Does intimacy have to be synonymous with rudeness?

Many years ago, I had a neighbor who made sweets to sell. She was a woman in her fifties who lived with her mother, who was already very old. Turns and moves, I bought rocambole and biscuit at her house. Good. This neighbor of mine fought with her mother almost daily. It was just the two of them living in the apartment, so her mother was also my neighbor, but in my head I referred to them like this: my neighbor. And my neighbor’s mother.

I heard the cries of impatience and the harsh sentences not only coming from the apartment next door but in front of me – in the elevator, in the hall of the building, even in the bakery, when we passed by. Everything was a reason for my neighbor to tease her mother, raise her voice, get impatient, or just plain rude. The rudeness was such that, because of those scenes, I started to rethink the way I treated my mother: my gratuitous screams and mistreatment stayed there in my adolescence, but, you know, we can always improve.

It was years following that dynamic. With me, the neighbor was sweet. But with mom…

Sometimes I thought: well, I’m here, feeling sorry for my neighbor’s mother, but who knows what relationship these two had throughout their lives, right? Her mother was a pest… Even so, I couldn’t help it: I felt sorry for that fragile-looking old woman receiving such hostile treatment from her own daughter.

Well, after a brief period of illness, my neighbor’s mother passed away.

And then I saw my neighbor wasting away. She was so sad that she couldn’t even hold back publicly – I tend to interpret this “social overflow” of sadness, these tears that can’t be kept in her room and are exposed on the street, in a restaurant, on the bus, as a sign that, wow , this pain is really suffocating, desperate. She cried in front of me, when I went to her house, when I started a conversation in the elevator, when we crossed the street. She had dark circles under her eyes, she said she couldn’t sleep. I even suggested that she undergo therapy and I passed on my acupuncturist’s contact to see if it would improve her sleep (she didn’t want to know about either one, and then I suggested it again and I didn’t talk about it again, after all, right… No we were great friends, she was just my neighbor who sold me roulades).

My neighbor, who had never exactly been a cheerful person, carried that sad and heavy look for over a year. One day, she confessed to me that, for the first six months, she cried every day. Every day… For the death of a woman she had mistreated every day, at home and in public. In my (intrusive) mind, she must have added the longing for her mother to a regret for the rudeness. This regret must be very painful, I thought. Not being able to apologize to someone who is gone must be the most bitter impotence.

So I was startled when she commented to me:

– There are still days when nostalgia tightens. I liked her so much. We always got along so well…

We always got along so well🇧🇷 I understand that she missed her mother, that she loved her mother, but… Did we always get along so well?

Apparently, in my neighbor’s mind, there was no reason for regrets. There was just the sad mourning for someone with whom she, well, got along so well.

How treacherous intimacy can be. Be polite and lower your voice with the graduate class colleague, whose name we barely know, and let out all the demons with the person we love and who loves us.

In intimate relationships, we find freedom to be honest, to be cross, to wear our worst clothes. We are safe in that environment. We are naughty on a Tuesday because we know, after all, that on Wednesday everything will be fine. But will it really be okay?

If, on the one hand, it seems natural to me that intimacy welcomes our less polished, less civilized version, on the other hand, it seems sad to me to reserve the most pleasant of us for people who don’t even care about our aching tooth or the bad meeting. we had. It seems even sadder to me to find it perfectly natural to relate without any kindness to the closest people. Of course, there is no need for formality, love is not protocol. But are we going to spend our days yelling and berating and cursing the people who live with us, and if one day they are gone, we’ll think, “We always got along so well”?

Intimacy specializes in sheltering jokes, laughter, comfortable silences and spontaneous words. And tolerating small misbehavior and frowns, because, come on, nobody is made of iron. But in tolerating everything? In accepting, resigned, the worst of those who reserve side A just for the street and B for indoors?

In the past, it’s easy to have good relations. In the future, too. What seems to me a beautiful and rewarding challenge is to take a deep breath and have a good relationship here, now, with the people with whom we are intimate – although of intimacy. I find it so touchingly beautiful that we treat well not only our graduate colleagues, but our children, husbands, wives, parents, brothers-in-law. Not just on special dates, not just after we got back from our trip, and no, definitely not just for memories. “We always got along so well”: good. Even better is to achieve harmonious coexistence not in the vague and idealized sphere of “always”, but in the concrete and mundane of today.

Liliane Prata is CLAUDIA’s editor and writes here every Wednesday. To talk to her, click here!