The summer after my sophomore year in college, I went through a phase of being friends-with-benefits with a douchebag. I know, most, if not all, girls go through it and then arise from the ashes of their emotions with newfound revelations that you deserve to be treated better than how they were treating you. In any case, lets call him P for the sake of the story. P had a habit of thinking he was quite the intellectual and even recommended a philosophical sort of book for me to read.
The book was originally translated from Czech into French, then English. Oh, what a foreign and haute piece of literature for little old me. In any case, the main reason I suspect he recommended it to be was because one of the characters reminded him of me. I think he even told me outright that I reminded him of one of the characters. The specific character’s name was Tereza, a sniveling and essentially broken woman brutally scared by her mother’s abuse. Tereza would stay with her cheating husband even though he continued to sleep with multiple women and not even go through the trouble of hiding it. She was forever shaped by her suffering and, spoiler alert, ultimately killed herself. As a character, she was complex and interesting, arguably strong in some ways, but that’s not the sort of character you want to remind people of.
In any case, as I read the book further, the main chapter that really stood out at me was the one that talked about how much people didn’t understand each other. There was a professor named Franz and a free-spirited mistress named Sabina who loves to travel and run away from her problems. The best thing about this relationship was how much they completely misunderstood each other. There would be one thing, something as simple as a parade, and both would follow completely different thought processes to achieve their opposite opinions. The chapter continued to explain that the individuals which had been traveling on such different roads of life had almost no chance of ever understanding each other or moving past a sexual relationship. As expected, Sabina runs away to some other country to be on some other adventure and Franz constantly remembers her as someone who forever changed his life. The characters even remember each other as perceptions of who they thought each other was rather than who they really were as people.
In a way, I think this book is a perfect anecdote to my relationship with P. We operated on completely different levels and he never ever understood me. A lot of the time, I understood his motivations for his actions, but eventually I realized that he would never understand me at any level deeper than a sexual one. Even then, I was going through a rough emotional patch so I suspect he was just surfing the giant emotional hurricane that followed and decided to enjoy it while it lasted. Maybe I never quite understood him either.
Regardless of what P thought, I think I’m more of a Sabina.
Photo by: timeo http://www.deviantart.com/art/Love-And-Regret-42761682
katherine pretending to be a philosopher 