I’m an impulsive shopper. Not with everything, just a few essential things for me: books, perfumes, shoes, jewelry, clothes, flowers – some essential, others that could be easily included in the ‘nice to have’ category.
And yet, until the pandemic, when I went to Paris, I always saw shoes that I considered ‘the shoes of my life’, perfumes without which I had the feeling that I could no longer breathe well. By the way, perfumes and books remained on my list. But every time I ‘fell into sin’ and bought another pair or two of shoes, I would get home and not seem to have the same joy as when I wanted them.
After a year of pandemic in Paris, I noticed that I no longer had this impulse. It was no longer vital to have sandals, shoes, boots. I was glad, especially since, over time, this desire cost me some money, not to mention the psychological need I had.
However, relativizing, I have the feeling that something similar is happening in interpersonal relationships. We like someone, we make great efforts to get closer, we think a lot about that person. We make all kinds of scenarios; we imagine what it is like, how beautiful, how many possibilities are there as if we were watching a film directed by our mind, in which we and the other exist in the ideal world of our own imagination. It is a unilateral approach, however, which does not consider the other but its own imagination about how the other would be.
But, strangely, when that person pays attention to us, when we become confident in the relationship, we start misbehaving. We have the relationship, we have the person, now we don’t need it anymore. We start working in another film, the one in which we see through our negative, smoky glasses, which distorts reality. If, before we were sure about the relationship, we functioned like Voltaire’s Candid, with the glasses that distorted reality ‘for the better, in the best possible world’, the glasses afterward take us to hell: we only look for what is not good at the other, we see them monstrously, we look for a knot in their rush.
I know not all people are like that. I know, the wisdom we get over time helps us most times. But in many others it seems that nothing makes us behave in a balanced way, to have the patience to discover the other as he is, to accept him, understand, appreciate, love him, this other reality, not our mental construct.
When the balance comes from within us, when we control the bulimia after things and the script, when we look clearly at reality, maybe we see the other, we see how we fit, and we choose to behave differently. Ah, and we respect our choice, we value it.

Georgeta Dendrino