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If you are among those who will accept to be the third party out of love, you will feel like the weak link within the trio. Maybe you are indeed. If your lover’s couple tears itself apart, it tears itself apart for two; while you will tear yourself apart alone. Thus, learn to defend yourself: no one will do it for you.
The world is quite a harsh place. So harsh it didn’t wait for me to reveal it in 2011: all its other inhabitants had already figured it for themselves.
The questions about which the world can be particularly insensitive often pertain to romance: especially in these places where monogamy is established and seen as the only possible rule. It is indeed in these cultural locales that the lover figure is always despised and condemned.
In France for instance, lovers never are an aid to family stability – even if that is what lovers happen do in spite of themselves; instead, lovers are marriage-wreckers. That lovers can often allow spouses who no longer love one another to hold the family pad steady thanks to the breath of fresh love and air they bring in, a bit like a wedge under shaky furniture – that fact no one can understand or admit. And it is strange, as even Thomas Aquinas says that without the “black pit”, “the palace will become a malodorous dwelling”. The “black pit” being extramarital sexuality, and the “palace” the official family unit.
The obtuse moralists of sentimental freedom do not find the cause for the collapse of the family within the family itself…but must this family not be so satisfying to he or she who, while being an integral part of it, falls in love with another person? But these moralists are nonetheless happy to place the blame on the lover, on the person who at one moment fell in love with the family father or mother. If that is not an illogical and obtuse piece of reasoning, please tell me what it is.
We should instead remember that what drives lovers in love towards someone already in an official relationship is the same feeling that drove that someone towards their official partner in the first place; and that love is always love, and not uniquely between husband and wife or spouse and spouse. We should also add that it is much easier to be the husband or wife, or either partner, than to be the lovers in love.
These lovers must, for this, be understood, for they have “inherited” the most difficult role in a love triangle. We need understanding and respect for all who love in secret, indefinitely, seeing little of the creature that has hypnotized their hearts to the point of accepting only the secret crumbs of their beloved one’s life and time.
In his sonnet number 116, Shakespeare wrote of love that it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Maybe a lover in love is the only one capable to understand what these words truly mean: never shaken, looking on tempests within a love lived devoid of guarantees of happy endings – this means being endowed with an immense capacity to love, remaining patient and suffering but always going forward.
For this, it needs to be said and accepted, once and for all, that insofar as the lover behaves in this way by love, we are faced with the exercise, both heartbreaking and laborious, of sentiments. Because one must be strong, and not weak, as so many think, to be a lover. The lover has no rights nor honor, whereas the official partner has them all and often exercises them with the gentleness of a dictator. Often, his or her feeling of superiority over the lover only comes from the fact that an official union has taken place with someone, an union in virtue of which, supported by religious and civil law, by common morality, he or she considers the other to be property, forever. This seems a little skimpy if love to be love truly, that is to say desiring happiness and not dominance over the loved one.
These things should be explained to those who, enslaved to ferocious and obtuse common morality, those narrow thinkers of civil and religious laws, firmly condemn infidelity even if emanating from love; those who pass judgment on lovers who, with a little luck, will one day become the new daylight companions of those whom they have loved so much in the dark, and the parents of creatures who would otherwise never have come into the world – as was the case for Nicoletta Mantovani and Luciano Pavarotti.
But it would be probably futile to attempt and explain, for, even though Shakespeare has written that no beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity, pity in reality belongs to lovers. The same to whom Patty Smith memorably sang in “Because The Night” that the moon belonged to them.
As I write these lines it is nighttime. And it is tonight that I want to tell lovers in love never to doubt their own purity. A white and clear purity which will always brighten the night – even when outside, in the eyes of those who will never understand but will want to understand, it will always be dark.
Gemma Gaetani
