La Douleur Exquise - The Exquisite Pain

I love discovering phrases or words for specific emotions that exist in other cultures but with no equivalent word in the English language. One of my favorites - because it's so fittingly French that even in English it sounds French is La Douleur Exquise. Directly translated to "the exquisite pain", the closest translation to this feeling would be the sadness of unrequited love, though unrequited doesn't capture the feeling. The exquisite pain is gut wrenching because it directly states how you feel when you're experiencing the pain of being in love. It doesn't necessarily have to be unrequited, it could be incompatible love, or a love that wasn't meant to be. But the pain of it, the exquisite pain, it's what I realized I grew up romanticizing. I loved the exquisite pain of suffering for love. I was addicted to it. That was what I ultimately realized, love meant to me. To suffer is what made love worthy. And I needed to learn this about myself. 

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My first and longest relationship lasted about 10 years. On our first date, I headed back to his place, admitting I didn't want to return to my dorm since my roommate had family sleeping over. He offered for me to crash on his couch and I sincerely accepted, oblivious to the connotations of the date we were on. I stripped down to my boxer shorts in front of him with full intent of going to sleep. He was smitten by my absolute trust in him and the naïveté of not realizing the insinuation of undressing in front of your date. 

Within the first week of us dating, we were fighting passionately and broke up with each other almost immediately. Little did I realize, that was what drew us closer and tighter together, bonding and healing more tightly intertwined every time we hurt each other. It was a cycle of passion. We were madly in love and madly in hate with each other. And we kept it going for the next ten years, moving in together, getting married, getting divorced. Even after we broke up, we repeatedly kept got back together and became mad at our inability to move past each other. Even when I had finally exhausted all my positive feelings for the relationship, we still interacted with bitterness and anger. That was when the pain no longer felt exquisite. That was when it became just pain. 

I remember one of those last few moments, where I no longer romanticized our futile attempts to stay together. Where I finally realized I didn't want to continually hurt each other. We had just gotten back from our weekly Saturday dinner at his brother's in the Upper West Side. It was the Sabbath dinner, and after going to several of them, what I realized, was that these dinners were his attempts of testing the waters about my receptivity to that lifestyle. While not necessarily religious, it was the cultural traditions that was important to him, the communal rituals of family. Ironically, this was a bigger sign of our incompatibility than my lack of religious faith. Unlike his close-knit family, mine maintained a comfortable distance, each member pursuing their own interests and social circles. It was common for us to spend weekends without acknowledging each other.

For him, he looked forward to the weekly communion with his family. He spent a large part of his life away from them since he lived abroad when he was younger and looked forward to being a bigger part of his brother's lives, including his nieces and nephews. I was at best neutral towards this but I could see that was bothering him. We got into an argument on the subway, I can't remember exactly how it began but it was likely about how he could tell I wasn't excited about the prospect of spending every single Saturday for the rest of my life at his brother's. And that led to more and more realizations around how we saw our respective future together.

 I hadn't considered it beyond the fact that I enjoyed spending time by myself or with him and was content with that. I didn't want to invite more people into my life. He was welcome to spend his time with his brother's family every Saturday if he wanted, I wasn't looking to deter him. However, this was extremely hurtful for him, because it conveyed a lack of interest in being involved with his life and his family. For me, it was perfectly fine to want to spend time with people other than my family on weekends. 

We argued all the way downtown from 96th to Christopher Street on the local 1. With each passing station, we unraveled yet another incompatible realization about us. We fundamentally had different views on how we envisioned spending our time together and apart. It affected everything. I was fine with us eating meals at different time, he was not. He wanted us to be a fixture in the lives of his young nieces and I was uncomfortable having a deeper role to children that weren't mine. Every bit of differences about us counted down to our stop, to the apartment we shared together.

We were about two stops away, emotionally exhausted and I can't remember who said it first, but I remember the sentence - strikingly final in the quiet of the subway car we were the passengers in. 

"Something needs to change," one of us uttered into the air, not looking at each other. The pain, once exquisite, now simply ached.

The thing was, he would've kept going. Kept hurting himself, me, us, for the relationship. And what I realized was that I used to find that devotion exquisite, that he was willing to sacrifice so much. I found our suffering for the relationship romantic. 

Until that moment. When it hit me, stop after stop, how wrong we we were for each other. Finally, I understood that sentence to mean we were close to the ending of our relationship. That all our attempts to keep force fitting ourselves into a relationship that kept breaking wasn't actually healthy. Our lives were so fused that the next time we broke apart, it would be too painful to get back together. It would be like losing a part of me. And it was.

We finally reached out stop and as we walked back to our apartment, I ended out suffering by ending the relationship.