You don’t have to know everything about your partner in a love relationship!

Tell each other? What impoverishment! Marital fusion makes you stupid, thinks Jacques-Antoine Malarewicz, couple therapist.

She approaches him until a single breath separates them. Then their faces touch. He squeezes her so tightly that she feels like her body is slipping away from him to merge with his in the same ardor. One more moment, and… Abruptly, he pulls back to look her in the eyes, “Promise me first to tell myself everything, promise me never to hide anything from myself.”

It starts very badly, very, very badly. It is likely that she will indeed commit to not hiding anything from him. Of course, he is prepared to keep the same promise. This is what makes them feel like they are completely honest with each other. Right now, they see it as even the best proof of love they can give themselves. But what impoverishment!

In fact, the only thing that they demonstrate to each other - and in chorus - is that each of them does not know how to trust the other, that is to say that they do not have no confidence in themselves. They put this fragility and this impossibility in common. There is better to do!

Be reassured...

They therefore need to be reassured. What other reason would lead them to pretend that everything is simple, that you only need to commit to keep your word, or to promise to make their beliefs come true? Everything must therefore be publicized by the violent and imperialist irruption of speech. Yet the word separates and moves away just as much as it brings together.

Our world is so complex that we tend to think that knowledge flows directly from the amount of information gathered. I think I know the other better by putting on him - or on her - words and sentences which, in fact, enclose him in an explanatory model from which emotions, the unexpected and complicit silence are excluded.

Being able to walk in his secret garden is an urgent necessity. You have to know how to confront yourself in order to learn to be with others. Everyone needs boredom and loneliness to see where they are, and therefore to be better with each other. Boredom clings to time, not just the passing of time, but also the time of others. Because we deny them, as much as ourselves, the right to be bored. This is a prospect that has become intolerable. Yet boredom makes us human, since only machines cannot be bored.

Merger or confusion?

Loneliness hangs us on space in a dimension of variable geometry: you can be alone in a crowd as in your room. It scares us this loneliness, because it is ambiguity itself: if it can open up to the realm of dreams, it can just as easily be a place of sadness.

In a couple, claiming to know everything about the other is wanting to possess him or her until denying their existence; to pretend to understand everything about the other is to try to take his place. To be two is fundamentally to be multiple. Marital merger makes you stupid, because merger is not far from confusion.