your day, he wants Netflix. The boundaries snap back and you wake up next to a separate human being with their own opinions, their own mess, their own morning breath and their own disgraceful habit of not replying to your bloody messages immediately (how dare they!).
The feeling fades. It was always going to fade.
That is not a relationship failing but the honeymoon doing exactly what it does. But, because nobody explains us this, when the feeling goes, you start thinking that you married the wrong person, or you became the wrong person, or love “just died.”
And you start grieving a thing that was never built to last in the first place.
Love is not a feeling
Marrying for love (that wonderful feeling!) is barely a few hundred years old. We treat it like ancient law and it’s actually a recent experiment. Before that, marriage was property, alliances and duty. Cold and practical and sometimes brutal.
Then somewhere around the 1800s, someone had the bright idea to sell it as romance instead (two incomplete halves finding their missing piece) and we’ve been chasing that fairy tale ever since.
Well, I’ve been a few times 🙄
So let me be me and yell for a moment:
We never chose any of this. We inherited the fairy tale, and then we inherited the shame when the tale didn’t hold.
And I keep chewing on this: monogamy in itself was never the thing that made us miserable, we just ran the whole thing on autopilot and signed an invisible contract nobody read to us, in a language nobody taught us, and then called it failure when we couldn’t make it work.
The philosophers mentioned in that talk (Peck, Fromm, de Botton if you want the full reading list) all say the same unglamorous thing: Love is a skill. An art. A discipline. Something you learn, like an instrument or a language. Not something you fall into and pray survives.
And all that makes sense BUT - I love fat buts - the talk did not go into what happens when, despite you learning and choosing to love somebody, despite respecting them, there comes a day when you don’t want their tongue in your throat... then what?
Then silence. Avoidance.
The one thing I was most interested in wasn’t even mentioned.
Every one of those brilliant men will tell you love is a verb. A discipline. A daily choice. And not one of them will go into what happens when desire is literally...gone and you can’t think your way back from it.
That’s the part everyone skips. The philosophers file desire under “shallow” (a reflex, not real love) or under “maintenance problem” (the boredom, the novelty wearing off). Either way, they get to look away from it. Convenient.
You can choose to love someone. You cannot choose to want them.
“I love you” and “I want you” are not the same, and pretending they are is how people end up in disciplined, dignified, loving marriages that are also a slow starvation. The will says yes. The body left years ago. And everyone calls that endurance virtue.
I won’t.
I don’t have a tidy answer for you, because there isn’t one. You can’t force desire. You can’t negotiate it, or guilt it, therapise it, spiritualise it or discipline it into being there.
Nobody is wrong for not wanting and nobody is wrong for needing it.
But the moment you stop lying about which one you are, is the moment your life starts feeling alive again.
So I am going to ask you the question I had to ask myself, the one that wrecked my comfortable little story and took me where I am today:
Did you ever consciously choose any of it?
I have been doing some interviews with my mum and friends and the consensus is that they married “because you were supposed to do so”.
That does not sound like love to me, just saying.
But let’s not end on a downer.
Everything has a solution except death, as we say in Spain, and there is nothing better than telling the truth if you want to set yourself free.
So, if you are one of those people stuck in a relationship that, despite being loving in the living room, it is dead in the bedroom, I want you to know this:
I’ve been building something for exactly this kind of work, not to tell you what to do or if you should leave or stay but to help you get to the truth buried under the rug before life detonates it for you, the way it did for me.
I’m going to run this first as a small beta with only five people, individually.
Five private processes, one person at a time, so I can test the structure properly and make sure the work is as honest, useful, and grounded as I want it to be.
More on that in a few days.
For now, just answer this question honestly, just for you, nobody’s watching:
Did you actually want to get married?
More soon,
Eva :)
