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No, we won’t be like those two who sit in a restaurant and have nothing to say to each other! But then one day something happens that we could not imagine … We also get bored together. What is it – a temporary calm or a sign that the marriage is going to the bottom?
She buries her face in her plate and picks at the lettuce with her fork. He examines the stem of his glass carefully. He furtively glances at his watch. Time seemed to freeze. Calm Saturday evening at the restaurant. They would now enjoy these moments, rest, dinner, each other … but they miss. Everyone must have seen couples who dine like this, as if invisibly chained by a common dreary weight. How can this be? How can the two of us experience what is considered to be the lot of the lonely?
Stable relationships mean boring?
“Boreddom is a feeling that everyone experiences from time to time, unpleasant and very painful,” recalls psychologist Lyudmila Shaigerova. “At such moments, the pressure of time becomes unbearable, every second stretches for an eternity.”
This feeling is nothing like the idleness of an unoccupied child, nor the slow flow of a rainy day. Real boredom tests our relationship with the world. Philosopher Vladimir Yankelevich calls this state “stuck in between”: we seem to be unable to move, constrained by expectation, weighed down by a sense of our own emptiness and uselessness. The zest for life is gone and there is nothing we can do about it.
The work of this mechanism of loss of interest and meaning becomes noticeable when it begins to manifest itself in a particular area, for example, in relationships with a partner.
“We are beginning to perceive them as monotonous,” says Lyudmila Shaigerova. “Boredom causes a feeling of fatigue and dissatisfaction with the relationship in general.” It is like a funeral bell for love: we know the other inside and out, we have nothing more to say to him.
“I miss you” means “I don’t love you anymore”, or “I know you too well”, or “You don’t interest me anymore” … No, thinking like that is a mistake, because it is impossible to know the other completely. How to know yourself.
In moments of boredom, it is useful to remember that dissatisfaction is one of the properties of the psyche, a form of our existence. She is not connected either with her own inability to live, or with the imperfections of another, and therefore one should not blame anyone for her boredom, sociologist Veronique Naum-Grapp is convinced.
“Today, a long monogamous union in Western society is perceived as the personification of a lifeless routine, banality, inertia. And it is these associations that put pressure on us. But should we live by the law of the infinite multiplication of everything – our partners, occupations, interests, achievements?
Today’s life is governed by slogans, the main of which is success. And if “going to the same job every day” or “making love with the same person” means to me that “my life failed”, that I “remained a nobody”, then all this needs to be destroyed quickly . And then I’ll probably tell myself that I’m bored. Today, more and more partners are breaking up, explaining this only by the fact that they were bored together.
Look for what unites
Real boredom is harder than a vague feeling of being tired. Another thing comes from her: “so – unbearable.”
“But as long as the words of one partner resonate with the other, love is still alive,” explains psychoanalyst Patrick Lamboulet. – Yes, boredom invaded our couple, but we didn’t necessarily stop loving and didn’t necessarily stop loving us. What we feel like abandonment or loss of our own feelings, most likely, only says that new sources of energy are needed, something needs to be changed in life. In the end, all couples sometimes experience moments of doubt: maybe we will have something else … but not for sure.
There is only one way out of this state: to talk to each other. “The two need to look for any language that unites them,” says psychotherapist Ekaterina Mikhailova. – Admire a picture or watch a movie together, generally experience a new joint experience with a partner. Anything: a common hobby, board games, housework, going to the pool … Even the joint participation of partners in some kind of social action can improve the quality of relationships.
Boredom is the absence of feeling
But if neither common nor personal affairs and hobbies of partners inspire them to communicate, if everyone returns home with an involuntary sigh and both plunge into an unbearable feeling of emptiness, then boredom confirms that there is no feeling, and the relationship is shaky.
“One evening, Gleb and I went to a familiar cafe,” recalls 35-year-old Vika. – And I was suddenly overcome by a terrible feeling that both of us had become one of those dull, boring couples that were so mocked at each other at the beginning of our romance. And I was kind of insipid, and he was faded. We had nothing to talk about. Well, there was music playing. I became very sad. Something broke”.
By that time, Vika and Gleb had lived together for a year and a half. What happened? “To understand, to feel that the former, initial merger with a loved one will no longer be, is a piercing, very painful experience,” says psychoanalyst Jean-Jacques Moskowitz. – It’s like a separation, like leaving the life of a loved one – an acute feeling of emptiness instantly arises inside, an understanding that there is nothing more to wait for. The feeling of dislike is like stepping over an abyss. A dizzying ordeal.”
What causes boredom
It is important to take a closer look at those features of relationships that seriously increase the risk of stagnation in a couple, says psychologist Lyudmila Shaigerova.
- High expectations. Falling in love, we involuntarily idealize our partner, attribute to him qualities that he does not possess, and he, in turn, behaves in such a way as to seem better. When romantic love passes, we see a real person, the ideal image collapses. Frustration and dissatisfaction arise.
- Good intentions. “It’s more important to devote yourself to children or home improvement than to spend time developing relationships” – such behavior undermines intimacy.
- Retained emotions. The desire to smooth things over, to suppress anger, to control oneself, to avoid quarrels can lead to the establishment of even superficial relationships … flowing into boring ones.
- All attention is on others. The disproportionately large involvement of one of the partners in other relationships (professional, friendly, family) leads to the fact that there is not enough strength for the relationship in the couple.
- Personal features. Some of us are more prone than others to fall into a bored state, which can then turn into a depressive one. If a person is bored with himself, if neither work nor hobbies inspire him, then it is difficult for him to offer something to another.
Who is to blame?
“He (she) is bored with me …” Such a discovery can knock anyone down. “One Saturday, Yulia and I were at home, just lying on the couch,” says 28-year-old Sergei. I asked her why she was so silent lately. Embarrassed, she admitted that she was a little bored. It was like a wall had collapsed on me. Since then, I’ve been waiting for her to leave me.”
“The moment I realize that the other is bored with me, the image of me that (as I thought) the other had collapses,” explains Jean-Jacques Moskowitz. – This is a loss – I lose my usual support, support. The love of another gives a sense of the justification of our existence, but, leaving, it takes away everything that this feeling gave, and above all, the definition of me as a valuable being … The childish omnipotence, which the other one returned to me for a while, is rudely taken away from me.
But if we have nothing more to say to another and it is not interesting to listen to him, is it not because we stop hearing ourselves? And isn’t this the very moment when you should turn to yourself and ask: where did boredom come from? Why does everything that we lived before (all our plans, desires …) now seem completely useless?
Boredom is useful in that it gives a clear signal: “Something has changed, and we will no longer be able to look at the world the way we used to.” But how then to look? Everyone can search and find the answer to this question – there will be no ready-made recipes. “Never ask the way of someone who knows it,” says a Chinese proverb. “Otherwise, you will no longer be able to find yourself lost.”
Boredom is a novel by Alberto Moravia.
In Alberto Moravia’s book, this feeling gnaws at Dino, a wealthy Roman bourgeois and failed artist. For fun, he becomes the lover of Cecilia, a seventeen-year-old model. Thinking that he will get bored with her very soon, he tries to turn her into a thing, to humiliate her, but the woman eludes him. He plunges into a pool of passion, and while she pulls away from him, he plunges deeper into the mystery that she embodies. His insatiable need to understand the world and find meaning in it collides with the riddle of a woman.
Alberto Moravia brings two radically different ideas about life face to face: Dino falls into the void because he desperately seeks to find a rational explanation for everything, and Cecilia gives herself to the world and accepts it as it is. Boredom sets in, as the novelist would write a few years later, “when one person uses another to achieve a goal that does not concern him.”