Not being loved as we would like to, feeling of loneliness, the need to feel whole again with oneself? Being stuck in old patterns? Ignoring what is happening to me? Losing something and I don’t know exactly what this is? A desire for something new and exciting?
Like dancing the “Tango”, love is an improvised dance where a couple moves from an open to a closed embrace. Love and hate are entangled like bodies when they move. A close relationship between happiness and despair. Getting closer, moving away, sometimes painfully. Other times, being able to look at it with humour and affection.
Mario: I’m overflowing with emotions, are you with someone else?
Will you ever return to me? :
Mario believes in the myth of the “other half”, “the soul mate”, where they are united as ONE.
His wife has asked for an open relationship, he is fearful and suggests… let’s go to the psychoanalyst!

Between Mafalda¹, Rhymes and Love.

Mafalda says: “ Let’s meet and I will introduce you to my friends” Miguelito thinks to himself: “I thought I was THE friend. But I am just one of them!”

In the tangle of love, exclusivity, possession, jealousy, resignation, there is tension and sometimes pain.
Maria says: I want only a moment of passion. I want to experience other relationships. You want me all to yourself. I want an open relationship. I want to be free to follow my own desires. You make me feel guilty.”

Remember Mafalda?: “ That tenants, it all started with that voice that said “that is wrong !”
Mafalda’s mother: “Which tenant?”
Mafalda answered: “The tenant that lives inside of us”

Maria discovers that love is not a like “Cinderella” story, it’s no fairy tale. Not how others portrayed it, not as she had imagined it to be, not like the stories her aunt told her.
She wants to listen to her own desires, as well as feel the love for her husband. Her love rhymes with dissatisfaction and pain.
Mafalda says: “ Be careful! Because when we go out seeking adventure we can get lost on the way back. Ah?…”

Jose: “I want an open marriage. You can have sex with whomever you want, only when you are away.”
Anna: “You can have other relationships, as long as I remain your number one.”

As with all love relationships, there is an underlying need for contracts, for rules to gain the certainty of love, to be able to make it through the anxiety, the dissatisfaction and the pain that the momentary remoteness of separation brings.

Is it an impossible dream?

The voice of Mafalda: “ Welcome a good breeze of fresh air.
Pity the smell of Naftalina mothballs”

On the long journey of love, negotiations and renegotiations will result in new, and not so new, agreements and disagreements. However, this time the desires of one, are not secret any more to the other.
It results in a need for new inventions, different ways of being together are discovered, and new bonds are made.

What will love rhyme with tomorrow? How will one view define love tomorrow?

Susanita says: “ First I will marry, I will be a Lady, I will have children, I will buy a house, a car, jewellery, I will have grandchildren. Do you like my life?

A pre-planned future? Looking for exits to go through life avoiding dissatisfactions?

Mafalda says: “ That is not life, it is an obstacle course !”

¹ Joaquin Salvador Lavado Tejon, QUINO, argentinian cartoonist , creator of “Mafalda”. “Mafalda”, Quino, Ed. Lumen.