Categoria: Blablabla

La nostra lingua perduta

Ci sono amori che, finendo, non portano via soltanto una persona. Portano via un clima, una stanza, un modo di dire il mondo. Non si spezza solo il filo visibile del rapporto — le telefonate, le mani, le abitudini, il nome dell’altro sullo schermo — ma qualcosa di più segreto e più grave: una lingua. Una lingua minuta, privata, nata senza intenzione, costruita negli anni con parole qualunque e silenzi irripetibili, con frasi che da fuori sarebbero sembrate povere, persino banali, ma che tra loro avevano il peso esatto di una chiave nella serratura.

Lei lo capì troppo tardi. O forse lo aveva sempre saputo, ma certe verità aspettano la perdita per diventare visibili.

Con lui non parlava soltanto del presente. Con lui riusciva a raggiungere regioni di sé che nessun altro sapeva nominare. Non perché lui avesse una sapienza speciale, non perché fosse più buono, più attento, più profondo degli altri. Ma perché tra loro era esistita una combinazione precisa, una grammatica affettiva fatta di fiducia, ironia, memoria, ferite riconosciute a mezza voce. Bastava una parola detta in un certo modo, una canzone lasciata partire senza annunciarla, un’allusione a qualcosa che entrambi fingevano di non ricordare, e dentro di lei si apriva una porta.

Dietro quella porta c’era l’infanzia.

Non l’infanzia come si racconta agli estranei, ordinata in episodi, addomesticata dalla nostalgia. C’era l’infanzia vera, quella che non torna intera, ma per lampi. Il tavolo del pomeriggio. Il rumore della custodia del violino appoggiata in un angolo. Le dita ancora stanche delle lezioni, l’odore del legno, della resina, del caffè appena passato. Suo nonno che preparava qualcosa senza fare domande difficili, come se l’amore, in certe ore, consistesse proprio nel non pretendere spiegazioni. Il pomeriggio che si distendeva lento, fuori dalla finestra, e la casa — quella casa che ora non esiste più se non nel modo imperfetto in cui esistono i luoghi perduti — diventava arancione.

Era il sole a farlo. Entrava basso, obliquo, quasi liquido, e trasformava le pareti in una specie di memoria calda. Le cose sembravano meno reali e più vere: le sedie, il pavimento, la tazza, la polvere sospesa nell’aria. C’era odore di legna bruciata, forse venuto da fuori, forse da qualche terreno vicino, forse inventato dopo dalla memoria per dare un corpo a quel tempo. E c’era l’aria fredda dei pomeriggi d’inverno, quell’aria che non entra soltanto nei polmoni, ma nella parte più antica della pelle. Lei riusciva a tornare lì solo parlando con lui. Solo dentro quella lingua.

Dopo la fine, i ricordi non scomparvero. Sarebbe stato più semplice. Rimasero, ma chiusi. Come stanze dietro vetri spessi. Lei poteva vederli, a volte, ma non abitarli. Poteva dire: mio nonno, il violino, il caffè, il sole arancione, l’odore del freddo, la casa. Ma le parole erano diventate inventario. Nomi senza passaggio. Oggetti deposti sul tavolo di un museo dopo l’incendio.

Perché non basta ricordare. Bisogna avere una lingua capace di sopportare il ricordo.

E quella lingua era morta con loro.

La cosa più crudele non fu nemmeno perderlo come uomo, come corpo, come possibilità. Fu perdere il mondo che si apriva quando lui ascoltava. Fu accorgersi che certe parti di sé non erano mai appartenute completamente a lei, perché avevano bisogno di quello sguardo per manifestarsi. Non era dipendenza, o non solo. Era più sottile, più umiliante, più umano: alcune versioni di noi stessi nascono soltanto nello spazio creato da un altro. E quando quell’altro si ritira, non resta semplicemente l’assenza. Resta una persona mutilata della propria via d’accesso.

Anche le musiche cambiarono.

Prima, certe canzoni sembravano contenere una stanza supplementare dell’esistenza. Bastavano pochi accordi e tutto si inclinava: la sera, la strada, il corpo, il passato. La musica aveva profondità perché era attraversata da quella lingua comune. Lui avrebbe capito una pausa, una frase, un verso lasciato cadere con apparente casualità. Lui avrebbe saputo che una melodia non era soltanto una melodia, ma una maniera di dire: guarda, sono ancora qui, sotto tutte le forme che ho dovuto assumere.

Dopo, le canzoni continuarono a suonare. Ma non aprivano più. Facevano rumore contro una porta chiusa.

Lei le ascoltava e sentiva quasi l’ombra dell’antico impatto, come quando si preme la mano sul punto in cui un dolore è passato e si trova soltanto una memoria del dolore. C’erano brani che un tempo l’avrebbero devastata, o salvata, o resa improvvisamente trasparente a se stessa. Ora le attraversavano addosso senza trovare ingresso. Non perché avesse smesso di sentire, ma perché le mancava il codice. La musica era diventata una lingua straniera imparata nell’infanzia e dimenticata per mancanza di qualcuno con cui parlarla.

In dieci anni ci furono piccoli ritorni. Minuscoli resgates, quasi incidenti. Un messaggio, una riapparizione, un segnale ambiguo, una fessura nella parete. Ogni volta lei pensava, con una vergogna che non riusciva a estirpare, che forse la lingua non fosse morta davvero. Forse era rimasta ibernata, fragile ma intatta, sotto gli strati della vita. Forse bastava una frase giusta perché tutto tornasse a respirare.

Ma lui non lasciava che accadesse.

O non più.

Aveva costruito intorno a sé una casca dura, una superficie severa, resistente, quasi ostile. Forse erano maturità, forse erano pace: qualcosa di più simile a una difesa diventata identità. Era diventato l’uomo che non risponde, che non si lascia raggiungere, che scambia ogni tentativo di contatto per una minaccia alla propria sopravvivenza. Forse aveva sofferto. Forse aveva dovuto indurirsi per non crollare. Forse aveva scelto di credere che chiudere fosse la stessa cosa che guarire.

Lei, invece, continuava a bussare non soltanto alla porta di lui, ma alla porta di sé stessa.

Ogni messaggio ignorato non le diceva soltanto: lui non ti vuole. Le diceva qualcosa di più definitivo: il mondo che conoscevate insieme non esiste più. La bambina con il violino non ha più voce. Il nonno al tavolo del pomeriggio non può più essere raggiunto. La casa arancione resta dall’altra parte. Il sapê bruciato, l’aria fredda, il caffè, il legno, la luce: tutto rimane sospeso in una zona senza traduzione.

E lei cominciò a sentirsi scomparire lì, proprio lì dove nessuno poteva accorgersene.

Agli occhi degli altri era ancora intera. Parlava, lavorava, rispondeva, attraversava i giorni con una competenza quasi offensiva. Ma dentro di sé sapeva che una parte essenziale era rimasta prigioniera di quella lingua perduta. Non era il desiderio adolescenziale di tornare indietro. Era il lutto adulto per una forma di esistenza che aveva avuto luogo soltanto in due. Una patria minuscola, senza geografia, fatta di battute, canzoni, ricordi, pomeriggi, confidenze lasciate a metà. Una patria che non poteva essere visitata da sola.

Questo era il dolore più intelligente e più inutile: sapere che non si trattava più di riconquistare un amore, ma di recuperare un alfabeto. E sapere, allo stesso tempo, che un alfabeto inventato da due persone non sopravvive quando una delle due decide di non leggerlo più.

Così la porta si chiuse.

Non con violenza. Non con il fragore teatrale delle grandi fini. Si chiuse come si chiudono certe case abbandonate: lentamente, per polvere, per inverno, per mancanza di passi. Dietro restò una luce arancione che lei avrebbe continuato a vedere per tutta la vita, ma sempre da fuori. Restò un tavolo apparecchiato in un pomeriggio remoto. Restò suo nonno, forse giovane nella memoria, forse già fragile, che le offriva qualcosa dopo la lezione di violino. Restò una canzone incapace di fare il suo lavoro. Restò l’odore di qualcosa che bruciava lontano, in un campo, in un tempo, in una lingua che nessuno parlava più.

E restò lei, con tutte le parole del mondo a disposizione, ma non necessarie.

Twelve scenes of my children in the car

  1. I’m not the one behind the wheel. I’m sitting in the back seat with milk-filled breasts, gazing out into the dark night. It’s cold, and the windows are misting up. I look at my son, who is sleeping in his baby car seat. It’s eleven o’clock at night. He’s only two days old, and we’ve just left the maternity ward.
  2. It’s the first time I’ve driven alone, and today is his first day at school. I drive there singing “Dark Necessities”, while he swings his legs clad in navy blue uniform trousers and his mustard-yellow trainers tap against the front seat. My vision blurs as I say goodbye to him outside the school building; he simply takes a deep breath and walks inside.
  3. My red Fiat 500 makes a noise as we drive through the empty streets on this blue-sky Sunday. We don’t have anything to do, but he wanted to go for a drive. We head to a DIY store and don’t buy anything. On the way back, he says it was the best day ever.
  4. It’s his last day at school. The pandemic would begin shortly afterwards, delaying our move to another country. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, I see the curls of his black hair swaying in the wind against his face. He smiles.
  5. The Prius was very full, but the driver managed to fit all our bags in. The driver weaved quickly through the streets of Munich while I said goodbye to the city, thinking it would be the last time I’d see it. He dozes off, leaning against my shoulder and clutching a Spider-Man toy.
  6. I went a long time without driving. First the pandemic hit, then I moved to another country where I didn’t have a driving licence for Europe. When we returned to Brazil, it was just me, him, my seven-month-pregnant belly, and lots of luggage that I dragged, crying from exhaustion, through various airports. My feet were swollen. My father strapped my son into his car seat in the back, and I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was already in my mother’s arms and she was crying.
  7. My son wasn’t with me. It was still the pandemic, but the first scene had repeated itself with a few changes: this time, it was morning. My brother was driving and I was sitting in the back seat with my milk-filled breasts. Looking to the side, I saw my daughter in the infant carrier, wearing a yellow outfit. She looked very small compared to the carrier, and her hair was jet black.
  8. The car was full to bursting, and now I was sitting in the back seat next to two children: one in a child seat and the other in a baby carrier. We were about to arrive at the airport to return to Germany. I watched the two of them play and smile whilst my parents, in the front seat, tried to hide their tears.
  9. We travelled by train. The older one walked beside me and the little sat in the pushchair. A woman overheard us talking and asked what language we were speaking. She smiled and looked surprised when she heard the answer.
  10. I passed my German driving test, and I could see the two children playing in the back seat in the rear-view mirror. My son was carrying several books, while my daughter was drawing and humming. Between them was our elderly German Spitz. We were driving along the autobahn, and I had got used to driving at nearly 200 km/h.
  11. Once again, the car was packed with suitcases as we drove through the outskirts of Munich towards Freising, the airport town. My heart was heavy with the thought of saying goodbye, but I knew I’d made the right decision. My son was already anticipating feeling homesick as he gazed intently out of the window. My daughter was excited to fly alone with her grandmother for the first time. On the way back home, I felt a tremendous emptiness, mirroring that of the car. I sang along to the playlist I’d heard a million times before, almost on autopilot.
  12. Every morning at 6.50am, the two of them sit in the back seat while I drive them to school. There’s usually an argument about the music, but today they both agreed to my choice of music and happily sang along to songs by my favourite band from my teenage years. My son has lost his curls, and my daughter’s hair isn’t quite so black anymore. I watch life go by through the small rear-view mirror.

The Weather Outside and the Weight Within

There are days when waking up feels heavier than it should. Nothing has happened, exactly. No fresh tragedy, no dramatic rupture, no piece of news capable of explaining the exhaustion. And yet the body wakes as if it has already been through something during the night. The light enters the room differently. The sky hangs low. The air feels too still, too cold, too humid. Before we have even thought anything clearly, we are already living inside a mood.

Perhaps this is one of the simplest ways of realising that we are not only thought. For a long time, philosophy tried to imagine the human being as a consciousness almost detached from the world, as if thinking were a clean activity, suspended above the body, temperature, light, sleep, and the city. But ordinary life contradicts this every day. We are affected by the coke we have not drunk, by the noise in the street, by excessive brightness, by a grey sky, by the wind touching our skin. The world does not remain outside us. It gets in.

Spinoza might say that we are made of affects. For him, we are not entirely sovereign beings who decide, in a purely rational way, what to feel. We are crossed by encounters. Certain things increase our power to exist; others diminish it. A sunny day may solve none of our concrete problems, but sometimes it gives the body back a sort of permission. The street seems more possible. The future less sealed. A rainy, dark, heavy day, on the other hand, can make the very same life suddenly feel harder to carry.

This does not mean that the weather determines who we are. That would be too simple. But it takes part. It gives a colour to what already exists inside us. A sadness that, on a clear day, might fit into a pocket, can take over the whole house on a grey one. A fear that seemed manageable may grow when the sky itself appears to have no exit. The weather does not invent everything, but it intensifies. It changes the inner lighting of things.

Heidegger spoke of mood, or attunement, as something fundamental in our relationship with the world. Before we interpret life rationally, we are already thrown into it in a certain way. We do not meet the world neutrally; we meet it tired, hopeful, anxious, light, irritated, melancholic. And this changes everything. A simple email can feel like a threat. A banal conversation can become unbearable. A small task can take on the size of a mountain. It is not that reality has completely changed. It is that the way we are inside it has changed.

That is why certain days seem more difficult to live than others. There are days when existence requires basic maintenance: getting up, replying, eating, working, pretending to possess a minimum degree of normality. Days when life is not exactly dramatic, but nor is it fluid. It catches. Everything seems to demand a slightly greater effort. The body is slow. The mind drags its feet. The world keeps functioning, indifferent, but we fail to keep pace.

Camus might recognise in this a small everyday absurdity. Not the grand, theatrical absurd, but the quiet one: waking up and realising that the world demands continuity even when we have no enthusiasm for continuing. The alarm rings. Messages arrive. Shops open. The city moves. And we, sometimes, are internally living under a different weather — one that does not appear in any forecast.

There is a discreet cruelty in this: the world does not pause because our mood has fallen. But there is also a kind of consolation. If mood changes with weather, light, body, sleep, then perhaps it is not an absolute sentence. What we feel on a difficult day is not necessarily the final truth about life. Sometimes it is only life seen beneath a particularly heavy sky.

Nietzsche, who distrusted great abstract truths, might have liked this idea. Many of our most serious philosophical conclusions may be born from very concrete things: bad digestion, tiredness, loneliness, too much winter, too little movement. Sometimes we think we have discovered a terrible truth about existence, when perhaps we simply need to sleep better, walk a little, open a window, or wait for the weather to turn.

This does not diminish pain. On the contrary, it makes it more human. Not every sadness needs to be immediately turned into a diagnosis, a concept, or a destiny. Some sadnesses are meteorological. Others are older, and merely find, on certain days, the right atmosphere in which to return. There are feelings that live inside us like furniture covered with sheets. A change in the light is enough to remind us that they are still there.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body helps us understand this. We do not have a body as one has an object. We are a body. It is through the body that the world reaches us. The humidity in the air, excessive heat, lack of sunlight, cold in the shoulders, atmospheric pressure, the smell of rain on the pavement — none of this is merely scenery. It is experience. Thought does not take place in a white, isolated room. It takes place inside skin.

Perhaps that is why some days ask for less ambition. They are not days for great decisions, great conclusions, or grand interpretations of the meaning of life. They are days to get through. And getting through, sometimes, is already a dignified form of philosophy. There is a humble wisdom in recognising: today, I am not seeing clearly. Today, the light is bad. Today, my body is more vulnerable to the world.

Philosophy often seeks clarity, but life is full of atmospheres. We do not always know whether we are sad because of something, someone, the past, the future, the rain, Sunday, lack of sunlight, or simply because existence has its own shifts in pressure. Perhaps the answer does not need to be so precise. Perhaps it is enough to admit that we are porous creatures. The world touches us all the time.

And if there are days when living feels more difficult, that does not mean every day will have the same weight. Mood passes, even when it passes slowly. The sky changes, even when it takes its time. Light returns from another angle. Sometimes, without anything truly being solved, we wake up a little less crushed. Life remains the same, but we are no longer standing in exactly the same place inside it.

In the end, perhaps this is it: we are not only those who think about life. We are also those who feel it under a particular climate. There are days when the world seems to receive us badly. There are others when it opens a small gap. And until we are able to transform the whole of life, perhaps we can begin by accepting that some days do not need to be conquered with greatness. Some days only need to be lived with enough tenderness for us to reach the next one.

And in the meantime, I listen to music whilst driving and watch the raindrops hitting the windscreen.

Reflections of a skyline

There’s a particular kind of silence that settles in small towns after midnight — the sort that feels less like absence and more like a held breath. In the North, where streets narrow into memory and memory into habit, he walked without direction, though he would later insist he knew exactly where he was going.

He had said cariad once without thinking. It slipped out, unguarded, somewhere between a half-finished pint and a confession he didn’t yet understand he was making. The word lingered after, as certain words do — not for what they mean, but for what they reveal about the speaker. It is one thing to love, quite another to admit it in a language that feels inherited rather than chosen.

He told himself it had been incidental. A linguistic accident. Yet he repeated it in his head now, testing its edges like a loose tooth: cariad. Not quite love, not quite darling, something denser, less willing to dissolve into the casualness of modern speech. A word that resisted the disposability of feeling.

The town offered no answers. Only familiar façades, brickwork worn into quiet resignation, pub windows dimming one by one. He paused outside one — the same one, of course, it was always the same one — and watched his reflection hesitate in the glass. There is a peculiar estrangement in seeing oneself as a figure among objects, as though one’s interiority were merely an aesthetic choice imposed upon an otherwise indifferent world.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether love is less an emotion and more a structure — a way of organising perception. To call someone cariad is to rearrange the hierarchy of the visible: suddenly, they occupy the centre, and everything else recedes into a kind of functional irrelevance. The problem, of course, is that such structures are rarely symmetrical. One inhabits the architecture alone.

She had not replied. Not then, not since. The absence of response had grown, over time, into a presence of its own — something almost tactile, like humidity before a storm. He found himself narrating her silence, assigning it motives, depths, complexities that might justify its persistence. It is easier, he thought, to believe in the opacity of another than in one’s own misreading.

A group passed him, laughing too loudly for the hour. He envied them briefly, not for their joy — which seemed rehearsed — but for their apparent immunity to reflection. There is a violence, he realised, in thinking too much about feeling; it dissects what ought perhaps to remain whole. Yet he could not help himself. Thought had become his only reliable companion.

By the time he reached the end of the street, he had almost convinced himself that the word had meant nothing. That it had been an echo of something cultural, a borrowed intimacy, devoid of genuine commitment. But even as he constructed this argument, he felt its inadequacy. Language does not betray us so easily; it exposes us.

He stopped beneath a flickering streetlamp. The light stuttered, briefly illuminating then withdrawing, as though undecided about its own purpose. In that intermittent glow, he understood—not suddenly, but with the slow clarity of something long resisted—that what unsettled him was not her silence, but the irreversibility of having spoken.

To name is to fix, at least partially, the fluidity of experience. Once uttered, cariad could not be taken back into the realm of ambiguity. It existed now, independent of intention, lodged somewhere between them, whether or not she chose to acknowledge it.

He stood there for a moment longer, listening to the faint hum of the town recalibrating itself for morning. Then he turned, not towards home exactly, but away from where he had been.

It seemed, in the end, that love was not defined by reciprocity, nor even by endurance, but by the quiet, irrevocable act of having meant something — once — without the possibility of revision.

Love as an imposed fate

And other philosophical abstractions

All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid
Nymph then virgin, nurse then a servant
Just an appendage, live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger
24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour  
(Paris Paloma, Labour)

The history of the philosophy of love can be read as a long narrative about human desire; but also, silently, as the history of inequality. In almost every era, love appears as a universal experience, although it is experienced in profoundly different ways. For men, it appears as one dimension among others: an occupation of existence. For women, it often becomes the very meaning of life. This difference does not arise from the feeling itself, but from the way culture has distributed freedom, time, and identity between the sexes.

In ancient times, love was already thought of from a male perspective. In Plato, eros leads the soul beyond the body, in an ascent towards beauty. The one who loves moves, seeks, overcomes. Love is a path, not a destination; an impulse that accompanies a life dedicated to philosophy, politics, action. Even when love takes centre stage, it does not devour the subject who loves. The lover remains focused on the world. When women appear, they occupy above all the place of symbolic objects: something that inspires, rarely something that thinks. From early on, therefore, love is structured as an active experience on the one hand and a contemplated presence on the other.

Centuries later, Christianity transforms love into devotion, but maintains the asymmetry. The feminine ideal becomes linked to care, purity, dedication. While men are divided between God, war, work, and thought, women are drawn to the intimate sphere, to bonds, to fidelity. Love becomes their central virtue. The distribution is already beginning to take shape: he loves, but he also builds; she loves and, through this, she exists. The distance between loving and being loved already heralds an asymmetry that would continue for centuries.

Modernity shifts love to the inner self. With the birth of Romanticism, this difference reaches its most delicate point. Love ceases to be merely a moral or spiritual issue and becomes a promise of completeness. Passion becomes the great drama of modern subjectivity. However, it is not distributed equally: for men, love appears as an intense episode among other projects: career, work, adventure, social recognition. For women, the same love is presented as the final destination, as the place where their identity finds fulfilment. Marriage, home and intimacy become the territory where she must accomplish what he can temporarily abandon. The home becomes the setting where love must prove its truth, and this setting has a gender.

This is where the thesis becomes visible: men are educated to have a life in which love fits; women, to have a life that fits within love.

Nietzsche, in criticising the romantic ideal, reveals something essential. For him, absolute passions can threaten the autonomy of the individual. The creative subject needs to keep his distance, to preserve his own strength. Although he does not formulate a feminist critique, his distrust of totalising love shows that the risk of fusion is to lose one’s own self. What Nietzsche describes as an existential danger becomes, for many women, a socially expected condition: to love until one disappears. Love, then, loses its innocence. It is no longer redemption; it is tension. Your critique opens up space to see that love is not necessarily liberating — it can also be a field of power.

Simone de Beauvoir accurately names this historical difference. In The Second Sex, she shows that men were constituted as subjects: those who act, work, create, move towards the world; while women were taught to seek recognition in the gaze of others. When love presents itself, therefore, it occupies different places. For him, love is one occupation among many. He can love deeply and still preserve a defined identity outside the relationship. For her, love often becomes an absolute project: the relationship ceases to be part of life and becomes the axis that organises all other parts.

Beauvoir describes this movement with almost painful clarity. A woman in love tends to transform the man into meaning, into a measure of value, into a justification for her own existence. She invests totality where he invests partiality. He loves without abandoning his world; she abandons her world to love. The imbalance is not in the intensity of the feeling, but in the structure that defines what each can lose.

Love, thus, ceases to be merely a sentimental theme and becomes a political problem. Beauvoir does not claim that women love more; she claims that they have been taught to exist through love. The loving union, so celebrated by romantic tradition, proves to be a trap when it requires one of the two to disappear in order for the couple to exist. To love, in these terms, is to lose oneself.

Psychoanalysis helps to understand the depth of this phenomenon. To love is to seek recognition, to desire to be chosen. But when an entire subjectivity is built around this choice, love becomes a permanent risk of annulment. The woman not only loves the other: she loves the possibility of existing through him. The man, on the contrary, usually loves from a place that is already socially secure; he does not need to put everything at stake to be recognised.

Freud and, later, Lacan describe love as an attempt to fill a structural void. The beloved is invested with idealizations that no human being can sustain. To love is also to project, to desire recognition, to negotiate one’s own incompleteness. Love is no longer destiny or virtue: it is the movement of desire, always unstable.

Contemporary feminist philosophy insists that this difference is not natural. It is taught, repeated, transmitted as if it were inevitable. Boys learn that love is one dimension of life; girls learn that it is the very story of life. One moves on even when he loves; the other is encouraged to stay, wait, sustain. Thus, love becomes an occupation for him and a vocation for her.

Bell hooks asks why love has been associated with female sacrifice and proposes thinking of it as an ethical practice, not as submission. Judith Butler shows that romantic roles are performative — repeated until they seem natural. Love ceases to be an essence and becomes a learned social language. If it was possible to teach women to live for love, perhaps it is possible to learn to love in another way.

Perhaps the most delicate point of this thesis is to admit that the problem is not love itself, but the inequality of freedom surrounding it. When a person has multiple projects, love can be experienced as a choice. When one’s entire identity is channelled into the bond, love becomes an ontological necessity. What is an experience for one is a foundation for the other.

The historical line of philosophy reveals, then, a kind of paradox: the more love was culturally idealised, the more it was associated with the feminine. And the more men were linked to action and creation, the more love became just one of their possible occupations. He can love without disappearing; she was taught to prove her love precisely through disappearance.

Today, when revisiting this trajectory, we realise that the central question is not whether men and women love differently, but why they were allowed to love in such unequal ways.

Perhaps the true philosophical transformation occurs when love ceases to be the meaning of life for only one side and becomes an encounter between two existences that already have meaning before they meet.