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You’re reading How to Live, a weekly examination of the forces shaping your thoughts, choices, and patterns you can’t escape. Most of what drives us operates below awareness; this newsletter names it.

Paid subscribers make this work possible. They also get what free readers don’t: psychological insight that doesn’t just explain your life, it makes it conscious, like something you already knew but couldn’t name. Plus four years of archives, twice-yearly essays drawn from what readers are thinking about, and a monthly vote on the next topic. $6/month or $67/year

I received an email telling me it was over.
I didn’t know how to respond.
It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me.
It ended with the words, “Take care of yourself.”
And so I did.

I asked 107 women (including two made from wood
and one with feathers), chosen for their profession or skills,
to interpret this letter.
To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.
Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me.
Answer for me.

It was a way of taking the time to break up.
A way of taking care of myself.

Sophie,

I have been meaning to write and reply to your last email for a while. At the same time, I thought it would be better to talk to you and tell you what I have to say out loud. Still, at least it will be written.

As you have noticed, I have not been quite right recently. As if I no longer recognized myself in my own existence. A terrible feeling of anxiety, which I cannot really fight, other than keeping on going to try and overtake it, as I have always done. When we met, you laid down one condition: not to become the “fourth.” I stood by that promise: it has been months now since I have seen the “others,” because I obviously could find no way of seeing them without making you one of them.

I thought that would be enough, I thought that loving you and your love would be enough so that this anxiety—which constantly drives me to look further afield and which means that I will never feel quiet and at rest or probably even just happy or “generous”—would be calmed when I was with you, with the certainty that the love you have for me was the best for me, the best I have ever had, you know that. I thought that my writing would be a remedy, that my “disquiet” would dissolve into it so that I could find you. But no. In fact it even became worse. I cannot even tell you the sort of state I feel I am in. So I started calling the “others” again this week. And I know what that means to me and the cycle it will drag me into.

I have never lied to you and I do not intend to start lying now.

There was another rule that you laid down at the beginning of our affair: the day we stopped being lovers you would no longer be able to envisage seeing me. You know this constraint can only ever strike me as disastrous, and unjust (when you still see B. and R....) and understandable (obviously...); so I can never become your friend.

But now you can gauge how significant my decision is from the fact that I am prepared to bend to your will, even though there are so many things—not seeing you or talking to you or catching the way you look at people and things, and your gentleness towards me—that I will miss terribly. Whatever happens, remember that I will always love you in the same way, my own way, that I have ever since I first met you; that it will carry on within me and, I am sure, will never die.

But it would be the worst kind of masquerade to prolong a situation now when, you know as well as I do, it has become irreparable by the standards of the very love I have for you and you have for me, a love which is now forcing me to be so frank with you, as final proof of what happened between us and will always be unique.

I would have liked things to have turned out differently.
Take care of yourself.

G.

Why this letter will not be published in the newspaper

This letter hasn't killed anyone

To end the affair the author does not use the poisons of Madame de Brinvilliers or Landru's cooker, nor even anthrax in an envelope like modern young people in the U.S. No, what we get is an uncomfortable letter, with no terrible, sadistic witness that could also have done the job. It manifestly didn't provoke the kind of emotion that might drive him to crime or her to suicide.

In a word, what we need in order to report on this breakup — and therefore the letter that triggered it — in the "Crime" pages, is a corpse.

This letter interests nobody

The "People" pages, however, are very fond of heartbreak, even (and perhaps especially) if it is not fatal.

There is nothing here to suggest that this is someone famous enough for his love life to captivate a wider circle than those who have shared his bed or aspire to do so. To them we could add a few drinking companions, one or two gossips, the family maybe — in other words, nobody.

Hardly the kind of stuff to inspire a social chronicler.

This letter is not a book

If the author happened to be a writer, his letter might possibly constitute the beginning of an epistolary novel, of a book, or even an opuscle. But what is a letter, especially this one, which is quite short? You would need several of them to make a publication that might be of interest to the "Books" pages.

This letter is not a letter

There is a "letters page" where we publish readers' reactions to the news published in the paper.

That's not the case here.

This letter ended up in the bin

It wasn't very difficult to find out who wrote this missive and who received it. Otherwise, let's be honest, this letter would not have been taken literally because there's so obviously nothing in it for a journalist. This doesn't mean that said journalist never receives others of the same type. In fact they are strangely frequent. Generally, just a few words greet their arrival: "Another nut." And they end up in the waste paper bin. The comment was longer this time, but the mode of archiving was the same.

Paris, 1 September 2004

Florence AUBENAS

ANALYSIS OF AN ANONYMOUS LETTER

This letter, if authentic, was apparently written by a manipulator, a seducer, whose relationships with others are based on domination and ascendancy. This ascendancy is non-aggressive, soft and subtle, the ascendancy of a smooth talker who has power, but it is highly effective because he manages to exonerate himself for any act of his that might be perceived as negative, to make his interlocutor feel guilty and position himself as a victim.

He meant to write, to reply, he is of course sincere and has the best of intentions, but ... he didn't, and, moreover, since he seems incapable of dealing with conflict, his writing is deliberately evasive, thus keeping at a distance any perception, any judgment that might tarnish his image.

Certainly, he is ending the affair, but it is only "out of honesty, for he has made a promise and is standing by it." And if he has started seeing the others again, it is because "he has not been quite right." Anxiety? Sexuality. He is "sick, angst-ridden" and only the voices of the other mistresses can soothe this malaise.

He can look you in the eye and lie. He wants to project the image of a fragile, gentle person, bad at spelling, acknowledging or deferring his drives, and it is only anxiety, for which he cannot of course be held responsible, that drives him to this little masterpiece of honesty, of domination, and of manipulation. It is not his fault, he didn't do it on purpose ... but he will surely do it again.

For he presents himself as an unhappy man ... because of his purported fidelity, the authenticity of which should — parenthetically — be verified at once.

So, because he called the others, he has broken his promise, which obliges him to end the relationship, thus getting rid of a woman who presumably imposed certain constraints on him.

And he does not like constraints, or orders.

In passing, he takes a little swipe — "when you still see B. and R." — thereby putting his interlocutor in the role of fellow.

And "if he can no longer see her, of course he will suffer." But he quickly complies with her decision for them to stop seeing each other, and he makes her feel a little more guilty by telling her that "he will miss her."

No doubt the woman he is writing to flattered him, but he couldn't care less about her hurt, about the frustration engendered by the pain he is causing her.

I am destroying you. I am tearing you apart. I am smashing you up, but, whatever else happens, do take care of yourself!

Finally, a little romantic refrain: "I love you. I'll always love you, etc. etc." It is as if she had left him.

The roles are reversed.

He is an intelligent, cultivated man, from a good sociocultural background, elegant, charming and seductive, with a fine, fairly subtle, rather abstract intelligence. He is proud, narcissistic, and egotistical (he says "I" more than thirty times in a letter with 23 sentences). It is possible that he studied literature. He probably prefers jazz to rock. I can imagine him wearing polo neck sweaters rather than a suit and tie.

He must have a small kitchen and cook up tasty little meals.

He must have charm but not be classically handsome.

He is an authentic manipulator, perverse, psychologically dangerous and/or a great writer.

To be avoided, at all costs.