Disturbing desire

I've been going through old things. Stuff I wrote in college, when I was first getting to know Lacanian theory, and later on when I was immersed in it researching and writing my thesis. At that time, I was enduring the final throes of a relationship gone sour. I was taking a wonderful course called Disturbing Desire: Proust, Woolf, and Lacan, which was an extremely apt name for the class. The excerpts we read spoke to what I was going through in very disturbing ways.

"Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest." --Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. This was not the case with my fiancé of the time. We were attending college in separate states (geographically and otherwise). The trouble with him was that he was not absent enough.

The hysterical neurotic must keep her desire at a distance. Achieving her desire is her worst fear. Love is at its most intense when the object of love is at a distance, unattainable, impossible.

I kept my relationship with him on the rocks in order to keep the relationship. The arguments, the threats, the ambivalence-- I maintained my desire by manipulating the situation. Only if I kept him at bay with constant fighting could I maintain my love for him. The relationship was doomed. At the time I wrote:

Desire is the desire of the Other. I keep rereading this concept and I think of my desire for him, how I must respark it again and again by keeping him at a distance. I feel like the omnipotent Other, trying to make him guess my every whim and conform to it. He is such a bad guesser. “I’m worried about our relationship,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere, don’t worry,” he says. I sigh: “That is not the problem.” I wish he would keep me at a distance like I do him, so that I might desire him like I used to. “The only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost”. He is not lost; how can I desire him?

Okay, so a bit more clarity here. Why am I rehashing an old relationship? Certainly I no longer feel any twinge of emotion. No regret, no lingering flame, etc. The reason is twofold:

1. It's Christmas, and the first Christmas that I am introducing my husband to my family. Two years ago I was spending Christmas with That Other Guy. The fleetingness of love disturbs me a little. I want to explore how my current relationship is different from the old one. How is it that I have, seemingly, attained what I wanted-- I married my beloved, we live together, we have a beautiful baby girl-- and here I am, sitting happily beside him, content with my life? I have never felt so settled, so happy, so satisfied. I want to explore what changed for me and how that came about.

2. During the crashing and burning of that old relationship, I was looking at my life through a Lacanian lens and writing about it. This is my first time with this exercise since then. So I'm not just rehashing the relationship, but looking back on exactly how I was reading my life into Lacanian theory and writing about it. I remember it being very disturbing and very revealing for me. I'm hoping to prod and analyze and be disturbed again. The unexpected things that pop out of such a psychological journey are amazing.

So, we let go of the old relationship, my old experiences, and begin exploring my love life of the past year and a half.