A conversation about divorce. It's a complex subject, both before it happens, during it and, in many cases, afterwards.
Psychologist Marta Gautier recalls sentences from her most recent book A Quiet Place.
An excerpt from the book: "When I decided to separate from my husband, I felt like a bitch. Ungrateful, capricious, a home wrecker, as the old expression goes I feel like a bitch to this day."
Now for the author's own analysis: "Despite the light air, the street language, it's a very strong, serious thing."
"It's as if there was a mismatch between what you think as a modern, evolved woman, and what runs through our veins in terms of the collective unconscious, of generations: women who couldn't get divorced, and that's still very recent, the guilt very great," she explains on SIC.
Marta recalls a "very strong" phrase, not hers, but her grandmother's, to talk about a woman's hesitations (and her own) before divorce: "She used to say 'If he doesn't hit, doesn't drink, doesn't have others, why separate?
And how none of this was happening in her marriage... "It seemed like a whim to me, I felt frivolous, like a bitch" - and the children also come into it: "The children unintentionally exploit it, by showing that it was their mother who wanted to separate; there's the hurt of atoning for a fault, of apologizing for subtle gestures. It's a very delicate subject!".
"There's still that idea that marriage is for life. We don't agree, but there's the thought 'I'm still his, and I was trying to stop myself and educate myself in this sense'."
In her case, the divorce was a "convulsive" process, with two or three separations before the final one. "I always felt like I was doing something bad," she confessed.
In what way? "I always thought: how is he going to organize himself? Without me, how?
Women spend years thinking about divorce, "stewing" about it, and often don't even tell their closest friends. Always thinking about "guilt". And it would even be easier if the husband had made a mistake. For men, it's much easier if the woman makes the decision.
Here comes a warning about pressure from society. Not in their sense, but in their sense: "They say that society puts pressure on women. But I think society puts much more pressure on men in this sense: 'how are you going to abandon a family? He has this weight of 'this, when you take it, you take it all the way'".
Marta Gautier looks to history to analyze the "evolutionary decalage" of pain: "Women evolved because of pain. In a patriarchal system, men were spared and pampered. And so women got into the trap of taking care of everything."
The psychologist also touched on a curious aspect: today's men don't know how to make women happy. "Because they've never seen their father or grandfather making an effort to make their mother or grandmother happy".
So, "they don't really understand what women want - and women have the arrogance to want men to guess!".
An example of what women like: a man's insistence on knowing what's wrong with her, in those normal "are you all right?" conversations where she answers "yes", but he notices and later returns to the subject to try to help her. He's looking after her.
Women have these answers, they keep to themselves, because "they've been silent for centuries". Men, on the other hand, "shy away from this work" of insistence, "but it's work that has to be done".
