Lost love and how to find it

I have to admit that I always feel slightly on edge when I am about to see a male patient for the first time, especially if he happens to be significantly older than me.

It does put me more at ease, if the patient in question, like Giovanni Strata in this case, has happened to find me directly through my website, and even more, if he indicates that, after having looked at my profile, he would like to work with me. The reasons for choosing me that patients have presented me with over the last ten years since I built my website are always surprising and unexpected. But never nearly as surprising or unexpected as the reason Giovanni presented me within his first (and last) early evening session.

An Italian name and the age of fifty-two geared my imagination towards expecting a charming and well-dressed middle-aged man, perhaps struggling to shift an extended midlife crisis. I was not wrong on the looks count. Giovanni was dressed in an airy white shirt not tucked in his designer jeans and a black raincoat, which he took time to fold neatly before asking for my permission to place it on the bottom of my couch. His lightly tanned skin, calm and alert face and relaxed body posture, as well as the firm handshake he gave me at the door, exuded a confidence that made me wonder what was possibly bringing him to a therapist’s consulting room.

He worked as a travel agent, he said, which managed to combine two of his biggest passions, travelling and reading.

‘I did a lot of solo travelling when I was younger, but as I settled in my thirties with a wife and now three teenage boys, I travelled less and read more and more. Travel books and fiction set in all the places I hadn’t yet been to. It is reading that has actually brought me here, but not travel reading. Alain de Botton.’

‘Alain de Botton?’ I muttered, feeling even more on edge.

‘Yes, the romantic philosopher.’

‘Hmm?’

‘You and him have a lot in common as well as others in your profession.’

He paused and looked at me with an amused smile that wrinkled his eyes. It was a relief that fifty-two was considered nowadays a charming age for a man, and that women were catching up soon. I would be there in less than ten years and I had not even begun to settle on an answer to the question of whether to give up on my half-hearted wish to try and have a baby with Luke or not. This man seemed to have gone through the life stages and to have come through the other end relatively unscathed.

‘You seem puzzled’, he persisted.

‘I am’, I said smiling back. Most of the time, I preferred an honest answer to the supposed therapeutic neutrality that failed to deliver.

‘Well, what I mean is that you, like a number of your colleagues I looked up, but you in particular, focus on the importance of relationship and how therapeutic it is.’

I nodded, intrigued to know where this was going.
‘So?’ I said after a while when no more clarification was forthcoming.

‘So, I think you are wrong and I wanted to meet a professional in person to talk it through. I was prepared to pay a full fee just so that I can argue my case. I have been thinking about it a lot, you see.’

I tried hard not to feel defensive, but whenever I have heard somebody before trying to convince me that they were visiting a therapist for academic reasons and not through the urgency of their suffering, it got, even if unwittingly, my back up. I should have known better than jumping to the next conclusion or interpretation, but I could not resist leaning forward and asking him:

‘Is the problem that you are in an unhappy relationship?’

After all, the clock was ticking and, as he had mentioned already, he was going to pay my full fee.

‘Not at all. As I said already, I am not coming here to solve a problem in my personal life, but one that has preoccupied my mind in the last few months, and that if I don’t manage to find some peace with soon, it might well become a personal problem.’

‘Was there something that triggered the problem? You mentioned it occurred in the last few months.’

‘Look, unlike what you suggested, I am very happily married. I met my now wife in my thirties and she is also from Italy, although a different part than where I come from. I come from the South and growing up there marks you forever. It is such a culturally binding place. This is the best way I can possibly describe it.’

‘Hmm.’ I knew all about culturally binding places from my mother. How she spent all her life trying to avoid being defined like that, how ironically she was desperate to die in the very same place she ran away from for all her adult life, almost falling back into all the rituals she taught us to look down on.

‘I come from Messina in Sicily. A small place, growing up near the sea, not much money and you know, all the rumours about the Mafia are true. The Mafia is one of the ways in which the place defines your life. I mean either your family are in it or not, and if they are not, and my family were not, thank God for that, you spend your life trying to avoid it. Anyway, it is so many years now since I moved away and what has stayed with me, what I am still carrying is the landscape and the sea, you know.’

He tousled his hair and I thought I could almost see in his wrinkled skin and the discreet lemony scent that came through, the salt-sculpted rocks, the seagulls and the wind-bent pines of his homeland, not that far from the place of birth of my mother.

‘You are very right indeed, it was an incident during a short visit back home that has started these thoughts and my mind will not rest since. But before I get there, can I tell you what I meant about Alain de Botton?’

I nodded noticing I had not, even slightly, shifted in my seat, I had not even uncrossed my legs, my right leg getting numb now under the weight of the other, so intent I was to hear what he had to say.

‘In his early work, Alain de Botton describes what it is like to fall in, and also to fall out, of love. Well, this is not quite the same with staying in love, being in a loving relationship, is it?’

‘I guess it is not’, I muttered.

‘The thing with you therapists, though, and honestly, I spent the last three months looking at therapists’ websites before picking you, is that you romanticise relationships, you say they are therapeutic, it is what we all want and need, but not the emptiness of companionship or the convenience of marriage, the thrill of a connection that lasts. Somebody who connects with our soul. Right?’

‘Well, that seems to make many assumptions at once, but I would agree that a connection, a genuine one, is part of a good enough relationship.’

‘But if you look at falling in and out of love, it is something random that attracts us to somebody, and this something seems like the most important thing in the world, but once it is gone, that’s it, it doesn’t matter at all, and the person no longer matters either.’

I uncrossed my legs before I lost all feeling in them, and the thought crossed my mind that legs didn’t matter at all. My energy was now focused on my head and my gut.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I think you are confusing two things, a crush, what most young people have at some point, and more mature relationships, when things begin to go wrong, and the true intimacy built in a long-term relationship that can lead to a long-lasting connection, if one works on it.’

‘All clichés, I am afraid, same like in all the websites of your colleagues and yours’, he added.

‘Really?’ I nearly snapped as I felt the blow of his insult tighten my throat. ‘And why did you pick my website then, may I ask?’

‘Because unlike other therapists, you do not just mention relationships as the epitome of normality, but the connection too. Look, I’ve got it memorised, you say, ‘it is the unique connection between two people in the context of the therapeutic relationship that can invariably prove healing.’

‘And so?’

‘So, the two are not the same thing. I mean by that that if you are a cynic you believe that a relationship is an arrangement of some sort between two benefiting partners. If you are a romantic though, and permit me to say that most of you therapists are, you believe that you are in a relationship because of the unique and, to a degree, special connection you have with a particular person and that the number of people you can have such a connection and relationship with is limited. So if you believe that, then the question is how can you ever fall out of love or even worse, forget somebody you once loved? This is exactly the question I came to ask your opinion about.’

‘Do you mean then that it is somewhat disingenuous to claim a connection with somebody is important, if this connection can be easily lost or forgotten?’

‘Yes, precisely that.’

I looked at the clock, anxiety starting to take over. He was right of course, and the problem was I had no idea how to answer his question. I thought of her again, the deepest connection ever, that with one’s own mother, being carried inside her, fed from her body, her body a cushion for one’s growing being, my mother’s eyes and voice and the way she giggled through her nose, which was so utterly contagious, especially when she was near her summerhouse by the sea on a sunny day, all this was so not forgotten, I could see her throwing her head back and laughing under the sun as though it was only yesterday, yet it was over twenty-five years since her death. Twenty to six, only ten minutes to go. He came after all with a valid question to ask a therapist and I had no answer to give him at all.

‘It was a late September evening at the end of last summer in my hometown. A work visit, part of my research for my travel blog. I tailor-make holidays for the discerning traveller, you see, and I strongly believe that late September is the absolutely best time to visit Sicily. The summer nearly dying, the light in the evening growing melancholic, yet the air full with the scent of sweet ripe summer fruits. I was walking past my old neighbourhood when she stopped me and, in the unique way of women from the South, she gave me a tight hug that felt so heart-warming. The trouble was I had no idea who she was. So I was standing there, chatting warmly with her, answering questions about my family and as this woman clearly knew me so well, there was no way I could have said, ‘Excuse me, can you remind me who you are?’. Has that ever happened to you? It is so embarrassing, so awkward. And you are always left wondering if that person has sussed you out and she knows you are pretending and you have no idea who she is. Cleo was her name. She came to my dream the night after I met her. Her delicate smile, the dimples on her cheeks, even the other more intimate dimple on her lower back came to my dream. She was the first girl I ever fell in love with. And I had no idea who she was, can you believe that? I bumped into her in the very same neighbourhood where we used to meet for our late evening dates, thirty years later, and she had not even changed that much. Still as elegant and beautiful, and yet, a complete stranger.’

‘This must have been disconcerting, and I can see that you found it strange that you could not remember who she was.’

‘The thing is it is not that strange in fact. It was only a short summer fling. But the intensity of it, and the fact that she was so different from all the other girls I had ever met. I have had a teenage sweetheart before and other short flings as well, but she was just not like any of the other girls at all. She wanted to go all the way from the beginning, you know, and you could feel it was like … this is what she felt like, her body was fully in it, not self-destructive, not rebellious or lost or breaking a taboo, just fully present with me.’

‘But then, panic set in. My older brother spotted us by the beach once and that was it, the word spread and my parents were so worried. There were rumours about her father and uncles, you see, that they were hard-core Mafiosi, dangerous people.’

‘Ooh!’

‘She is the girl that set me free, you know, it gave me the push I needed to leave home, to travel the world, to find myself.’

‘Well, you seem to have just given the answer you came to me for, very clearly’, I said leaning forward and glancing at the clock. Only three minutes to go and I had a patient at 6 pm who always arrived promptly. Had he also given me the answer to a question that had unwittingly bothered me too for all my life? I felt the release of tension throughout my body and the relief of having reached some resolution for a life-long conflict.

‘Did I?’ he said, looking puzzled.

‘Yes, indeed! You see this girl was a catalyst. She taught you something about being true to yourself and present in your life. You took her with you in all your travels, she became you. I mean, she became a fully integrated part of you. Meeting her gave you permission to go places in life. So, you did not need to remember her, as there was nothing you still needed as such from her. She was all inside you.’

‘That’s a very interesting take, I guess’, he said seeming deeply buried in thought.

As I was accompanying him to the door, I thought of all the brief encounters and some longer ones I had with patients in my first years of practice. It occurred to me that I could hardly remember their faces or names or stories, yet they were all sitting alongside me in this room during this brief encounter with Giovanni.

I reciprocated his warm, firm handshake by the door.

This short story is from Christina Moutsou's forthcoming collection of short stories in adolescence and the consulting room entitled, Fictional clinical narratives in relational psychoanalysis: stories from adolescence to the consulting room (Routledge, September 2018).

If you would like to read more, the book is available for preorder. Click here.

Our heartfelt gratitude goes out to Christina Moutsou for generously sharing this piece with us. Work like this educates without our even noticing. You have made the world a better place. Thank you.