Yes, I was a bunny boiler ex, but I still love him
The other day, giving a talk about this column, I said there’s not much difference in the end between the doomed passion of Anna Karenina for her handsome Vronsky in Tolstoy’s great novel and ‘the agony of a woman who writes telling me she is in love with a man who is not her husband.’
At the time I had not yet read your email. The American novelist William Faulkner wrote: ‘The only thing worth writing about is the conflict in the human heart.’
The greatest love poetry and the most powerful novels have this at their core — and so does a heartfelt letter like yours, full of the perennial foolishness and agony of unrequited love.
You second-guess my response, saying I’ll shake my head in reproof — but this only happened once as I read your letter. It came where you write ‘thinking there’s no point to my life’.
The misery I can understand, the longing, even the hopeful fantasies, but I won’t collude in the self-pity of that awful phrase — not when I read your list of the caring people in your life.
You know as well as I that there is
every point to your life. To allow yourself even that single breath of self-indulgent negativity is a betrayal of all those who love you. I’m sorry, I’ve no time for it.
But I do feel sympathy for your honesty in writing as you have. I think I understand about unrequited love, although it’s not something I’ve ever experienced.
But devotion is real — and it always moves me to read of men and women who display it, even (say) after death. What’s more, I know there are some beloved people who enter your heart at a particular time and lodge there for ever. I have one such romantic memory myself and thinking of that long-past love still fills me with warmth. But not with mawkish wistfulness. No, no, no. There’s no time for that.
I am a realist — and so must you be. It’s essential to break this cycle of maundering sentimentality. The affair ended, but your feelings for this ‘kind’ man remained locked in that moment, like a mosquito in a bubble of resin that solidified to become amber, 30 million years ago, imprisoning it for ever.
Your ex went away; therefore you were never able to become bored, never running the risk of finding his laugh annoying or his breath a bit pongy after too much to drink the night before, never noticing he’s developed a paunch or slack jowls.
No, your romantic dreams remained fixed, and the only thing you had left was your rage that he had called it off. Obsessive passion turned you into a terrible person, the ‘bunny boiler’ (the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction) who came close to real harassment.
You’re lucky he remained tolerant — and that your poor husband didn’t change the locks. (Surely he must have known something was wrong? How awful for him.) But now you have to decide to face the future like an adult and remake your life with a whole heart. Vow not to send any more birthday cards. He doesn’t want them, so imagine him sighing as he opens the envelope. Do you want that?
You made the right decision this year, so let it be a precedent. You say, ‘I love him’, but precisely
who do you love? Your fantasy — or a real man, with all faults, who can’t ride horses?
The truth is, you don’t even know your old lover any more, so focus. Think of him as a fossil — beautiful, precious, but very dead.