In the City of Men - Day 8

I should talk to my husband. About the divorce, I mean. 
There is a long way I went during these last few days. Perhaps a way of no return. The step of a dream is quick, I suppose especially in my case, for whom dreamed is sometimes done with unpredictable bravery and energy. Meanwhile, it is so very easy to divorce in this system, and I think this is precisely what is strongly dissuasive. Just the simplest of all formulas, repeated three times to make sure it's really what he wants to say, and that's it. With all the formalities, it wouldn't take 15 minutes, I suppose. But it is a way of no return. A very, very, very long and totally impracticable way to get back to each other in case of a sudden repentance. If I suddenly discovered I do love him. From his side, anyway, he never claimed the opposite. 
On the other side of the balance, the natural exhaustion, the end of things. The urgency of a new beginning. 
I look back to my life, in an even larger perspective than this marriage. I have the sensation of loss, of having missed something, of a potential I wasted. To a certain degree, it must be true. Early in my life, I probably paid too little attention to relationships; I did not invest in them. Certainly not like my friends and colleagues. Both me and them were serious, but in our own ways. I was studying, building my independent future while they were catching husbands, trying on their wedding robes, working out their makeup. Some of them, I suppose, are still married to the same men to which I refused to pay attention; others, I imagine, may have divorced, and not just through a 15-minute procedure, but violently and traumatically. While I was gathering the fruits of my studies and my academic commitment. If a professorial nomination is what I wanted and aspired to in my youth, this is what I got in the end. It is stupid and unjust to claim now that I wanted something more or something else. 
I look back to a life without a great love story, without sufficient romance. The relationships I finished by having earlier in my life were accidental, unnecessary, as in a logical consequence of the little attention paid to planning those things, keeping them under rational and ambitious control. That's of course the tale of maturity to which I couldn't have access when I was young. Especially under the cultural and social conditions in which I was immersed at the time; no one taught me to expect much. I suppose women in Poland still don't expect much, at least not in terms of great love stories and romance. They take their pleasure in rituals as I took my pleasure in adventures.
Perhaps all my regret is precisely this. I didn't go as far on the road of adventure as I should have gone. I regret periods of stability such as this 12-year long marriage. Should I have ended it in the middle? Would it be more beautiful then? Perhaps. But six years ago I had no alternative planning; I was busy with other worries. So I let it run, in spite of insufficient romance. 
Certainly, if this marriage lacked anything, a half of the responsibility is mine. There was no sufficient romance, because there was no sufficient commitment and assertiveness. I was working for it only during the first half, and during the first half it was good. But not during the second one. 
I wasn't ambitious enough in my relationships. Yes, because my ambitions were deposited elsewhere. I never aspired to be with an important man, to gain social stance through relationship, to be invited to parties in the quality of my man's companion. Is it what I miss now? Yes. I do miss this. Perhaps it is a shortsighted and fanciful aspiration, and life is not really about it. And I come to this just because I've received my professorial nomination already, and I am in a period of vacation of some sort, permitting myself to be unserious for the first time in my life. Before I return to my academic work on a new level.
I've said in my previous post that now I require intelligence and sensibility that only one man in a hundred might eventually possess. I never expected or required any such things from anyone in the past. I accepted that man is essentially a simple being, greedy of hard porn rather than the sophistication I might find out about in my books. Certainly, there is a part of truth in it. Nonetheless, that was a mistake, perhaps the greatest mistake of my life. Metaphorically speaking, during the 12 years of this marriage, the sophistication was nailed to the wall of my apartment, just like my khulkhal. It was there all the time, unused. For no other reason than the lack of commitment with it.
Sophistication is a fragile thing, easily turned into ridiculous, easy to withdraw in front of vulgarity. Requiring mindfulness and brain power to maintain it. Who knows, maybe its cost exceeds its value. Perhaps this is why I constantly call the Absolute to my assistance, as if the matter required a support from higher up. It may seem inappropriate to many people, why should I make God meddle in such affairs. But I suspect there might be no other way. If we let it go, we will remain with nothing but the earthly reality of hard porn, simpler, quicker, cheaper, more efficient. Not to say more modern, for those things I speak of are tremendously archaic. I happen to have an exceedingly liberal attitude toward hard porn; on misty mornings, I enjoy walking through the Red Lamp district in Amsterdam, watching the prostitutes smile to me through their large window panes. But I couldn't possibly do this if my crimson angel wasn't with me. 
I suppose there is a specific talent for love-making that is as rare and precious as any other talent, be it for dancing, singing, painting or any other art. I do not even know in what measure I might possess it; if I got any, I probably wasted at least 95% of it. On sheer stupidity.