All give, no take: Women who love too much

Artist Celia Paul loved Lucian Freud somewhat that way in the 1970s. In a blind, with-every-cell-in-my-body kind of way. In her recent book Self-Portrait, her love for him – ‘more like a sickness’ – is described along with the damage it caused her psyche. He had multiple lovers, she had only him. She was 18 to his 56 when they met; she says she slipped into a limitless and dangerous world. The affair was a study in the slow erosion of female self-esteem. Celia even had his son. Finally, she did leave him, when irrefutable proof of his other women hit her smack on the face. How tedious and tiresome all that to-ing and fro-ing for her loved ones as well as herself!

In her memoir Inside Out, actor Demi Moore describes her eight-year marriage to actor Ashton Kutcher, who was 15 years her junior, as an addiction.  She says the co-dependency took her down, down, down. Her three daughters, with actor and ex-husband Bruce Willis, also remember this time as gloomy.

So what makes smart and gifted feminists throw themselves at men who, in the end, don’t stand the test of time? What gets them so desperate, so whiny, so low that they take what they get? It is a deaf time too, when the victim chooses not to hear family warnings and even open signs from said spouse. But once the nightmare has ended and the victim walks free, the truth does dawn.

The Mirabai syndrome suited only Mirabai, as she lived an ascetic life, calling out to Krishna, who never rejected her in real time. But men of our times would rather be treated at par rather than deities on a pedestal who can do no wrong. Take men as they come, leave them as you go.