“Objectively, honor is the opinion others have of our value; subjectively, it is our fear of that opinion.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
I am a Doctor of psychotherapy science, with twenty years of experience and practice around the world. These are my stories — stories that can happen anywhere and to anyone.
(All characters and stories are fictional and represent composite images rather than anyone’s private life.)
She comes back again and again, trying to understand what she should do. The calm, structured life she had built for herself collapsed right before her eyes, and she felt powerless to change anything. The reason, of course, was Him—or at least that is how it seemed to her now. Emilia was embarrassed, and even the privacy of the sessions at the beginning of our work did not help her open up. Everything happening in her life felt so far removed from the idea she had of herself and her future that she struggled to grasp how she was supposed to relate to it.
All her boundaries and defenses had been built long ago, back in childhood. She remembered that at around six years old, when questions of physiology first caught her attention, she received a strict reprimand from her grandmother: honor must be protected from a young age. Since no one ever clarified when exactly that “young age” began, Emilia started guarding her honor from about the age of six. In adolescence, the world of fiction opened up to her—she read The Story of O, Emmanuelle, Lolita—yet she found no answers to her questions about what she was supposed to do. Puberty passed without particular difficulties for her parents, and Emilia stepped into adulthood with a clear idea of what adult life was supposed to look like. Her school-year experiments were minimal and yielded no experiences she would later recall with joy or regret.
Her university years were spent in Paris, but despite how many of her friends romanticized the city, for Emilia those years were marked by hard work and a fight for her place in the sun. During that period, she did not even consider relationships—she could not imagine dividing her time between love and study. It seemed to her that life was about to begin, and then she would surely be ready for relationships, although she herself did not fully understand what that meant. And then weeks turned into months, months into years. A career had to be built, and after fifteen years of competition and relentless struggle, Emilia became the head of a very large company, carrying even greater responsibility—for thousands of employees and subordinates. Naturally, she no longer understood how one could devote time to anything other than work, although from time to time she allowed herself rare vacations with friends who had long since started families and were raising children.
Her capacity for relationships was limited to a single experience back in her school years—an experience that, due to both partners’ inexperience, left her puzzled as to why one would want relationships at all, and how questionable that pleasure might be, the very pleasure her grandmother had warned her against. But forty caught her off guard. For the first time, she felt loneliness and realized that her friends no longer met her need for intimacy, and that a dog was unlikely to start talking. The world, despite its apparent perfection, began to crack slightly at the seams. In the evenings, she brewed coffee as usual and read reports she had not managed to finish during the day. Loneliness had its advantages—it was sterile and predictable. Nothing disturbed the silence she once craved. Yet inside, tension was growing: the sense that she had missed something, that there existed an entirely different plane of being. For many years, through the lives of her friends, she had seen weddings, divorces, affairs, children being born and growing up. And if at some point she flirted with the thought, Do I even need this?, she almost invariably concluded that she did not want to artificially create a life alternative to the one she had already built.
And then He appeared.
It happened entirely by chance, at yet another meeting. He casually brushed her hand, and Emilia felt as if she had been struck by an electric current. From that moment on, she could think of nothing and no one else but him—and there were many reasons for that. First, she had never experienced such intense physical attraction to another person. Second, it was so unexpected that it fit none of the relationship scenarios she had read about or heard of. With fierce obsession, she wanted to possess this man and understood that nothing could stop her anymore. That was the paradox: the honor she had guarded since childhood vibrated and resisted, while the sudden surge of desire fought for freedom and demanded satisfaction.
And Emilia took a step that was unthinkable for her—she met with Him again. Inside, she trembled; her self-esteem cowered in a corner, nervously biting its nails, and her voice betrayed her excitement with a tremor. But Emilia saw no way back. She regarded that moment as a starting point. Now or never, she thought, and began talking about business. Her lack of experience in romantic matters interfered—she stumbled—but her habitual corporate composure helped her carry the conversation forward. He showed no sign of affection toward her, apart from a clearly affected interest in her field of work and professional achievements (and Emilia
had plenty of those). The conversation continued. His calm, orderly life did not imply the kind of changes Emilia’s presence could bring.
When the meeting ended, Emilia’s world finally tilted off balance. Never before had she wanted someone so specifically. Never before had she felt such powerful attraction toward a person she did not know. Never before had she felt so powerless before her own body and its desires. She desperately needed to know whether He felt the same. Now she could no longer remember how she had lived before experiencing all this. Honor, along with conscience, was pushed far onto a shelf, and lust and sensuality stepped onto the stage—desires to possess and to have. Emilia knew how to get what she wanted. She fought herself honestly, but her body resisted, and her thoughts were filled with fantasies of his hands, his lips, the words she wanted to hear from him. Her only desire was to be close to him—to feel his touch on her skin, to listen to the resonant timbre of his voice, to be wrapped in his tenderness and affection.
Delay was akin to death, and Emilia went on the offensive. He, on the contrary, hesitated. Her pressure and confident advance toward victory disoriented him. He stumbled and made desperate attempts to appeal to her sense of honor—but by then, there was no trace of it left. Everything was unfolding against familiar social scripts. It was simultaneously arousing and unsettling, exciting and confusing, and it was unclear what should come next.
When he finally told her that the feeling was mutual, Emilia found a noticeable calm, and her life flowed into an entirely new current. In it, there was no need to hide behind masks or mechanically repeat socially acceptable scripts. There was room for a life filled with feeling and freedom. Emilia discovered an entire world. She realized that everything happening to her could be called by one word—love. Many times she asked herself how it was possible that she had never felt anything like this before, that at forty she had fallen in love like a teenager. And many times she answered herself that she was grateful it had happened in her life at all. All-consuming love, born from a single touch. She did not know—and could not know—how long this state would last, but having experienced it, she could no longer imagine living any other way. It was as if someone had torn Ellie’s little house from the ground and carried it by a hurricane into the magical land of Oz. It was a path full of discoveries and hope. It was Emilia’s path toward herself—her chance to truly know who she was and to experience what she had once thought impossible.
In therapy, Emilia managed to work through her childhood scripts and free herself from the unnecessary baggage she had so carefully carried on her shoulders since childhood. We never blame parents for the baggage we carry—we simply sort through it meticulously, leaving by the roadside of our life what will no longer be useful, what is no longer needed. Emilia no longer needed honor in the sense in which she had carried it. But the love she found turned out to be very much needed.
