... that will probably get me in trouble.
In Quebec we have a weird system called CEGEP. It's a publicly funded college system that is the educational equivalent of the last year of high school and the first year of university. It's a great system, at least I think so because I had a great experience at CEGEP.
A big part of that great experience was that I fell in love. Wild, head over heels romantic love. It involved a repertory theatre, a trendy restaurant, a circle of women friends who dressed like they were to pose for pre-Raphaelite paintings and I spent hours just talking, flirting joking, having fun and discussing feminism with them. They were very much feminists in a town where it was an act of physical courage to be a feminist. Most of this romance was not spent in relationships but just being around those women. I treasure that memory now and if I had a time machine ....
Only a few of them, three if I remember correctly, went to my CEGEP but I fell in love will all three, made friends with them and got to know the larger circle through them. Inevitably perhaps, I ended up having two relationships with women from the group: E and A. Both had an attitude that will seem ludicrous now but felt quite normal to me the end of the 1970s. You might sum it up this way, "Men have treated women unfairly for centuries and it is now your responsibility to make it up to me personally." I cheerfully accepted that as a governing principle of both relationships.
The first relationship was with E. It lasted a year and then she ended it. She ended it with a very nice letter. It said all sorts of kind things about what a good and caring and decent guy I was. And then she said something that was clearly intended to be criticism even though it was presented as advice. E told me that I was not as good a lover as I should have been.
I was crushed and immediately took her to be right. I was failure.
And then a funny thing happened. E was running me down a bit, not a lot but persistently and consistently, to her friends. She portrayed me a "hopeless romantic". This was and is an ill-advised thing for women in their late teens to do because there will always be a certain segment of the female population of that age who crave the idea of a relationship with a hopeless romantic and A was a classic example of same.
And so I started going out with A, although it as only later that she told me I was the inadvertent beneficiary of E's criticism. I began that relationship in a state of constant dread. Never in my life have I had more sense of being an impostor. Worse, our initial sexual efforts failed in exactly the same way that things had with E.
But then things started to change. Two months in, things started to work sexually for A. And we got better at understanding one another. E and I had tried very hard to follow a standard bit of advice from the time: "tell your partner what you want." A hated this advice and I soon realized that she hated it partly because she didn't know what she really wanted and partly because the things she did know she wanted she preferred to have me figure out than to have to tell me.
And we discovered them together. And a cruel truth became clear. The problem with E and I wasn't that I couldn't understand her when she told me what to she wanted or that she couldn't express what she wanted. The problem was that there wasn't a right thing to do. There were right things to do for A and when we hit on them it was really, really obvious to both of us.
And it wasn't just sex, in just about everything in life E was not easily pleasable. A was pleasable. And A didn't have to tell me how to please her because it showed.
Another way to describe this pleasable is as sensibility. It's what Elinor and Marianne have and it is what makes them superior to the women who surround them in the novel.
I don't think poor E ever got it. By the time we both graduated from university, she'd gone through a long string of lovers and each relationship followed exactly the pattern ours had set. Part of the problem, I now know, is that she looked to these men to help her find this thing she knew was missing from her experience.
Sensibility is primarily a feminine virtue, and I don't care if that sounds old fashioned. It's not that men don't/can't have it, it's just that if you want to acquire it you should pick a woman as your role model (although you want to be very careful who you you pick). A was my role model and the debt I owe her is incalculable. She took me sailing in a boat called Phoenix, made me rusty nails with her daddy's best scotch, she showed me how to enjoy food, nature, music, art, poetry and her. And then she moved to Belgium and I lost her.
To some extent A was also her own role model. She learned how to enjoy herself by learning to enjoy herself. I'll dig the hole I'm in deeper by expanding in that later.
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